Hyperconverged Infrastructure Explained
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) handles critical workloads while also reducing data center complexity. Dive in to find out what it is and what it has to offer.
Hyperconvergence is a method used to build private data centres in a way that imitates the consumption of public clouds — in particular, their economic model, operational simplicity, and scaling granularity. Through server virtualization, it combines computing, networking, and storage services into one node, without compromising on the performance, dependability, and workload availability that businesses have learned to expect from private clouds.
This is accomplished by combining the elements of a traditional data centre by using software and Intel x86 servers to replace expensive, purpose-built hardware.
With it, hyperconverged infrastructure brings many benefits. Let’s break down a few.
Security
Through hyperconvergence, infrastructures have become more clarified and unified, in contrast to the separation auxiliary and replication products that others may still be using, thanks to the critical technology built right within.
Elasticity
The beauty of cloud computing is that users are just a few clicks away from scaling in or out, depending on the situation. Hyperconvergence is useful as it concentrates heavily on scaling efficiently in smaller units due to the collocation of resources. All you have to do is add or subtract a server or node to the cluster to respond to match your resource demand.
Data Efficiency
Hyperconvergence follows practices that lead to a high degree of data reduction as duplicates are removed, which enhances compression. As a result, there are more attainable specifications available from network bandwidth, storage volume, and Input/Output Operations Per Second requirements.
Cost
Hyperconverged infrastructure can reduce the initial cost of investment and setup of your new private or public cloud by merging compute and storage into one. There are also less IT components to manage.
Uptime
The storage nodes are one highly reliable pool of storage, so if one node goes down, the rest will continue to run seamlessly, thus improving uptime.
As you can see, there are many reasons as to why hyperconverged infrastructure is being embraced by more and more companies, but how does it differ from converged infrastructure?
Converged infrastructure involves a preconfigured assortment of software and hardware in a single system for simplified management. However, compute, storage, and networking components are discrete and can be standalone.
Hyperconvergence, on the other hand, adds more profound levels of abstraction and greater degrees of automation within a cloud-based setup as the components are inseparable. Software-defined elements are executed virtually with seamless integration into the hypervisor environment. This way, organizations are able to expand capacity quickly through the deployment of additional modules.
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