Hyperconverged Infrastructure And Its Rise To Prominence

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined system that combines all conventional data centre elements--storage, compute, management, and networking. It virtualizes all aspects of a typical hardware-defined system, reduces data centre complexity and increases stability. This integrated solution generally runs on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. An HCI uses software and x86 servers.

How Does HCI Work

The heavy legacy infrastructure is traded for a distributed platform running on industry-standard commodity servers allowing businesses to measure workloads accurately and scale when needed. Each server, also known as a node, comes with x86 processors with SSDs and HDDs. The software on each node distributes the operating functions across the cluster to deliver superior performance and resilience.

A Hyperconverged platform, broadly, has four software components: Store virtualization, compute virtualization, network virtualization, and advanced management capabilities such as automation. The virtualization software abstracts the underlying resources and then allocates them to applications running on virtual machines or containers. 

Hardware platform configurations can fit into any workload by independently scaling resources such as CPU, RAM, and storage. It can be provisioned with GPU for further graphics acceleration. All the nodes include flash memory to optimize storage performance.

The management pane allows easy administration of HCI resources from a single interface, eliminating the need for separate management solutions for servers, storage network, storage, and virtualization.

Trumping Traditional Systems

Though data centre infrastructure has been designed around SAN Storage since the 90s, it gained momentum with the virtualization explosion at the turn of the millennium. 

However, the SAN-based infrastructure can not keep up with the current IT needs due to its inability to scale and other operational challenges. Thus, HCI has emerged as a popular choice for companies.

HCI deployment does not involve complex steps, and it has a simple design. Since HCIs are administered by virtualization or cloud administrators, companies don’t require a dedicated team with expertise in storage, compute, or networking. It scales incrementally and operates on a pay-as-you-go cost model.

A recent IDC tracker report showed the COVID-19 had no adverse impact on the HCI market. The total system sales reached $2.46 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020. The research also found Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Nutanix are among the leading HCI technology suppliers.

HCI vs Cloud

Public clouds are flexible and help organizations to adapt to changing business needs dynamically. According to a Gartner report, post the COVID-19 crisis, the end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow by 18.4 percent in 2021 to a total of $304.9 billion.

Having said that, cloud adoption comes with its challenges. Building and deploying applications in the cloud require specialized skill sets, burdening an organization’s already highly compartmentalized structure. Other challenges with public cloud resources include control and security concerns and high expenses.

HCI offers two main advantages over cloud infrastructure:

• Since the HCI cluster consolidates the hardware components into an integrated infrastructure, it eliminates the bottlenecks that come with distributed architectures. The physical hardware in the cloud infrastructure, which can span across multiple locations, poses a risk of bottlenecks.

• HCI are easier to manage than clouds. The former offers a high degree of operational efficiency and also streamlines data centre operations. It greatly simplifies the processes of acquiring, deploying, managing, and scaling infrastructure.

Notably, HCI and cloud are not mutually exclusive. HCI services can be extended to public clouds for building a proper hybrid cloud infrastructure. Such hybrid settings enable applications to be deployed and managed with the same procedure. A hybrid infrastructure may compromise the cloud’s flexibility but simplifies implementation.