Cisco HyperFlex

Spin up infrastructure as fast as your teams need, while keeping it under your roof. With Cisco HyperFlex, you work from a single control plane: define policies, lay down clusters, and publish resources your app owners can consume immediately. Start with a three-server footprint and get your first workloads online in under an hour. Use the guided setup to assign IP pools and VLANs, carve out datastore tiers, then claim the system in Cisco Intersight for ongoing management. From there, create golden VM templates, tag them by environment (prod, stage, dev), and let application teams self-serve through approved catalogs while you keep guardrails in place.

Rolling out applications is straightforward and repeatable. Build multi-tier blueprints—web, app, and database—and apply placement, anti-affinity, and storage policies per tier. For virtual desktops, clone from a parent image to deliver hundreds of seats rapidly, then scale capacity in small steps as demand grows. Protect critical services by scheduling application-consistent snapshots and replicating them to a secondary site. When patching time arrives, trigger a nondisruptive, cluster-aware upgrade; hosts are updated one by one, live workloads move automatically, and you track progress in a single view.

Scaling follows the pace of the business. Add capacity-only or balanced nodes to expand storage and compute independently; the platform rebalances data and workloads without service interruption. Need specialized acceleration? Introduce GPU-enabled nodes for AI inference or visualization tasks. Tune performance by assigning policies for cache, compression, and deduplication, then watch real-time telemetry for latency, IOPS, and bandwidth. Set headroom alerts so you act before users notice slowdowns. Standardize operations with APIs—wire up Terraform modules or Ansible playbooks to create projects, provision datastores, and register templates based on tickets or CI/CD events.

Modern app teams aren’t left out. Publish persistent volumes to Kubernetes through the CSI driver and map storage classes to performance tiers. Developers request what they need with YAML; the platform delivers volumes with the right protection and performance policy automatically. Spin up ephemeral test environments from production snapshots, validate changes, then tear them down to save resources. For branch and edge deployments, drop a compact cluster on-site, manage it from the same console, and replicate critical data back to headquarters. Whether you’re hosting SQL Server, Oracle, or NoSQL stacks, you can codify best practices—CPU reservations, I/O limits, protection schedules—so every new instance launches with production-ready settings from day one.