Today, Barcelona waves goodbye to another successful Cisco Live Europe event. There’s been an abundance of exciting news regarding existing Cisco solutions, industry trends, and brand new innovative projects that Cisco have in the pipeline. One of the most significant areas that was showcased was Cisco’s “data center anywhere” vision and how it is coming to fruition.

Nowadays, data centers are not located in a fixed location. They have to exist wherever data is created, processed and utilised. Because of this, Cisco has announced a new type of data center architecture that more efficiently meets customer needs by extending it to everywhere that data lives and applications are deployed.

In order to achieve this, Cisco is introducing a variety of innovations related to hyperconvergence, security, networking, and automation.

Hyperflex 4.0 has been announced! This will enable Hyperflex to be extended into branch offices and remote locations to power applications at the edge.

CloudCenter will be further enhanced in order to assist customers in managing the lifecycle of applications if across multiple cloud environments.

Customers will now have the option to buy and manage their technology across the whole data center architecture through a single Enterprise Agreement. This will vastly simplify the existing process, saving time and resources.

ACI will be expanded into the cloud with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Roland Acra, senior vice president, Data Center Business Group, Cisco, said “Enterprises should be able to deploy applications based on the needs of their business, not the limitations of their technology. Customers want to deploy applications and manage data across a range of diverse platforms, from on-premises to cloud-based. That is why we are taking the ‘center’ out of the data center. Today, Cisco is helping our customers expand their reach into every cloud, every data center, and every branch.”

“BT adopted Cisco ACI as the basis for our newly launched SD-Fabric managed service to extend SDN capabilities into the data center. With ACI, we can offer customers full automation, central policy control and built-in security,” said Adrian Comley, general manager, Dynamic Network Services, Global Services, BT. “We’re working with Cisco as it extends ACI policy to AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud services. With Cisco we’re enabling customers to rapidly deploy fabric extensions and provision applications anywhere with a repeatable, proven design for operational simplicity and better security.”

HyperFlex 4.0 with Cisco Intersight will be available in Q2CY19.

Cloud ACI and Virtual ACI will be will be available in Q2CY19.

The new types of Cisco Enterprise Agreement can be ordered in March.

Cisco CloudCenter Suite subscription on-prem is available in Q1CY19 while the SaaS version is planned for availability in Q1CY19 in North America and Q2CY19 in Europe.

Original Cisco blog post.

Tesrex Hybrid Cloud solution overview.