Cisco's Wei Songbin: ACI and HyperFlex dual innovations make data centers ubiquitous

[Original article from 51CTO.com] When you mention data centers, what is the first image that comes to your mind? Is it countless servers and switches humming, or colorful cables interwoven and arranged in an orderly manner? Indeed, this is the traditional impression of data centers in the public's mind, but today's data centers have been quietly changing.

According to market forecasts, by 2022, 3/4 of data will be processed at the edge, and only 1/4 of data will need to be processed in data centers or the cloud. The edge of data will be a new trend in the future. In other words, data centers are no longer a fixed place. In the future, data centers will exist wherever data needs to be created, processed, and used. In response to this development trend, Cisco recently launched a new architecture that allows companies to build data centers anywhere data resides and applications are deployed. Wei Songbin, senior vice president of Cisco Greater China and general manager of the product division, also accepted an interview with the media a few days ago, sharing Cisco's many innovations to achieve the vision of "data centers everywhere."

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Cisco's triple gates in the data center: automation, multi-cloud, and security

How does Cisco respond to the new trend of data edge? Wei Songbin told reporters that Cisco uses three data center strategies: automation, multi-cloud, and security to enable a small data center to process data anytime and anywhere, ensuring real-time intercommunication between the edge and the data center.

In the automation, multi-cloud, and security triple architecture of Cisco's data center, automation is mainly concentrated at the underlying infrastructure level. As a leading company in the network field, Cisco mainly achieves automation at the network level through hardware products such as Nexus switches, plus Cisco's application-centric infrastructure ACI software solution. In terms of storage solutions, Cisco's hyper-converged product HyperFlex is also helping customers achieve automation.

In the multi-cloud architecture, Cisco has a series of multi-cloud products. For example, Cisco multi-cloud technology CloudCenter provides users with a public unified interface. No matter which public cloud the user's backend is connected to, the user's application and CloudCenter interface remain unchanged.

In terms of security, Cisco also has a series of security solutions that provide multiple security protections, such as internal protection of the network itself, traditional firewalls, OpenDNS, data cleaning before cloud computing, etc. In short, automation, multi-cloud and security constitute Cisco's comprehensive data center and cloud strategy.

Wei Songbin emphasized that in order to realize the vision of "data center everywhere", Cisco has launched a wide range of innovations in the fields of networking, hyper-convergence, security and automation, including two important innovations - ACI and HyperFlex.

The connotation of ACI has been expanding, making data centers ubiquitous

ACI was proposed ten years ago. Many people regard it as a traditional data center network, but in fact its connotation has been expanding, from network simplification to intent-based network implementation, from ACI remote access to virtual ACI. Today, ACI can also be deployed in the cloud and enter the public cloud field. Whether users want to use the central data center, the edge data center, or the cloud, the experience is unified. The same application and the same intent can be delivered to all places to provide users with completely consistent support.

The reporter can't help but wonder, in traditional centralized data centers, application-centric infrastructure (ACI) naturally has a place to play, but after data is marginalized, how does ACI achieve ubiquity in data centers?

Wei Songbin explained that the first major expansion of ACI is multi-partition, ACI Multi-Pod, which is similar to the concept of high-availability partitions (AZ) in cloud planning. An ACI can span multiple data center partitions, but it can still be operated and managed like a single data center, and can cover the same city or several nearby cities. In addition, ACI has been further enhanced by ACI Multi-Site, which is similar to the concept of cloud planning regions. Multiple ACIs run separately, and the failure of any ACI will not affect another ACI, but they maintain intercommunication, and the intentions and policies are also automatically synchronized, which can cover data centers across the country or even across countries.

"ACI is meant to be ubiquitous. The use of ACI has nothing to do with the location of the data center, the underlying hardware, the virtualization and container platforms, or the choice of public cloud. Ultimately, ACI can be used wherever there is data," he summarized.

3 years and 4 generations of products, HyperFlex4.0 is still leading the way in hyper-convergence

Wei Songbin then introduced Cisco's HyperFlex 4.0 to the reporter. As of April 2019, Cisco has released four generations of products in just three years. "With each generation of products, Cisco has seen the development direction of hyper-convergence and made the right decision, becoming the main driving force for the development of the hyper-convergence market and leading the development direction of hyper-convergence."

He explained that in the HyperFlex 4.0 era, Cisco has further paid attention to the importance of edge computing to enterprises and the dependence of enterprise remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) on hyper-converged deployment. From the past design ideas that focused on performance, reliability, and availability of data center infrastructure, it has further increased comprehensive support for edge computing and ROBO, achieving comprehensive support from ultra-light loads to enterprise-critical applications, truly achieving comprehensive coverage from data centers to edge computing, and proposing a new concept of HyperFlex everywhere.

What exactly does HyperFlex Ubiquitous mean? It means that the same HyperFlex architecture can be used in ultra-light loads and edge computing at the edge. Whether in the core data center or in the public cloud, private cloud or remote edge, the same HyperFlex architecture can be used to integrate computing, storage and network. "Its core management platform is Intersight. Through Intersight's centralized management, the user's IT staff can be completely consistent regardless of the number of data centers, size, geographic location, design, planning, deployment and operation and maintenance management of the data center."

In an interview with ***, Wei Songbin emphasized that ACI and HyperFlex have made data centers ubiquitous, but this is still far from enough. Multi-cloud, security, and application management are higher-level requirements. Cisco has seen these requirements and provided multi-faceted enhancements and extensions on the basic platform through software in different fields. These software can be used independently, and have also been integrated with ACI and HyperFlex to varying degrees, which can more effectively exert the overall business functions of the data center.

"We are now at a stage of redefining the data center. Cisco has seen that it is now able to push the capabilities of the previous super-large data center, including management, performance, and business support capabilities, farther away than before, and closer to customers. In the future, it should continue to extend farther, and will definitely move closer to users and terminals, while emphasizing unified management and unified business effectiveness."

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]