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Views: 70 Author: Site Editor Publish Time: 2022-03-01 Origin: Site
HCI is a horizontally scalable, software-integrated infrastructure that takes a modular approach to compute, network and storage capacity. instead of using dedicated hardware, HCI leverages distributed, horizontal-level commodity hardware and provides a single-pane dashboard for reporting and management. Size varies from person to person: enterprises can choose to deploy hardware-agnostic hyperconverged software from vendors such as Nutanix and VMware, or they can choose to deploy integrated HCI appliances from vendors such as HP Enterprise, Dell, Cisco and Lenovo.
Gartner predicts that 70 percent of enterprises will be running some form of hyperconverged infrastructure by 2023, up from less than 30 percent in 2019. As HCI gains popularity, cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft will provide connectivity to the local. HCI offerings for hybrid deployment and management.
Traditional data center designs include separate storage silos with separate server tiers and private networks that span compute and storage silos. This has worked in the pre-cloud era, but is too rigid for the cloud era," says Greg Smith, vice president of product marketing at Nutanix. "It's untenable for IT teams to take weeks or months to deliver new infrastructure so that development teams can produce new applications and get to market quickly.
HCI software (from Nutanix or VMware, for example) is deployed in the same way in the customer's data center and cloud instances. It runs on bare metal instances in the cloud in exactly the same way as it does in the data center. For companies that want to build a hybrid cloud, "HCI" is the best foundation. They can deploy applications in the data center and then converge them with the public cloud.
In the traditional approach, multiple pieces of hardware had to be installed and configured separately, including servers, Fibre Channel switches, host-based adapters and hypervisors. With hyperconvergence, everything is defined by software. HCI uses storage in the server, and the software almost completely automates the configuration and detection of hardware to establish the connections between compute, storage and network.
By starting small, customers find they can reduce their hardware stack to the size they need, rather than over-provisioning too much capacity. The move away from silos also allows users to eliminate certain hardware.
To run a traditional three-tier environment, companies need experts in compute, storage and networking. With HCI, companies can have general technical consultants and employees manage the environment instead of more expensive specialists.
The key elements of a hyper-converged product are its backup, recovery, data protection and deduplication capabilities, as well as the analytics to fully examine them. The disaster recovery component is managed through a single dashboard, and HCI monitors not only local storage, but also cloud storage resources. With deduplication, compression ratios of up to 55:1 are achieved and backups can be completed in minutes.
HCI products come with extensive analytics software to monitor workloads and find resource limitations. The monitoring software is consolidated into a single dashboard view of system performance (including negative performance).
Goodall says he used to typically spend up to 50 percent of his time storing issues and backing up the matrix. Now he spends maybe 20 percent of his time dealing with it, with the bulk of his time spent resolving and troubleshooting legacy systems. And his applications perform better with HCI. "We don't have any problems with our SQL database. If anything, we've seen a huge performance improvement due to moving to full SSDs (instead of hard drives) and data deduplication, which has reduced reads and writes in the environment."