JKS Infrastructure Solutions - Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

What’s All the Fuss About Hyper-Converged Infrastructure?

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What is HCI?

Speaking of datacenter technologies, am sure you’ve heard about hyper-converged infrastructure as the next big thing. It is not surprising that according to IDC, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is the fastest growing segment of the converged (commodity-based hardware) infrastructure market which is poised to reach $4.8B in 2019.

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The top-level definition of HCI is actually quite simple. HCI is fundamentally about the convergence of compute, networking and storage onto shared industry-standard x86 building blocks.  It’s about moving the intelligence out of dedicated physical appliances and instead running all the datacenter functions as software on the hypervisor.  It’s about eliminating the physical hardware silos to adopt a simpler infrastructure based on scale-out x86.

Perhaps more fundamentally, it’s also about enabling private datacenters to adopt an architecture similar to the one used by large web-scale companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. HCI is by no means confined to low-end use cases like ROBO and SMB (although it does great there too). The real promise of HCI is to provide the best building block to implement a full-blown Software Defined Data Center.

When thinking about HCI, hardware and software are fundamental to this new infrastructure.

Hardware: HCI includes industry-standard x86 systems that can be scaled up or out. Almost like small lego bricks stacked together to build a much more imposing infrastructure. By design, it’s simple, elegant, scalable infrastructure

Software: I consider this the secret sauce. All the key datacenter functions – compute, networking, and storage – run as software on the hypervisor. They work seamlessly together in a tightly integrated software layer. The software can be scaled out across many x86 nodes. We believe that VMware offers the most flexible and compelling option for customers to adopt the HCI model: a Hyper-Converged Software (HCS) stack based on vSphere, Virtual SAN and vCenter. Customers can deploy the software on a wide range of pre-certified vendor hardware. They get the benefits of HCI, including strong software–hardware integration and a single point of support, while having unparalleled options of hardware to choose from.

Benefits of HCI

This new IT architecture has many benefits for the end customer including:

·         Adaptable software architecture that takes advantage of commodity technology trends, such as: increasing CPU densities; new generations of solid-state storage and non-volatile memories; evolving interconnects (40GB, 100GB Ethernet) and protocols (NVMe)

·         Uniform operational model that allows customers to manage their entire IT infrastructure with a single set of tools.

·         Last but not least, streamlined procurement, deployment and support. Customers can build their infrastructure in a gradual and scalable way as demands evolve.

JKS is partnered with VMware.

For more information, contact JKS at:

infrastructure@jks-systems.com / 860-436-4664

www.jks-systems.com