Meta description: Here’s a comprehensive look at the benefits of hyper convergence for data center systems and enterprise IT.
For enterprise IT and modern data center systems, the old ways of doing things aren’t going to cut it anymore. These outmoded systems (called “legacy systems” for the sake of politeness) can turn out to be too costly, too difficult to maintain, enhance, and expand, and too vulnerable, impossible integrate with newer systems with different technologies. For all these reasons, hyper convergence (in the form of software from vendors such as Nutanix) has come to the fore.
What Is Hyper Convergence, and How Is It Different from Convergence?
When you have converged infrastructure, you have 4 core data center aspects brought into a single framework. These aspects are compute, storage, networking, and server virtualization. Sometimes you can also bring in VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) management, though this depends on the configuration you buy and the vendor of your software.
Converged infrastructure does have some limitations due to focus on hardware. These limitations don’t really apply to hyper converged infrastructure (HCI). Hyper convergence merges the idea of the converged infrastructure with the software-defined data center (SDDC).
Thus, HCI provides greater integration between the various components through the use of software. It’s why many choose HCI when it comes choosing between converged vs. hyper-convergenceinfrastructures.
Here’s a quick look at some of the benefits you get with HCI:
Efficient Management
It’s efficient because it’s centralized. All the components are combined in a single shared resource pool and you have hypervisor (virtual machine monitor) technology. It’s simple, because your IT is now able to manage various resource components over individual nodes as a single system.
Data Protection
It’s a sad fact that numerous organizations don’t do nearly enough to safeguard their critical data. To be fair, it’s somewhat understandable especially with legacy systems. Data protection can be too complicated and too costly. There are too many decisions to make, and you have to buy lots of expensive products.
However, with HCI you have backup, recovery, and disaster recovery already incorporated. They’re inherent parts of your infrastructure, so you don’t need to incorporate any 3rd-party products.
Shared Resources
Your business can now deploy many types of applications in a single shared resource pool. You won’t have to deal with degraded storage performance for your virtual environments, since you avoid the I/O blender effect.
With HCI, you have several different kinds of storage which includes spinning disk and solid-state storage. So you have enough IO operations per second to deal with all manner of intensive workload contingencies. Now you won’t have to worry about VDI boot storms and login storms that can overwhelm your network with data requests.
The Virtual Machine as Focus
HCI uses VMs as the most basic components of the environment. All your resources such as storage, backup, load balancing, and replication support individual virtual machines.
Because of this, policy and management options also revolve around your VMs. Integrated data protection policies and control occur at the VM level.
Automation Becomes Easier
Hyper convergence usually goes with automation. Since your resources are combined and you have centralized management tools installed, administrative automation can include scripting options and scheduling opportunities.
Everything is included in a very convenient single environment. You won’t have to try to come up with automated structures using different hardware components from various manufacturers.
Relatively Low Cost
Yes, it can cost you to switch to HCI. But then persisting with legacy systems can ultimately be more costly. Maintaining outdated hardware can be more expensive than replacing both your hardware and software. Old hardware may also be unfamiliar with your new personnel, and running it effectively can become harder as your experts retire.
You also have security problems to deal with, and such problems can be very costly indeed. In the end, the cost of switching to HCI is more than worth it.
The low cost is also due to the fact that hyper convergence is based on software. You can add new features without having to
Scalability
The HCI approach is like using LEGO bricks. You can expand your IT simply by adding more units. But unlike more expensive integrated systems products, hyper convergence involves a much smaller “step size”.
The step size refers to the amount of infrastructure you need to purchase, just so you can step up to the next infrastructure level. With a smaller step size, HCI isn’t as expensive. It also doesn’t take as long to fully use the new resources you add when you expand.
Booted Agility
The concept of “agility” is crucial in modern IT. It refers to how your IT can react quickly as you encounter new problems and you have new needs. HCI is much faster than legacy systems in achieving the outcomes you want.
With HCI, all your resources in every data center come under a single administrative authority. So it’s an environment where workload migration is very easy. That’s especially true when your solution allows for consistent deduplication (a specialized data compression technique toeliminate duplicate copies of repeating data). When your data is reduced, IT can get things done more quickly than when working with fully expanded data.
Quick Applications for HCI
One of the main benefits of hyper convergence is that it’s not absolutely necessary for you to overhaul your current infrastructure to benefit right away. Here are a few examples of how you can use it right now:
- You can use hyper convergence products if you’re building a new data center or going through a new consolidation project.
- You can modernize various parts of your technology piecemeal. The implementation of hyper convergence is significantly non-disruptive. You can put in new architecture and phase out the old, as your funds allow.
- You can use it for new tier-1 workloads. You can deploy the new workload in a hyper converged environment, rather than just use up more resources from your legacy system.
- You can deploy your VDI project.
- You can manage sites remotely.
- You can use it for testing and development.
- You can use it for disaster recovery and improve your backup.
So what are you waiting for? Hyper convergence products are now readily available, and all the cost and efficiency benefits should convince you to start with it as soon as you can.
