Cisco Cisco HyperFlex HX220c M4 Node White Paper

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Proven components from Cisco are integrated to form a software-defined storage (SDS) platform. This approach

eliminates or reduces the need for planning and configuration decisions, while allowing customization to meet

customer workload needs. The platform and management model adopted is an extension of the established Cisco

UCS data center strategy, with familiar components managed in a consistent manner through a policy-based

framework using Cisco UCS Manager.

Business Challenges

An efficient IT Infrastructure is integral to the initial success and continued competitiveness of most businesses. IT

efficiency can be expressed in capital and operating costs to the business. Two major components of operating

costs for all businesses are human resources and optimal utilization of purchased IT resources.

The underlying issues that contribute to these operating costs are as follows:

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Complexity: Complex systems take longer to deploy and require a greater number of highly skilled

technical staff members. The multitude of technologies and tools required to keep the infrastructure running

and the nonstandard methods introduced by this approach have a direct effect on failure rates, contributing

to even more costs to the business.

●

Stranded capacity: Even with virtualization, IT resource consumption is not optimal. The business

requirements and computing and storage needs of workloads change over time, potentially resulting in

unused computing or storage resources in the enterprise. One way to prevent this underutilization of

resources is to introduce flexibility into the architecture so that you can expand computing and storage

resources independently.

Efforts to reduce management complexity through consolidation of native element managers on preintegrated and

converged IT infrastructure have resulted in only limited improvements. These factors and the short depreciation

cycles of capitalized IT resources point to the need for simpler and more precisely controlled components to

achieve necessary levels of utilization.

The Solution

The Cisco HyperFlex solution focuses on simplicity of deployment and operation. It delivers a hyperconverged

platform that has the advantage of allowing you to start small and grow in small increments without the need for

expensive storage devices connected to computing resources by either SAN or network-attached storage (NAS)

methods. A basic cluster requires three hyperconverged nodes managed by Cisco UCS Manager. Beyond this, a

Cisco HyperFlex cluster can increase computing and storage resources for flexible scaling according to workload

needs. Flexibility is introduced by creating a cluster with a mix of Cisco UCS B200 M4 Blade Servers as

computing-only nodes connected to a set of Cisco HyperFlex HX240c M4 Nodes operating as hyperconverged

nodes. In this scenario, the hyperconverged node provides storage for the Cisco UCS B200 M4 computing-only

nodes. This feature allows either storage or computing capacity to be added independently to achieve optimal

levels of cluster resources.

The Cisco HyperFlex solution also delivers storage efficiency features such as thin provisioning, data

deduplication, and compression for greater capacity and performance improvements. Additional operational

efficiency is facilitated through features such as cloning and snapshots.

This solution uses Cisco HyperFlex HX220c M4 Nodes, Cisco UCS fabric interconnects, Cisco UCS Manager,

Cisco Nexus

9372 platform switches, Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform (SDS) software, Citrix XenDesktop

Version 7.8, and the VMware ESXi 6.0 Update 1b hypervisor. The HX220c M4 Nodes provide computing, cache,