Cisco announced new updates to its Hyperflex hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)  including a 40 Gb/s fabric, new integrations, and management capabilities.

The goal is to provide users with the ability to power more workloads, of course, and also offer more integrations with technologies from Cisco’s data center portfolio, says Todd Brannon, UCS director of marketing at Cisco.

Like other HCI systems, Hyperflex boils down to a piece of hardware, in this case Cisco’s UCS compute system, and the software, its HX Data Platform. And part of today’s announcement includes a 40 Gb/s fabric that ties all of the nodes together to distribute data evenly and increase application performance.

“We’re bringing in the 40G fabric from the networking side because as we add that flash, we need the network pipes for the east-west traffic to match that performance,” Brannon says.

Cisco also announced CloudCenter for customers who want an application-focused management tool that allows users to add cloud application deployments to their service offerings. Customers can use CloudCenter in conjunction with HyperFlex in the same way they can use CloudCenter with other Cisco data center products. “Our integration work with CloudCenter gives customers an on-premises cloud experience with HyperFlex,” Brannon says.

The company’s new platform management system, called HyperFlex Connect, allows users to manage HX clusters remotely and from mobile devices.

Since Cisco launched HyperFlex about one year ago, the company has gained 1,100 customers, and about two-thirds of them were already UCS customers, which made it easy for them to adopt, Brannon says.