Cisco will next week reveal something called Project Starship that it promises will allow greater and easier automation of UCS servers and its HyperFlex hyperconverged appliances, no matter if they run in the data centre, remote office or a small business.

Details are scarce at the time of writing, but next week's Cisco Live! gabfest includes a session titled Cisco UCS: The Road to Full-Potential Automation in which Switchzilla promises to share our outlook and strategic plans for the next levels of data center automation.

In a colossal non-surprise, Cisco reckons that Predictive analytics and autonomous capabilities create new opportunities for AI assisted operations in IT and promises architecture and roadmap information on how it will address those opportunities.

The company also describes Starship as next-generation cloud-based management for UCS and HyperFlex that delivers faster deployment, simplified operations and richer analytics that are especially powerful in a multi-site Edge environments.

The edge is important because ahead of next week's Starship ride Cisco's slipped out news of some new HyperFlex appliances intended for use in remote offices.

The new HX220c nodes pack a pair of E5-2600 v4 Xeons, can be equipped with up to 1.5TB of RAM and house half a dozen disk drives, either 1.2TB spinning rust or 3.8TB SSD. There's a vanilla appliance and an all-flash affair.

Cisco expects you'll run vSphere on the appliances and has provided a pair of FlexFlash SD cards to boot it from. Connectivity comes from 2 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FcoE), plus native Fibre Channel fabric to each node with 2 x 80-Gbps networking available.

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Cisco to reveal 'Starship' ride to cloudy server automation heaven - The Register