Cisco Expands Cloud and Hyperconverged Infrastructure Play

Cisco made two major data center announcements Tuesday, unveiling an agreement to acquire IT orchestration startup CliQr Technologies and rolling out a new line of hyperconverged infrastructure systems. Both the acquisition and the new product line leverage Cisco’s existing data center technologies.

CliQr, the San Jose, California-based startup Cisco is buying for $260 million cash, has integrated its orchestration platform with Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure software, its flagship data center network automation technology, and Unified Computing System, its pre-integrated compute, networking, and virtualization IT package.

The new hyperconverged product line, called HyperFlex, adds a storage management layer to UCS, which turns it from a converged infrastructure solution into a hyperconverged one. Both converged and hyperconverged infrastructure concepts are attempts to unify disparate data center hardware into a single easy-to-manage environment, with the main difference being that hyperconverged systems add Software Defined Storage, which turns clusters of commodity x86 servers into automated storage systems using software.

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Cisco’s HyperFlex consists of UCS and hyperconverged infrastructure software by a company called Springpath.

CliQr gives Cisco a piece of technology that helps customers switch to IT environments that take advantage of cloud infrastructure – public, private, or hybrid – faster. It orchestrates IT resources underneath, regardless of the type, to support applications at hand.

A user sets up a single application profile, and CliQr ensures it can be deployed in a way that’s consistent with the IT department’s access control and security policies.

The platform is already integrated with UCS and ACI, but Cisco plans to integrate it further across its data center technology portfolio.

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