Although not necessarily a bleeding edge topic (maybe slightly more cutting edge), Hyperconvergence is definitely taking huge steps in the right direction. Businesses in all vertical markets seem to be adopting or at least taking some interest in Hyperconverged infrastructure.
Defined: "A type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking, and virtualization resources and other technologies from scratch in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor" ....Some technical jargon I found on hyperconvergence. Wow, that is a mouthful. Let's break this down to a high level business perspective.
What we can tell you is that Hyperconverged infrastructure is really starting to take hold in businesses big and small. In the coastal areas of the United States, many billion dollar pipelines exist. In the Mid-west, we are starting to see many customers that have traditional server, storage, networking, and hypervisor based data enters take interest in at least getting some information about how hyperconvergence may help their business. I've outlined a few high level reasons to take a look at hyperconverged infrastructure.
- 1) Less Complex - Datacenters hold a ton of complexity. In most customers of ours, "silos" of people manage different aspects of a datacenter. One team manages the servers, another team manages the hypervisors, so on and so on......Since hyperconvergence collapses all of the items above into one platform, and generally lets you manage it from one pane of glass, this can reduce the complexity around teams of people managing your datacenter.
- 2) Expense - Different aspects of your datacenter can outgrowth others. For instance, you may have a project coming up that requires additional processing power. In a traditional datacenter, you are then required to purchase servers to give you more compute power. In doing so, you are taxing your storage and networking more. You've created a bottleneck that you didn't necessarily expect. This can cause you to spend unexpected dollars (or ask for money, which is not a comfortable situation).
- 3) Support - In true hyperconvergence, support is all handled by one vendor. Rather than have one vendor/manufacturer support your servers, and another support your storage, and another support your network, bringing in a hyperconverged model can place all datacenter infrastructure in one bucket. Less throats to choke has a ton of benefits.
- 4) Availability - Hyperconverged environments generally are built out into "nodes" that are fully redundant of one another. The more nodes you have, the more redundant you are. Rather than having one SAN with a single point of failure, you can rely upon a "RAHN" (I just made up this term). Redundant Array of Hyerpconverged Nodes.
- 5) Proven - Dell's portfolio of hyperconverged is pretty amazing. XC (Nutanix), VxRail, vSAN, Dell Hybrid Cloud, are all good choices depending on your business practices. These are proven, tested, and well baked solutions that fit nearly every model that a company might look at.
We encourage our customers to take a meeting with us as soon as possible to talk about this model of datacenter growth. Will hyperconvergence be the new standard? Time will tell but we believe it will be. Please contact us now for more information.
