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Hyper-converged infrastructure is a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage and virtualization resources in a single system that usually consists of x86 hardware.
Modern businesses rely on the data center to provide the computing, storage, networking and management resources that are necessary to host vital enterprise workloads and data. But data centres can be notoriously complex places where a multitude of vendors compete to deliver myriad different devices, systems and software. This heterogeneous mix often struggles to interoperate -- and rarely delivers peak performance for the business without careful, time-consuming optimizations. Today, IT teams simply don't have the time to wrestle with the deployment, integration and data center management challenges posed by traditional heterogeneous environments.
The notion of convergence originally arose as a means of addressing the challenges of heterogeneity. Early on, a single vendor would gather the systems and software of different vendors into a single pre-configured and optimized set of equipment and tools that was sold as a package. This was known as converged infrastructure, or CI. Later, convergence vendors took the next step to design and produce their own line of pre-packaged and highly integrated compute, storage and network gear for the data center. It was an evolutionary step now called hyper-converged infrastructure, or HCI.
Converged and hyper-converged infrastructures are possible through a combination of virtualization technology and unified management. Virtualization allows compute, storage and networking resources to be treated as pooled resources. Unified management allows all those resources to be discovered, organized into pools, divided into performance tiers and then seamlessly provisioned to workloads regardless of where those resources are physically located. Unified management offers a quantum leap over traditional heterogeneous data center environments that might rely on multiple disparate management tools, which often didn't discover or manage all resources.
Today, the combination of virtualized hardware and associated management tooling is often treated as a standalone appliance that can operate as a single, complete subsystem in the data center, or be combined with other HCI appliances to quickly and easily scale up a hyper-converged infrastructure deployment.
Partnered with StoneFly, let's take a closer look at hyper-converged infrastructure technology, consider its use cases and implementation, evaluate its trade-offs, examine some current vendors and product offerings, and look ahead to the future of the technology.