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Cisco is 'all over the place' with composable infrastructure, says HPE

"Weeks of work" required for Cisco to deploy, compared with mere hours with Synergy, claims firm

HPE wasn't holding back in its attempts to sell "composable infrastructure" solutions, lashing out at Cisco in a bid to position itself at the front of a growing trend.

Paul Miller, HPE's VP of marketing for converged data centre infrastructure, told Computing at HPE's Discover 2016 event in Las Vegas today that Cisco's tiers of APIs would take weeks of work to roll out compared with a couple of hours with HPE's Synergy solution.

Composable infrastructure, which bridges virtualisation and software-defined data centres, is a term being increasingly bandied around as customers see the appeal of achieving cloud-style convenience in on-premise data centres.

The concept is still in a testing phase, having been adopted by just three customers: Qualcomm, genome research firm HudsonAlpha and US satellite broadcast firm Dish Network.

Miller also insisted that, HPE's OneView converged infrastructure software counts as a facet of composable infrastructure, giving the vendor yet another advantage over Cisco.

"We've built OneView so we can help customers deploy quicker and faster. It's not just us saying: ‘Throw your old stuff away,'" said Miller, suggesting that existing hardware and software can be brought under the composable umbrella.

The integration of Docker, Ruby on Rails, VMware and Saltstack is also cutting down the number of APIs required in favour of a "unified API", according to Miller.

"I go to IT customers all the time asking if they've heard of these things so we can show them we've already got it," said Miller.

"Cisco has tiers of APIs. Studies have shown that's weeks of work. We first did the work with Docker, and it took a couple of hours to integrate our API. For most customers, it's less than half a day, or even 30 minutes. If you had to do that through 20 APIs, forget it - you can't do it.

"We see composability as a full family of offerings. Synergy is first - we're making that fully composable. Cisco launched the M-Series - they're all over the place.

"We have a prescriptive target we're moving on. We have dozens in the ecosystem. We publish the integrations on our site, but most [come from] GitHub and other open source areas."

Miller admitted that many CIOs still don't really understand composable, but that "when you talk about the costs and the ability to have it under financial control without lines of business swiping their credit cards, they like that control".

"You're only paying for what you need. They also tend to say that it's infrastructure as code and 'I want it!'"

Cisco is 'all over the place' with composable infrastructure, says HPE

"Weeks of work" required for Cisco to deploy, compared with mere hours with Synergy, claims firm

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