Laggard Cisco stumbles over, puffing: 'HyperFlex now supports Hyper-V'

Huh?

So, Microsoft already ships project Honolulu with RDMA based hyperconverged storage as part of Windows Server 2016. And, Storage Spaces Direct is non-proprietary, works on every vendors servers, etc...

Hyperflex is a hyper resource hog. It can do 40Gbit, but so can WSSD with about 1/100th the overhead due to the RDMA support. Oh... let’s not forget large scale storage tiering, massive data scaling, etc...

Add to that support for Microsoft network controller and you can do everything Hyperflex does better.

So buy some C220 M4 or better servers for compute and hot storage. Then buy some C3260s for cold, colder and damn near frozen storage. Then install Windows Server 2016 and project Honolulu and skip using storage products that offer absolutely nothing useful at a massive additional cost.

Oh... Hyperflex is compatible with precisely nothing when it comes to backup. You have to run sector by sector backups of hard drive snapshots.

Cisco does make the absolute best servers for enterprise data centers. But Hyperflex, UCS Director, UCS central, UCS Manager, Cloud Manager, etc... they’re absolute shit.

Look at the latest version of UCS Manager. Cisco can’t even get the right box to be highlighted when navigating servers. No upload process bars on software uploads... no status report at all during firmware updates causing the fabric to reboot.

The only way that UCS Manager is useable anymore is through the command line or APIs and the APIs are frigging horrifying messes of “it’s kinda like SOAP”.

Thankfully, they support Redfish on rack servers which completely eliminates the need for horrors like UCS Manager and UCS Central.

Honolulu is close to being fully integrated with Redfish, so bare metal will be 100% managed by a company who actually writes software.

To be fair, UCS is 100000% better than most competitors if for not other reason than it’s ability to managed all devices from all vendors through a single API. So, creating a RAID is done through Cisco’s code and doesn’t require trying to hack your way into the RAID controller. Ethernet settings are parts of Cisco’s code and doesn’t require booting into a 10 year old version of Windows to run a 8 year old Java to maybe perform a network BIOS update (hello HPE).

Hyperflex is just an amazing waste of money if Hyper-V is there. It’s great for platforms like VMware which who actually think storage, networking, and management are optional.

The foundation is done

Now that all players have feature parity in the foundation, with Cisco probably having some significant performance advantages, the focus turns towards the stack. This was predicted long time ago but completely ignored by El Reg.

Nutanix is desperately trying to bring their application blueprinting product Calm to market but is finding out that this is not so easy. At the same time Orchestration and Automation is not easy either, Vmware's vRealize has been around forever and still sucks.

In the meantime Cisco has integrated AppDynamics (which is a force of nature in its space) and CloudCenter into HyperFlex. CC is years ahead and really only completes with RightScale.

So the stack wars might be over before they even began. Would be nice if we get a real analysis and not stupid snark.

HyperFlex?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha

That was a good one!