Hyperconvergence— anytime, anywhere

Chapter 3

Hyperconvergence—
anytime, anywhere

Aspirations of improved organizational agility and data efficiency are not unique to a particular sector, industry, or department. In an increasingly competitive environment, these are now requirements for organizations across all industries that want to stay competitive and drive modernization.

What started out as a natural evolution of convergence has transformed into an end-to-end infrastructure solution that can be used to address virtually any business challenge and applied to any use case. But not all solutions are created equal. Leading hyperconverged infrastructure providers are constantly making additional iterations to their solutions based on current IT trends and ongoing customer feedback.

When considering a hyperconverged infrastructure solution, ensure that the offering is capable of reducing complexity and supporting your growing list of demands and requirements. To tackle your toughest challenges, you need a solution that can:¹²

Ensure Application Performance:

Provide application performance metrics to drive better workload placement decisions so that your application platform can more easily adapt to the needs of your business-critical applications. It should suggest or even automate actions based on its insights to help ensure workload performance.

Support hybrid cloud and
cloud native services:

As hybrid cloud environments become more common, your solution must give you the freedom and flexibility to support multiple hypervisors and deploy and support your applications in the place that makes the most sense.

Support any application and scale as you grow:

From traditional enterprise applications to big data and analytics applications and to virtualized and containerized software, the right hyperconverged infrastructure solution must be able to support a wide set of application deployment models and adapt as those needs evolve and grow.

Deploy at edge locations:

Bring the robust feature set of hyperconvergence to your remote or branch office environments with a low-cost, easy-to-deploy, centrally managed solution.

The right hyperconverged infrastructure solution should be able to integrate with your on-premises resources and support any application, at any scale, in any cloud.

Penske Australia Accelerates Applications, Eases Shift to Remote Work with Cisco HyperFlex

Penske Australia is a leading supplier of the world’s finest heavy-duty trucks, diesel and gas engines, and power systems. With a portfolio of brands—including Western Star Trucks, MAN Truck & Bus, Dennis Eagle MTU, Detroit, and Allison Transmission—and a network of retail branches and dealers, Penske Australia serves a variety of on-highway and off-highway industries.

Penske Australia now has five-node Cisco HyperFlex clusters at its primary and backup data centers, hosting roughly 200 virtual servers and all of its applications. The HCI environment slashed the company’s technology overhead and costs, reducing 56 rack units of gear down to 24. The platform is tightly integrated with VMware and Veeam, and is managed with Cisco Intersight and Cisco Workload Optimization Manager.

“We would have been in a world of hurt if we hadn’t installed Cisco HyperFlex before the pandemic. Because we had the right platform in place, we were able to shift about 300 people to remote work in a matter of days.”
– Bobby Stojceski, Technology and Security Manager, Penske Australia