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

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.

Support any application:
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.

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

Scale as you grow:
The right solution will be able to support your
IT needs today and adapt as those needs evolve, providing the simplicity and flexibility
to handle any workload and use case.

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.

Energy industry leader chooses hyperconvergence over public cloud.¹³

EXMAR is a provider of floating solutions for the energy industry. Its specialized ships, infrastructure, and services support the offshore extraction, transportation, and transformation of natural gases, petrochemical gases, and liquid hydrocarbons.

The company is used to change. Operating in the highly dynamic energy industry where pricing, geopolitical, and economic instability is the norm, the company has been reinventing itself for the better part of a decade. Exmar expanded its focus from straight forward energy transportation to multifaceted energy transformation. It pioneered the use of floating barges for mid-sea energy processing and transfers, helping avoid port-based limitations and costs. It established a fleet of specialized vessels and crews that can be rented or leased. And it continues to meet customer needs through differentiated maritime services and logistical support.

“We did a cost analysis, and putting our workloads into a public cloud is equivalent to buying one new HyperFlex system every year.” – David De Roock, ICT Infrastructure Project Manager, EXMAR

Learn more about Exmar and other companies using hyperconverged infrastructure in innovative ways on the Compute Customer Stories webpage.

Challenges

Simplify and accelerate IT operations
Increase infrastructure resiliency
Improve application performance

Solutions

Cisco HyperFlex™ system
Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®)
Cisco Intersight™ infrastructure management
Cisco® Nexus 9000 Series Switches
Cisco Umbrella™ security
Cisco Identity Services Engine (Cisco ISE)
Cisco Email Security

Results

Modernized data centers at a lower cost than cloud and other hyperconverged options
Decreased application latency from 200 to five milliseconds
Sped up server deployments from days to minutes