What’s All the Fuss About Hyper-Converged Infrastructure?
Technology has made it so easy that customers looking to
purchase a product or service need to simply look online for reviews. Did you know
that 80% of people try new things because of recommendations from friends? It’s
the reason why e-commerce companies like Amazon have thrived! Customers want to
hear what other customers have to say about: The product, their experience with
the brand, durability, support, purchase decisions, recommendations … the list
goes on. This is no different in the B2B space. That is why IT Central Station
is such an invaluable resource for customers looking to adopt new technologies
like hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) with VMware Virtual SAN. Customers
get a chance to read unbiased product reviews from the tech community which
makes them smart and much more informed buyers.
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.
Cagr
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.
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