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- Modernizing computing infrastructure
- Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS)
- Cisco HyperFlex
- Cisco Intersight
- Multicloud integration
- Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
- AppDynamics
- Application and database workloads
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- Modernizing computing infrastructure
- Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS)
- Cisco HyperFlex
- Cisco Intersight
- Multicloud integration
- Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
- AppDynamics
- Application and database workloads
Modernizing computing infrastructure e-book
Cisco's computing portfolio
Businesses need modern computing infrastructure to keep up with changing business demands while driving innovation. Cisco's breadth of computing solutions provides all the resources your IT team needs to excel today and lead in the future—while increasing performance, lowering TCO and simplifying management. With modern servers, hyperconverged infrastructure, edge and multicloud solutions, SaaS management, optimization software, and more, Cisco can power all your application workloads, anywhere you need them.
Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS)
A computing architecture designed for IT innovation and business acceleration
Cisco UCS combines servers, networking, and management in a cohesive system where form factor is irrelevant. You choose what's best for your application: blade, rack, storage, or multi-node server. This common operating environment enables optimization for traditional workloads, data analytics, and cloud-native applications—with open APIs for broad interoperability and unparalleled automation.
- Available in 1, 2, or 4 CPU configurations
- Unified management with Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects or cloud management with Cisco Intersight
- Cisco Validated Designs help you pick the right configurations for enterprise applications, virtual desktop environments, databases, and more
- Support for VMware vSphere/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and other major operating systems
- Deploy converged infrastructure or hyperconverged infrastructure (Cisco HyperFlex)
The industry's highest-density, most flexible and expandable modular 2- and 4-socket blade servers
1U, 2U, and 4U options that size to your workload, PCIe, and storage needs
A dense storage server supporting up to 840TB of storage with one or two server nodes
Key features and benefits
Lower TCO
Easy to deploy and manage
Easy to scale
Performance for any application
Cisco UCS M5 servers support
- 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors or AMD EPYC™ CPUs
- New security features
- More NVMe drive support
- Ethernet speeds up to 100Gbps
Cisco UCS supports critical data center initiatives
- Increasing use of server virtualization
- Data center consolidation
- IT infrastructure orchestration and automation
- Building a private or hybrid cloud infrastructure
- Implementing a “software-defined data center” strategy
“We now spend 40 percent less time on maintenance and training, releasing our engineers to focus on revenue-generating innovations like new product offers and service improvements.”
CEO, OffsiteDataSync
For more information
Cisco HyperFlex
Hyperconverged Infrastructure engineered on the Cisco UCS platform
Cisco HyperFlex combines compute, networking, and storage in an easy-to-manage system that delivers consistently high performance to power any application, anywhere. Co-engineered hardware and software—along with powerful data optimization features—brings the full potential of hyperconvergence to a wide range of workloads and use cases. The Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform combines cluster storage devices into a single, distributed, multi-tier, object-based data store. And with simplified scalability and manageability, HyperFlex offers cloud-like agility and pay-as-you-grow economics for on-prem, virtualized environments.
Hyperconverged infrastructure built for your specific needs
- Powerful management options include HX Connect, Cisco Intersight and plugins for VCenter or Windows Admin Center
- Available in Hybrid, All Flash, and ALL NVMe nodes built on the Cisco UCS platform, HyperFlex utilizes Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects
- Can be easily scaled by adding one node at a time to a cluster; start with 2 nodes and scale up to 64 nodes (new components are automatically recognized and incorporated into the cluster)
- Support for VMware Vsphere/ESXi or Hyper-V
- Ideal for multicloud environments with Kubernetes support, multicloud services, integrations with cloud providers, and edge computing
- Cisco Validated Designs help you pick the right HyperFlex configurations for enterprise applications, virtual desktop environments, databases and more
Cisco HyperFlex Edge
HyperFlex Edge is optimized for the unique requirements of distributed operations—with cluster sizes of 2 to 4 nodes—and can utilize existing 1Gb or 10Gb networking.
Did you know
You can run Cisco UCS as compute- and/or GPU-only nodes in the same clusters as HyperFlex nodes—so you can easily match your clusters to your exact needs, while not paying for anything you don’t need (like additional HCI software licensing).
“Our ERP response time has improved by 50% post deployment and we have been able to reclaim almost 80% of our capacity.”
CEO, Spark Minda Technical Centre
Key features and benefits
- Proven, industry-leading HCI performance to power any application
- Easy to deploy and manage
- Flexible scalability to add resources independently
- Lower TCO compared to 3-tier or other hyperconverged offerings
- Built with integrated UCS Fabric Interconnects to ensure networking performance
Consistent Performance with HyperFlex
Cisco Intersight
Cloud operations platform for any workload across any infrastructure
Cisco Intersight acts as a copilot for your IT Ops teams, delivering operations-as-a-service, driving continuous optimization, and enhancing strategic agility. The SaaS platform provides access to cloud-delivered management capabilities that streamline operations across your hybrid environment. It analyzes data collected from each component of your environment to power a recommendation engine that continuously ensures application performance while optimizing and lowering costs. The Intersight platform unifies the components and toolchains required to support modern application strategies, accelerating application delivery while enabling further innovation. Cisco Intersight is the only cloud operations platform that enables you to actively monitor, optimize, orchestrate, and operate any workload in your unique hybrid environment.
Key features and benefits
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Pervasive simplicity |
- Simplify the user experience by managing your infrastructure regardless of where it is installed
- Reduce the complexity and manual effort required to deploy, upgrade, and maintain your servers and hyperconverged infrastructure
- Automate updates to Cisco HyperFlex cluster firmware, software, and hypervisor updates to reduce complexity and manual efforts
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Actionable intelligence |
- Use best practices to enable faster, proactive IT operations
- Gain actionable insight for ongoing improvement and problem avoidance
- Learn and evolve to deliver greater capabilities and improved insights that help you proactively manage your distributed environment
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Agile delivery |
- Respond quickly to new requests
- Deploy in the data center and at the edge with massive scale
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) for rapid development, delivery and customer feedback
Did you know
Intersight provides a Cloud Witness at no cost for HyperFlex Edge 2-node deployments, ensuring data accuracy and eliminating the cost of having a physical witness, which is required by competing 2-node solutions.
For more information
Multicloud integration
Optimized for on-prem, multiple clouds, and containerized applications
Applications are quickly transitioning to collections of microservices—often in containers—that can run in any environment and any location (core, cloud, or edge). Cisco’s computing solutions integrate with these applications, helping you orchestrate and optimize on-prem infrastructure, multiple clouds, and containerized applications.
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- IBM Cloud
- Azure Cloud
- And more
Containers/Kubernetes Environments
Cisco infrastructure solutions deliver:
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A modern, common infrastructure platform for containers with support for Kubernetes Platforms:
- Cisco Container Platform
- Google Anthos
- OpenShift
- Enterprise-grade building block support and software-defined storage/computing to simplify adoption of containerized applications and microservices.
- Operationalize production-grade containers with easy and automated Kubernetes lifecycle management across your multicloud environment with Intersight Kubernetes Service.
Key features and benefits
Reliable, persistent storage
Simplified infrastructure
Independent scaling
Centralized, cloud-based management
Orchestration and optimization tools
(learn more in the next section)
Did you know
Cisco HyperFlex running Cisco Container Platform is the only complete hardware and software stack that’s SAP-certified for container deployment of SAP Data Hub.
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
Better visibility leads to better performing applications
IT teams are challenged with balancing performance, efficiency, and cost in today’s complex, multicloud environments. Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer is a real-time decision engine that visualizes complex interdependencies across the stack and ensures performance of critical workloads while maximizing efficiency and reducing cost across on-prem and multicloud environments.
It simplifies and automates application resource management at scale by leveraging telemetry data from over 50 targets across a range of hypervisors, compute platforms, container platforms, public clouds, and more, with a single tool. It relieves IT teams from the day-to-day management of infrastructure and resource availability, giving them time to drive innovation for the business.
Key benefits
- Radically simplify application resource management at scale and avoid performance issues with a single tool that continuously collects, analyzes and stitches together infrastructure resource telemetry data across your on-prem and cloud environments and dynamically optimizes resources to ensure application performance.
- Continuously optimize critical IT resources, resulting in more efficient use of existing infrastructure and lower operational costs on-prem and in the cloud.
- Take the guesswork out of planning for the future with the ability to quickly model what-if scenarios based on the real-time environment to accurately forecast capacity needs and avoid overprovisioning.
AppDynamics
A smarter approach to performance management
AppDynamics is an application and business performance monitoring platform that ensures every part of multicloud environments—from software to infrastructure to business outcomes—is highly visible, optimized, and primed to drive growth. AppDynamics works throughout your environment to discover individual business transactions and create a complete view of your application topology, across all public/private clouds and on-prem environments. Detailed performance and business metrics are generated with machine learning anomaly detection alerts to help identify the root causes of issues.
Key features and benefits
- Help developers understand how code is performing
- Detect issues before they impact customers
- Deliver real-time performance metrics
- Visualize maps of your application environments
Application and database workloads
Cisco’s computing portfolio is designed to handle all your workloads
From enterprise apps and databases to virtual desktops to AI/ML, Cisco’s tested and validated solutions provide the right resources for the applications that power your business.
Enterprise apps and databases
Data resides where it’s created and accessed: at the edge, in the cloud, and in the core data center. Build a bridge to this data and your enterprise apps with scalable, high-performance infrastructure from Cisco.
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SAP |
Run traditional SAP apps with better performance or migrate to SAP HANA with SAP-certified infrastructure.
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Microsoft |
Use validated designs for Cisco infrastructure to ensure that the latest versions of Microsoft SQL Server run at peak performance.
Cisco Data Intelligence Platform
Big data meets AI|
AI/compute farm
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Data lake - Hadoop
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Data anywhere
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Big data meets AI
Hadoop 3.0 enables AI workloads to run natively with GPU and container resources
Eliminate architectural silos
Data intensive workloads, compute intensive workloads, and storage systems work closely together
Cloud-scale architecture
Brings together big data, AI, and object storage to scale to thousands of nodes and hundreds of petabytes
Automation
Solution management and deployment automation with Cisco Intersight
The Cisco Data Intelligence Platform (CDIP) is a cloud-scale architecture that brings together big data, AI and compute farm, and storage tiers to work together as a single entity, while also being able to scale independently to address IT issues in the modern data center.
AI/ML: Get faster insights and increase business value with Cisco’s data center solutions designed specifically for AI/ML. Learn more
Big data: Integrate your infrastructure with IBM Big Data Insights, SAS, Splunk, and other big data solutions. Learn more
“Our investment in Cisco UCS and SAP HANA is key to generating significant returns on our deployment of analytical applications and specifically in our ability to run more efficient trade promotions.”
Director of Enterprise Applications, Johnsonville Sausage
“Before, it would take 15-20 minutes to open each design file. Now it only takes four minutes.”
Project Engineer, Mayfran International
“From hardware to licensing to human resources, the overall cost of HyperFlex and UCS is better for us and we can pass those savings on to our customers.”
Founder and CEO, Malicis
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Virtual desktopsWhether you’re running Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops or VMware Horizon, you can modernize your virtual desktop infrastructure with Cisco’s data center solutions. With consistent performance, pay-as-you-grow economics, and NVIDIA GPUs, you can securely enable rich experiences for your users anywhere. Learn more about desktop virtualization Find the best Cisco Validated Design for your virtual desktop environment |
Cisco UCS systems with Intel® Xeon® Platinum processor
Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.