TOP Hyperconvergence

20 Questions
Answered
 IN THE
1980s,
IT WAS As personal computers were popularized
THE WILD, and proliferated in homes and organizations,
not much thought was put into operating
WILD WEST needs or resources.
Because of this revolutionary new Then, during the web explosion of the 90’s, infrastructure with server-SAN and storage networks
technology, the 80’s were really also entered the scene, featuring independent modules that could be updated or changed without affecting
the dawn of IT as we know it today, other layers. This infrastructure revolutionized IT departments and has been used ever since.
and the term “datacenter” was born.
But now, in the era of cloud, 3-tier can no longer keep up with IT needs. It’s complex, unwieldy, doesn’t
provide a firm foundation for DevOps, and can’t scale with the magnitude it used to. Plain and simple,
it’s yesterday’s (or three decades ago’s) news.

Today, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) which consolidates compute, storage, networking, and
virtualization in one solution, is the infrastructure of choice for companies that want to stay competitive
and ensure their datacenters are cloud-ready. Yet, the change feels difficult for some companies—
and others just aren’t aware of what HCI is, what it does, and its benefits.

If you’re in the same boat as other IT teams grappling to understand HCI and its potential impact on
your datacenter, here are the top questions we’ve been asked about hyperconverged infrastructure
over the years.
 1. JUST WHAT IS
HYPERCONVERGED
INFRASTRUCTURE? Technical definition
Hyperconverged infrastructure streamlines the
deployment, management and scaling of data-
center resources by combining x86-based server
and storage resources with intelligent software
in a turnkey software-defined solution. Separate
servers, storage networks and storage arrays can
be replaced with a single hyperconverged solution
to create an agile datacenter that easily scales
with your business.

Less-technical definition
It breaks down the legacy storage silos of 3-tier
infrastructure, reducing complexity, and allowing
for superior performance and resilience.

The most simple definition

Remember when you wished for your nights,
weekends, and holidays back when you blew
BONUS RESOURCE: You can read out your birthday candles this past year? HCI
The Definitive Guide to Hyperconverged is your wish granted. (The sysadmin in this video
Infrastructure for a complete drilldown. went as far as to say it gave him his life back!)
We’ve already noted that hyperconverged The Enterprise Cloud for Dummies eBook (which you can download here) does a good job
infrastructure is the core of a cloud- explaining scaling limitations of traditional infrastructure, that in turn impede hybrid cloud goals:
ready datacenter. BUT WHY?
The vision of private and hybrid clouds is not new—and companies have tried doing this before.
However, the underlying infrastructure is still based on scale-up storage accessed over a storage
network that is deployed and scaled in big chunks. What’s needed is a re-platforming of the
enterprise datacenter. You cannot build cloud capabilities on traditional three-tier infrastructure
with scale-up storage.

Scale-up storage has hard limits. At a certain point, the shared components — controllers and
the network fabric — get overwhelmed. It’s inevitable. The question is not if this will happen,
but when. As a result, many scale-up storage systems are bundled with spec sheets that tell
customers that they can grow only so far before they have to add more shared components.
Adding these components also adds complexity to the system.

The end result is unpredictability, a scenario that cannot be tolerated in the modern datacenter.
Businesses must be able to operate with the expectation that their workloads will operate con-
tinuously at predictable levels. In scale-up, as you add more burden to the shared resources,
performance levels can be affected.

Even many of today’s array-based scale-out storage methodologies begin to crumble under
their own weight as they grow. The bigger these constructs grow, the more data has to traverse
a storage networking fabric. Eventually, as data gets farther and farther from the CPU and RAM,
performance problems ensue.

2. WHAT DOES HCI

A reliable datacenter infrastructure combines the ability to leverage scale-out storage
while maintaining data locality.

HAVE TO DO WITH
CLOUDIFYING MY
DATACENTER?
 3. GIVE ME ONE
GOOD REASON
TO LET GO OF
MY CURRENT
WE’VE GOT A FEW! INFRASTRUCTURE?
Costs
HCI is an investment, but it’s nothing compared to what it would take to continue
to manage ever-increasing costs of upgrading traditional SAN environments.
Multiple vendors and software licenses, paying for specialists, increasing power
and cooling costs, and expense of provisioning storage all can be significantly
reduced with the implementation of hyperconverged infrastructure

Complexity
Silos, racks, servers, cables, separate management interfaces, multiple vendors,
shelfware...the list goes on and on when it comes to the ways datacenters and
datacenter management have become increasingly complex. HCI is the way to
“tidy up” your datacenter—simplifying operations by consolidating key elements,
reducing footprint, and managing your entire infrastructure from one pane of glass

Cloudability
IT environments are going multicloud, and legacy infrastructure
isn’t built to make companies successful in a hybrid cloud world.
(See above question on what HCI has to do with cloud!)

Changing the infamous 80/20 rule

80% of your budget focused on keeping the lights on while BONUS ASSET: Datacenter Modernization Done
a mere 20% is dedicated to innovation? That changes with HCI, Right. See how these companies in a variety of
which enables automation, self-service, pay-as-you-grow scaling, industries are modernizing with HCI and reaping
and more opportunity to focus on high-value business activities. all the rewards.
 4. HOW EXACTLY
DOES HCI SIMPLIFY
OR IMPROVE MY IT
OPERATIONS?
Every day, it seems, we hear of new use
cases where HCI has helped businesses with
their own unique operational challenges.
Let’s look at some ways that seem to
be true across the board: It saves you room
HCI reduces your datacenter footprint (by 75% in this company’s case!) by reducing typical
infrastructure stacks down to scalable building blocks with compute, storage, and networking
built in. Not only do you save space and reduce datacenter footprint costs, but you also reduce
complexity by removing compatibility problems between multiple vendors associated with
the stack.

It consolidates
Separate servers, storage networks and storage arrays can be replaced with a single hyper-
converged infrastructure solution to create an agile datacenter that easily scales with your
business. Hyperconvergence makes administration much easier, letting you manage all
aspects of your infrastructure from one place.

It’s “just-in-time” infrastructure

Scaling made simple! If resources become scarce, you simply call your vendor, ask for another
node, and deploy it. The infrastructure should be all but invisible to the users. They shouldn’t
have to worry about underlying infrastructure; they should only be focused on their workloads.
 5. WHAT ARE THE
COMPONENTS OF
HYPERCONVERGED
INFRASTRUCTURE?
There are really just a couple main
components of HCI: two planes.

The distributed plane

This runs across a cluster of nodes delivering
storage, virtualization, and networking services
for guest applications—whether they’re VMs
or container-based apps.

The management plane

The beauty of a single-pane-of-glass! 6. HOW DOES HCI MAKE IT TEAMS
MORE PRODUCTIVE?
The management plane lets you easily
administer HCI resources from one place
and one view. It eliminates the need for
separate management solutions for servers, Our customers seem to universally agree and have echoed over and over again that HCI “just works,”
storage networks, storage, and virtualization. meaning they don’t have to spend their days babysitting infrastructure and their nights and weekends
scheduling maintenance, or doing upgrades or implementations. It’s self-healing, “always on, always
HCI solutions are 100% software-defined— up” infrastructure with the five nines of availability. Upgrades are one-click, and can be done anytime
zero dependency on proprietary hardware. and literally almost anywhere—we’ve even had customers initiate an upgrade from an airplane without
batting an eye. Resiliency is key here too; make sure you can take snapshots so that even if a disk gets
corrupted you can recover VMs and data.
PRO TIP:
Make sure your HCI solution can work with By shifting focus off of infrastructure, teams can focus on value-add activities for the business—
any hardware vendor and has qualified be it spending time on developing DevOps practices, designing automated solutions, or pursuing
the hardware/firmware for easy upgrades. hot initiatives like IoT.

The 2018 State of the Enterprise Datacenter Report showed a correlation between hours worked
in companies running hyperconverged infrastructure as opposed to those that don’t: 78% of
respondents running HCI worked up to 40 hours per week, and just 24% of those with HCI
answered that they work over 40 hours per week. For companies without hyperconverged
infrastructure that number is 36%—almost 50% greater than adopters.
 VDI ASSURANCE

7. WHAT DATABASES,
APPLICATIONS,
AND WORKLOADS
DO COMPANIES
RUN ON HYPER-
CONVERGED In the past, HCI started with workloads like VDI and ROBO (remote or branch office).
That dynamic has rapidly changed as more and more users of HCI solutions have made

INFRASTRUCTURE?
their systems available with more and more production and datacenter workloads,
even as they prepare their resources for the future.

SOME PRIME EXAMPLES OF WHAT APPS RUN ON HCI:

❯ Business-critical applications: Oracle databases and E-Business Suite, SAP Business Suite
(and SAP HANA), Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Dynamics, IBM DB2, and many others

❯ Messaging and collaboration applications: Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, as well as unified
communication solutions such as Cisco UC, Avaya Aura, and Microsoft Skype for Business

❯ Server virtualization and private cloud: Multi-hypervisor support for VMware ESXi,
Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nutanix AHV virtualization

❯ Big data and cloud-native apps: Splunk, MongoDB, elastic, and more

❯ Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and application virtualization

❯ Remote Office and Branch Office (ROBO) deployments

❯ Dev/Test Apps Puppet, Docker, Chef

 8. IS THERE A
DIFFERENCE
BETWEEN 9. I’M LOOKING
‘CONVERGED’ FOR STORAGE.
AND ‘HYPER- HOW CAN HCI HELP
CONVERGED’ MY SITUATION?
INFRASTRUCTURE? IT’S ABOUT CONSOLIDATING STORAGE!
Data is growing at 50% or more per year, and that
Many think this is a “tomato, to-mah-to”situation, data is stored on block, file, and object storage.
but there is one key difference between these two: New requirements for visibility and control are
hardware and software. CI depends on hardware increasing demands on storage administrators.
and building blocks where HCI is software-defined, And cloud has become an important tier of
and therefore more flexible and scalable. (This storage that must be considered in any storage
post does a good job showing the differences). architecture.
Think of CI like fruit salad; all the pieces of fruit
can be together, or separated from each other. But legacy storage infrastructure can’t keep up
(So with CI, servers can be separated out, storage with the demands caused by these new realities.
can be separated out, you get the picture). It’s siloed, which creates complexity, limits flexi-
With HCI, the pieces are integrated and can’t bility, and reduces utilization. Legacy infrastruc-
be broken apart, more like, say, a smoothie. ture lacks sufficient visibility into the data to
support the new compliance and control require-
ments. It was originally designed in a time before
cloud—making adoption of cloud-like capabilities
really difficult.

HCI breaks down silos and pools all resources

into a single resource that’s easy to manage and
control. The more “invisible” infrastructure can be
the better, and HCI extends that invisibility into
the storage domain. With HCI, you can include a
variety of nodes in a cluster that make sense for
your needs at that point—storage-heavy nodes
when you need storage, CPU-heavy nodes when
compute is needed, and so forth.
 11. WHAT PROBLEMS
ARE SOLVED BY HCI?
With hyperconverged infrastructure you don’t
have to purchase and manage storage and servers
separately. It combines compute, storage, net-
working, and virtualization resources which saves
money that would have been spent on hardware,
power, and hiring specialists to manage, and time
that would have been spent on deployment and
operational issues. Furthermore, with HCI infrastruc-
ture, management becomes vastly easier thanks
to a single management interface, eliminating the
need for separate management solutions for servers,
storage networks, storage and virtualization.

10. WHAT’S MARKET

ACCEPTANCE
LIKE FOR HCI?
Enterprises are increasingly adopting HCI—
according to the same 2018 State of the Enter-
prise Datacenter Report mentioned previously, BONUS RESOURCE:
67% of respondents say they either have adopted Download a complimentary copy of the 2018
HCI or are open to adopting it. And Gartner Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged
predicts that by 2020, 20% of business-critical Infrastructure to see their assessment of the
applications currently deployed on 3-tier will strengths and weaknesses of key vendors in
transition to hyperconverged infrastructure. the space.
 13. HOW EXACTLY DOES HCI
SCALE EASIER THAN TRADITIONAL
INFRASTRUCTURE?
Similar to public cloud services, hyperconverged infrastructure solutions enable IT
teams to start small and scale incrementally to precisely meet application demands.

With HCI, you can non-disruptively scale out your environment as your business needs
grow. However, with traditional infrastructure, each tier is sized based on specific needs.
Expanding it requires a redesign, which is why they’re typically done in 3-5 year cycles.

12. HOW DO
HYPERCONVERGED
SYSTEMS DIFFER
FROM MIDRANGE,
MAINFRAME, AND
SERVER FARMS?
Hyperconverged systems make use of modern
distributed systems and virtualization technology.
Clusters of hypervisors pool and share storage,
removing the need for arrays while simultaneously
improving flexibility, scale, and performance.
 15. DOES ‘HYPER-
CONVERGENCE’
JUST MEAN HARD-
WARE RESOURCE
CONSOLIDATION?
No—hyperconvergence builds a scalable storage
infrastructure that is rich in features. Deduplication,
compression, any of the features you would find
on a storage array are available. Additionally, you
have complete end to end visibility of how your
cluster is performing via a single management
plane (and in the case of Nutanix, you can take
advantage of the fact that storage and compute
are collocated to further improve application
performance).
14. SHOULD I BE LOOKING AT TCO OR
ROI WHEN CONSIDERING ADOPTING
HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE?
A TCO analysis is best for situations where you are considering migrating from an existing virtualized
infrastructure either to an HCI solution, or to a new (or refreshed) 3-tier architecture vs. HCI solution.
Use an ROI analysis when comparing remaining with a status quo environment (whether physical or
virtual) vs. making the investment to migrate to HCI. In terms of cost, an HCI configuration is not
always the least expensive option when comparing against 3-tier infrastructure. But when incorpo- HELPFUL TOOL: Use this calculator to get
rating projected upgrade costs over a 5-year period along with variables such as rack space, power, a personalized view of the financial impact
cooling, administrative costs, fiber channel cabling, etc., HCI will generally blow away the competition. of adopting HCI in your organization.
 16. IS IT A GOOD
FIT FOR LARGE
AND SMALL
ENVIRONMENTS?
For smaller companies, hyperconverged
infrastructure eliminates the silos of separate
management and troubleshooting for servers,
storage, networking, and virtualization.
No separate support costs, support
teams, or licensing costs.

For larger environments, you eliminate the risk of

going “all-in” with a new solution by starting small
and scaling out a node at a time and adding more
workloads—all the while making sure the solution
makes sense as you go. Each node contains all the
resources required to scale, so it’s simple yet perfectly
linear since nodes are built to match your needs.
17. CAN I JUST
MANAGE MY
CURRENT SAN
THROUGH HCI?
It’s possible, but it wouldn’t help you simplify your
operations! Hyperconverged infrastructure makes
your SAN obsolete; you remove an entire layer of
complexity when you move to HCI. Rather than
managing storage arrays, potentially from multiple
vendors requiring multiple skill sets, your storage
becomes a component of your virtual infrastruc-
ture with hyperconvergence.
 18. ARE WE JUST
REINVENTING
MAINFRAMES?
Nope! Mainframes are monolithic machines
capable of running multiple operating systems.
They are not clustered or distributed technology.

19. THIS SEEMS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

FROM OUR CURRENT ENVIRONMENT—
BETTER, BUT HOW CAN WE AFFORD TO
REPLACE IT WITH ALL THIS NEW STUFF?
Like much technology, a phased approach is often recommended. You can start small with
as few as 3 nodes to run a single workload. Once IT teams see the efficiency of that workload,
they grow their cluster and add additional workloads.
20. MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION:

HOW
DO I
EASY AS A CLICK! Try it for free here.

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