Cisco announced new innovations to help customers accelerate and simplify their hybrid cloud journeys.

As application growth continues to drive more interactions between people and things, businesses are striving for simplicity and flexibility to manage application diversity. Modern applications have become more dynamic requiring infrastructure to be more adaptable. At the same time, IT is being asked to support enterprises' rapidly changing business requirements and speed up infrastructure and application delivery.

As a result, organizations are shifting to a hybrid multicloud operating model to centrally manage infrastructure and applications wherever they reside and deliver optimized application experiences.  In fact, a recent Gartner end-user survey showed 76 percent of respondents who are currently using public, hybrid or multicloud infrastructure reported using multiple cloud IaaS and PaaS providers.

Cisco is advancing its strategy to deliver innovation at all levels of the hybrid cloud stack, ranging from silicon to computing systems to a SaaS-delivered operations platform with public cloud integrations - all designed to help customers simplify and manage multiple cloud environments and applications.  

"While enterprises are standardizing on hybrid, multicloud environments, many are still building a strategy to minimize complexity and maximize value with an operational model and tools that deliver flexibility, speed and simplicity," said DD Dasgupta, Vice President, Product Management, Cloud and Compute Business Unit at Cisco. "Cisco has paved the way to help IT operations transform with hybrid cloud, enabling an operational model that allows businesses to adapt quickly, and streamline the secure delivery of applications whether they are located in on-prem datacenters or in the public cloud."   

New hybrid cloud innovations announced today include:  

Cisco Intersight Platform

• Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service with Attached Clusters: New Intersight capability that allows customers to connect their on-prem Kubernetes clusters to new or existing Kubernetes clusters in public cloud, allowing IT administrators to observe and operate containers across on-prem and multiple public clouds from a single platform.
• Cisco Intersight integrations with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2): Expands hybrid cloud capabilities to include combined inventory and automation of virtual machines in AWS in addition to on-prem environments.
  

Cisco HyperFlex Hyperconverged Infrastructure

• Introducing Cisco HyperFlex Express: Simplified hardware and software that provides customers with a fast on-ramp to hybrid cloud, reducing deployment speeds with on-prem hyperconverged infrastructure powered by Cisco Intersight.
• Cisco HyperFlex systems with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC TM processors: Expands customers' choice with AMD EPYC CPU-based hyperconverged systems that deliver outstanding cluster performance and efficiency for a diverse set of workloads.   
• Innovation for Edge Computing: New containerized local witness software can run on a variety of Cisco switching, routing and IoT industrial networking platforms, often already present in edge environments, providing an efficient, lightweight high-availability solution for 2-node clusters.
  

Cisco UCS X-Series

• Cisco UCS X-Series: The fastest growing UCS system in Cisco's history, the UCS X-Series Modular System is now enhanced with new accelerated computing capabilities and flexible high-performance networking. These include:
• Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Node with Cisco UCS X-Fabric Technology: Provides customers the flexibility to connect compute nodes to NVIDIA accelerated computing GPU resources to meet the needs of modern AI/ML and virtual desktop infrastructure workloads. This enables improved efficiency using a single system for blade and rack workloads.        
• 5th Gen Unified Fabric for performance and simplicity:  Industry-leading performance in a modular system including 100G single port support and 200G bandwidth to a single server that delivers investment protection, lower costs, and ample bandwidth to power data intensive applications.   
  

"With increasing cloud adoption, application outcomes are the new currency, and IT must modernize their environments to dynamically deploy resources to suit multiple application demands," said Matthew Kimball, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.  "Cisco is building on its strategy and technology foundation to help customers simplify their hybrid multicloud environments and provide the infrastructure that powers all types of workloads and delivers the most value from using on-premises resources in coordination with public cloud services."