Hyperconvergence vs SAN: A Comparative Analysis
by Tommy Hong, Sr. Systems Engineer at a Major U.S. Bank
Making the case for HCI at your organization? When my employer, a major U.S. bank, was looking for a new data storage solution, I spent nine months researching all the options. Keep reading to see if what worked for us will work for you.
Data storage is more than software, and my employer learned that the hard way. After spending a ton on DataCore software-defined SAN, our previous CTO hired consultants to implement the hardware. They bought very cheap hardware for Datacore (unfortunately) and used new Cisco UCS gear for the traditional server side but didn’t have the expertise needed to execute or maintain it, which led to a new CTO and a migration to in-house infrastructure management. That’s when they brought me in.
Anyone who’s ever come into a broken system knows how difficult it can be to play catch up, especially with a small team. And after the fatal mistakes of the previous CTO, the new CTO was dead set on not repeating that blunder. He knew we needed a better tier 1 storage solution, but after the budgetary drain of the DataCore/UCS combo failure, we had to be smarter in our due diligence this time around.
I spent the next nine months researching both traditional SAN and hyperconvergence vendors, balancing budget, our team’s skillset, and the path of our company to create a detailed proposal. My goal was to be able to put forth a plan to reap the biggest ROI from our technology investment. To save you time, and headaches, here’s my process and my findings from those months of analysis.
SAN vs Hyperconvergence
Two major issues I considered when looking at potential vendors was our old fiber SAN switches and our many segmented Cisco UCS gears. If we went with a traditional stack, we’d need another SAN/Cisco UCS admin to help with upgrades and maintenance of the fiber switches, our other storages, and UCS hardware, which would’ve increased our cost. In addition, we were having some backup issues. I really wanted to move away from the silo storage administration. That led me to hyperconvergence.
Since I had some VMware VSAN experience, I knew its limitations at that time: you couldn’t dedupe and compress unless you bought the all-flash setup and you needed at least three nodes per site. When it came to VSAN, it was still relatively new, and after reading a few Gartner reports, I just wasn’t comfortable trusting my company’s data with such a young technology.
After settling on hyperconvergence, I narrowed down my vendor list to two: HPE SimpliVity and Nutanix. I had been considering Pivot3, which is similar to VSAN in that they have good technology, but their feature set was limited. To compare the final two vendors, I presented my management team with a breakdown of cost and pros and cons of each provider. In the end, HPE SimpliVity just had an overwhelming number of checks in the pros column.
Besides our initial goal of data storage, they were able to solve our backup and DR issues, which wasn’t even in the original scope of the requirements. I actually gave HPE SimpliVity a very hard time; I just didn’t believe that they could deliver on these promises. So, they set me up with a bunch of customer references, and I even did my own digging. What surprised me was that I didn’t find a single unhappy customer.
Presenting the Solution
With the poor outcome of our first data storage purchase, I didn’t want my head on the chopping block in case things went awry this time as well. Not to mention, this decision was above my pay grade. So, instead I presented all my research and asked our senior management team: What’s the most important thing to the company and what are we trying to solve with this project? If you want a lot more compute, go with Nutanix. If you want data efficiency with full data protection, DR, ease of management, and less overhead, then go with HPE SimpliVity.
Their answer was that data protection was critical for the bank, and even though Nutanix actually came at a better price, HPE SimpliVity could provide the level of security protection, and peace of mind, that we required. At that point, it wasn’t about the price; it was about solving every issue — both immediate and as we scale…
Read the full story here.
