We understand that building a Converged or Hyper-Converged Infrastructure in a corporate environment means more than just replacing a few devices. It requires an entirely different way of looking at your companies network, storage, and server infrastructure; and the types of IT staff needed to support it.
Done properly, Converged and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure can tear down traditional data management center silos, lower your overall maintenance costs, and improve response times to the business units you support.
Champion has guided many companies to the next generation data management center by leveraging Converged & Hyper-Converged technologies.
</p>
<h2>Introduction to Converged &amp; Hyper-Converged</h2>
<p>Converged and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure can tear down traditional data center silos, lower your overall maintenance costs, and improve response times to the business units you support. Champion has guided many companies to the next generation data center by leveraging Converged &amp; Hyper-Converged technologies.</p>
<h2>How Convergence and VDI Help IT Grow Quickly and Affordably</h2>
<p>Cisco HyperFlex VDI for Citrix solves the toughest workforce mobility problems. Together, the two simplify operations, reduce upfront costs with a pay-as-you-grow model, and provide linear VDI performance that scales quickly and easily. Managers report being able to better serve their users and business units more affordably and in less time than ever before. Users, too, benefit from secure, flexible, and powerful desktop and application virtualization solutions while gaining the full potential of system resources through the intelligent utilization of network, compute, and storage. Many users report that their applications actually work faster and with less wait time over combined HyperFlex and XenDesktop/XenApp installations because they get access to the power of entire data centers rather than just individual machines.</p>
<h2>Gartner Magic Quadrant: Integrated Systems</h2>
<p>Hyperconvergence is disrupting the integrated system market, with major system vendors joining the growing number of startups (some of which are now mature). I&O leaders should still recognize a role for solutions based on SANs and either blades or rack servers, depending on workload requirements.</p>
<h2>451 Research: Top Considerations for Hyperconverged Infrastructure</h2>
<p>Hyperconvergence has been receiving a tremendous amount of attention because it represents the next step in the evolution of IT resource delivery. This technology takes the idea of integrating compute, storage and networking that started with converged systems design and has improved on those architectures by adding deeper levels of abstraction and automation. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendors promise simplified operation and the ability to quickly and easily expand capacity by deploying and launching additional modules; simplicity has been the key selling point for the HCI pioneers. As HCI ventures even deeper into the enterprise and cloud environments, the architectures will need to become more efficient, agile and adaptable to help IT professionals shoulder the burden of rapidly growing data sets and workloads. This report discusses the benefits of HCI and the enhancements that must be made to expand HCI deeper into the mainstream enterprise datacenter.</p>
<h2>Customers Experiencing End to End Improvements with Hyperconverged Solutions</h2>
<p>Based on Cisco UCS technology, Cisco HyperfFlex™ Systems represent the next generation in hyperconverged infrastructure with a leap in technology that delivers the industry’s first complete end-to-end hyperconverged solution. Experience Cisco HyperFlex at https://cs.co/6051Bdnvh.</p>
<p> <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaXgzptrYDc?rel=0&wmode=opaque&wmode=opaque&showinfo=0″ target=”_blank”>www.youtube.com</a> </p>
<h2>ESG Lab Validation: Cisco HyperFlex</h2>
<p>This report documents an ESG Lab audit and validation of Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure performance testing, which focused on comparisons of Cisco HyperFlex hybrid and all-flash solutions with anonymous competitive HCI solutions.</p>
<h2>5 Things You Should Know About Computing Outside Your Data Center</h2>
<p>With the dramatic increase in data generated by mobile devices and connected machines, centralized data centers and public clouds are too far removed from where the action takes place. To get the real-time insights you need, here are the five things you should know about computing outside your data center.</p>
<h2>Next-Gen Data Platform for Hyperconvergence</h2>
<p>The Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform revolutionizes data storage for hyperconverged infrastructure deployments. The platform’s architecture and software-defined storage approach gives you a purpose-built, high-performance distributed file system with a wide array of enterprise-class data management services. The data platform’s innovations redefine distributed storage technology, providing you with the next generation of hyperconverged infrastructure.</p>
<h2>451 Report: Customers Give High Marks to Cisco</h2>
<p>451 Research conducted a Servers and Virtualization Wave 14 Study. As a part of the Customer Assessment portion of the study, respondents chose vendors and ranked them in 14 categories, for customer promise and fulfillment.</p>
<h2>5 Ways Integrated Infrastructure is at the Center of Fast IT</h2>
<p>As new technologies emerge—cloud, mobility, big data, etc.—so do business opportunities. But your IT infrastructure isn’t always so agile and adept. For your organization to stay relevant, IT must deliver value faster and deliver free resources to invest in innovation</p>
<h2>Why Champion for Converged and Hyper Converged Infrastructure</h2>
<p>At Champion, we understand that the IT infrastructure market is undergoingunprecedented transformation and one of the most significant trends reflected in thistransformation is convergence, which leads to hyper-convergence. Building aConverged or Hyper-Converged Infrastructure in a corporate environment meansmore than just replacing a few devices. It requires an entirely different way of lookingat your companies network, storage, and server infrastructure; and the types of ITstaff needed to support it.</p>
<h2>Introducing Cisco HyperFlex Systems – Choose Wisely</h2>
<p>Experience HyperFlex at https://cs.co/6053BdnsW. Based on Cisco UCS technology, Cisco HyperFlex™ Systems represent the next generation in hyperconverged infrastructure with a leap in technology that delivers the industry’s first complete end-to-end hyperconverged solution.</p>
<p> <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd2KHjZs_2g?rel=0&wmode=opaque&wmode=opaque&showinfo=0″ target=”_blank”>www.youtube.com</a> </p>
<h2>Solution Brief: Top Five UCS Integrated Infrastructure</h2>
<p>If you need to deploy and scale applications faster to increase revenue, Cisco’s integrated infrastructure solutions can help you achieve your goals—and reduce risk.</p>
<h2>Case Study: Children’s Hospital Colorado</h2>
<h2>Blue Pearl Modernizes Data Center With Cisco Hyperflex</h2>
<p>BluePearl’s business is growing fast, doubling in just 2 years. The company now maintains 57 locations in 18 states and must provide excellent performance and healthcare-grade systems availability to all animal care facilities. “We faced a choice,” says Derek DePasture, senior network engineer at BluePearl Veterinary Partners. “We either needed to hire more IT staff or make our environment easier to manage.” The company tried using a shared infrastructure platform from another vendor, but found it difficult to scale. “The solution worked fine for our current hub-and-spoke architecture, but couldn’t support our longterm goal of moving to a centralized data center,” says DePasture. “There was no modular scalability, and each platform was a management silo.”</p>
<h2>Hyperconverged Infrastructure – Industry Analyst Insights</h2>
<p> Cisco Blog > Data Center Data Center Ken Spear – March 30, 2016 – 0 Comments Industry analyst firm, Gartner, expects the market for hyperconverged infrastructure to reach $5 billion by 2019. We’ve pulled together insights from a variety of analyst firms to explain why many customers are interested in this technology.Customer Benefits Create DemandHyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and software defined infrastructure in general address a wide range of customer demands. These technologies have been evolving for several years. They have reached a level of maturity that provide customers compelling reasons to transition from traditional infrastructure and the supporting operational processes. HCI fits into a broader product portfolio providing some distinct advantages. According to a recent blog from analyst firm Forrester Research:Hyperconverged platforms architect compute, storage and network together as a complete system (whether physical or virtual). Blending ease of use, scalability, and integration into easily consumable webscale building blocks which allows infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to spend less time engineering and tuning fundamental infrastructure and more time putting capabilities in the hands of their firms’ customers. (“2016 – Hyperconvergence Solutions with Containers to Become the ‘Norm’”, Forrester blog, 12/29/15)Many IT organizations consider HCI to be a good alternative as they evaluate options for updating their current server and storage systems. According to reasearch from The Aberdeen Group, 42% of SMBs reported aging infrastructure as their top IT challenge. Hyperconverged infrastructure provides an efficient way of achieving additional savings and efficiencies while upgrading existing infrastructure.Importance of a Complete Product PortfolioThe hyperconverged infrastructure market has been led by start-ups for the past four years, but they have focused on one product out of necessity. IDC conducted a recent end-user converged systems survey that included questions regarding HCI. The participants were asked the question, “When considering (HCI) vendors, please rate the importance of the vendors ability to offer a complete product portfolio outside of HCI?” More than 70% of the people surveyed indicated the vendor’s ability of offer a complete product portfolio was “very important, we value a vendor’s ability to deliver full breadth of products and services” or “important, we prefer to keep as much with trusted partners” (see Figure 1). This was true in smaller companies of less than 1,000 employees as well as larger ones of more than 5,000 employees (source: IDC Converged Systems: End User Survey Report 2015).Figure 1: Response to IDC Survey Question Based on Size of Company>70% of end users think HCI vendors should offer a broad product portfolioFlexible ScalingMost of the first generation hyperconverged products adopted an appliance approach, so systems were implemented on a single server type that scaled by stacking the systems in a linear fashion. IDC also conducted a survey regarding the adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure with IT executives; the executive interviews were a small sample of in-depth interviews. In response to the question, “What do you see as the major challenges of hyperconverged?” the top response was “must scale compute and storage together” (Source IDC Integrated Systems: Executive Interviews 2015).We spoke with over 100 customers, as we were developing our requirements for a hyperconverged solution, so we understood customers wanted greater flexibility to scale HCI. Cisco HyperFlex Systems™ allow you to scale compute and storage resources independently.Keep the Management SimpleCustomers emphasized the need to reduce complexity. They wanted to avoid establishing another island of technology in their data center to manage. HCI needed to be an addition to the product portfolio that fit seamlessly into a broader management architecture. This requirement was affirmed by Zeus Kerravala, the founder and principal analyst of ZK Research, in his recent article,Cisco’s unique differentiator is that it can move hyperconverged from being a standalone technology to being part of a larger converged architecture where converged and hyperconverged systems can be managed through a single, policy driven console offered via Cisco Enterprise Cloud Suite. (“Cisco flexes some data center muscle at Partner Summit 2016”, Zeus Kerravala, Networkworld, 03/01/16)Cisco HyperFlex Systems are next generation hyperconverged infrastructure. They leverage all the benefits of the Cisco UCS management platform, including the broader partner ecosystem Cisco has developed over the past six years. HyperFlex also includes storage efficiency functionality, such as deduplication and compression, through the HX Data Platform.What Do the Customers Think?The industry analysts can offer insights, but customers and partners are the people who determine if a product is successful in the market. Less than one month after announcing Cisco HyperFlex, we’re off to a great start. CRN spoke with our channel partners, and they published an article entitled, “Cisco HyperFlex Already ‘Sizzling’ in Hyper-Converged Market“. The article describes the strong customer demand partners are experiencing for HyperFlex.As I mentioned in my previous blog, hyperconverged infrastructure is Crossing the Chasm. Cisco has delivered a “whole product” to the market and demand is accelerating. In the CRN article, channel sales reps noted that “…Cisco is differentiating itself in the market with the ability to offer HyperFlex’s combined compute and software-defined storage technologies, along with Cisco’s networking expertise.”If you’d like to get additional insights regarding hyperconverged infrastructure from an independent analyst firm, download the 451 Research report, “Considerations for the Next Phase of Hyperconverged Infrastructure”.KenFor more information: www.cisco.com/go/hyperflexTags:Cisco HyperFlexForrester ResearchGartnerhyperconvergedhyperflexIDC </p>
<p>