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A brief guide to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and how to get the most from the next evolution in business computing infrastructure
Move at hyper speed
With a Hyperconverged Infrastructure
The next Generation
Future ready IT Infrastructure
Simplify
Hyperconvergence is a hot topic right now. And for some good reasons. Organisations have longed for a way to reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to deploy new business-facing IT services.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) delivers the speed, simplicity and agility for the infrastructure needed in today’s digital economy. But not all HCI solutions are created equal. And HCI is not the answer for every application or workload. But the more technology is implemented in today's servers, more and more workloads can run efficiently on a HCI platform. In the following, we explore what makes HCI different from traditional IT.
Introducing the next generation in IT infrastructure
"A software-based architecture that integrates storage, compute, virtualization, and networking resources in a box."
- Grand View Research
What is hyperconvergence?
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) represents the next step in the evolution of IT infrastructure.
It takes the idea of integrating compute, storage and networking that started with converged systems and adds deeper levels of abstraction and automation to provide an all-in-one data center that can be up and running in under an hour.
The market watcher highlights the key benefits of HCI as:
- Eliminates the need for making individual purchases of servers
- Virtualization software and management tools
- Supported by a single vendor
- Does not require installation of Storage-area Network (SAN) or Network-attached Storage (NAS)
- Integration reduces the overall cost of the HCI system
Stop the silos
The typical enterprise now has a data center built in silos of hardware to support a range of distinct applications. This distributed environment can be static and inflexible. It also means IT staff devote a large amount of time and resources to deploy, provision and manage the individual components. HCI solutions reorganize the components of converged infrastructure and are combined with software to deliver a pure appliance model. This architecture further simplifies operations.
Ressources
Report: Grand View Research
The business need
Scale as you growth
Speed of business
In today’s digital economy where the app has become king, your organisation must move faster than ever. It must also be extremely flexible. You need the ability to add apps and virtual machines (VMs) quickly. Silos of compute, network and storage in your data center can hold you back. Current infrastructure for the apps you need to deploy adds cost, time and inefficiency.
Filling the need
Much of the infrastructure available (converged stacks, storage arrays, traditional blade servers, networking) requires a degree of expertise that can hamper rapid deployment.
The drive towards HCI fills the need for moving the infrastructure at the speed of business. But often there’s another cost like proliferation of solutions that are managed separately. This complicates infrastructure management and operations.
The final challenge is around the ‘promise’ of cloud economics. Note that cloud doesn’t save you money – it provides simplified scaling at more granular levels, and allows you to spend the money when you need it. For these new apps and operational models, a solution is required that helps you scale capabilities as you need it.
"Future generations of HCI should allow customers to add resources independently and in a granular fashion."
– 451 Research
To be more agile, it says HCI platforms must have:
- Common management and orchestration
- Integration with legacy data centre platforms
- Integration with well-known management tools to eliminate the need to add new ones
- A common control plane for servers, networking and storage to centralize logs and error reporting within existing tools
To become more adaptable, HCI must be able to:
- Integrate with APIs – a key requirement for organizations building a private cloud environment
- Secure sensitive data – file-level encryption as an option, plus VPN integration for securing replication streams
- Provide comprehensive auditing capabilities to track the source of breaches and data
Ressources
Report, 451 Research about hyperconverged infrastructure
Market driver
Disrupt or be disrupted
Market driver
HCI’s ability to deliver key storage functions such as snapshots/cloning, replication and flash acceleration without the need for storage SAN expertise has proved a real game changer.
Initial deployments have been largely focused on the midmarket, where IT organisations often lack storage expertise and are not bound to a specific storage supplier.
1.) Storage challenge
HCI’s ability to deliver key storage functions such as snapshots/cloning, replication and flash acceleration without the need for storage SAN expertise has proved a real game changer.
Initial deployments have been largely focused on the midmarket, where IT organisations often lack storage expertise and are not bound to a specific storage supplier.
But as HCI ventures even deeper into the enterprise and cloud environments, the infrastructure architectures will need to become more efficient, agile and adaptable to help IT professionals shoulder the burden of rapidly growing data sets and workloads.
"The architectures will need to become more efficient, agile and adaptable to help IT
professionals shoulder the burden of rapidly
growing data sets and workloads."
– 451 Research
2.) Efficiency
Deduplication and in-line compression capabilities allow companies to store more data in the storage footprint by eliminating redundancies as data is being written to disk or flash.
Deduplication works well for reducing VM images and files and has moved into the primary storage space.
Compression has become necessary for reducing application workloads because deduplication does not work well on database workloads.
451 Research believes both have a major role to play in performance efficiency because they allow HCI nodes to cache more data within expensive flash SSDs and PCIe cards.
3.) Agility and Adaptability
Scale-out is a common capability in existing HCI. But most solutions have a rigid architecture that forces organizations to add compute, memory and storage in blocks. This can create inefficient silos with unused processing and storage resources.
Ressources:
Blog: 10 challenges in a Data Center
Blog: Why you need to embrace automation
Cisco HyperFlex
The Datacenter in a Box
The real deal
Not all HCI solutions are created equal. Several well-known platforms do not include the network as part of the HCI stack – which means additional time and cost for your business. It also leads to scaling issues later on. Cisco is driving rapid HCI innovations and has delivered high performance component options, intuitive management enhancements and new security features.
What makes Cisco HyperFlex different?
There are various flavours of HCI competing for your attention. Not all are created equal. Several well-known platforms lack a vital ingredient in the HCI stack – the network.
A single platform
Adding network as an afterthought can be costly. You’ll need to set up the network, level set the bios and firmware of the servers, and expand the cluster manually. It also leads to scaling issues.
Choosing HCI that includes network and embedded management by design means you have a truly converged and tightly integrated solution. That’s exactly what you get with Cisco HyperFlex. It fuses compute, network, storage, virtualization and data protection into a single platform. One that’s deployed in under an hour and managed using well-known tools.
Scale as you growth
You can use racks and blades for independent scaling of compute and storage. Software is offered as a subscription, bringing pay-as-you-go economics to the data centre. And with our new All Flash nodes and 3rd Generation 40 Gbps UCS fabric networking, you get blazing fast performance.
Based on UCS
Engineered on Cisco UCS, HyperFlex works seamlessly with and can be integrated with converged and build-your-own platforms, and third-party storage arrays. It leverages the software defined compute concepts UCS brings. Users can manage many technologies with a path to SDN, analytics, automation, orchestration and hybrid cloud.
Ressources:
Blog: Cisco HyperFlex Overview
In the Spotlight: At a Glance
HyperFlex Release Update: On Demand Webinar
Use Cases
Choose only what you need
Do more- spend less
The apps and workloads running on HCI typically vary by size of organization. The extraordinary of HCI is that you buy only what you need to match the workload. You can start small and grow as and when needed. And you can act faster – whether to harness new opportunities or transform the way you work.
Workloads vary
The beauty of HCI is that you buy only what you need to match the workload whether that’s a single rack, blade or more. It’s ideal for:
One family, many architectures - part of the Cisco Data Center
The UCS portfolio spans all workload requirements and operating environments:
- Scale out / scale up
- Bare metal, virtualised, cloud & containers
- Component, converged and Hyperconverged
All with common management
A consistent, policy driven infrastructure and no operational or technology silos to accomplish what you need. From individual servers to converged and HCI systems, UCS means you can choose from a family of solutions designed to work together – not just from Cisco, but a host of trusted vendors too.
Ressources:
In the Spotlight: Cisco Data Center Overview
Blog Cisco UCS: The key demands on todays IT Infrastructure
Forbes Report: When Clouds connect
Validation Lab Report: ESG
