At the basic level, hyperconvergence is there to meet the demands for intelligent and flexible software solutions. This kind of infrastructure offers seamless communications between different IT segments, with bulletproof security.
But what is hyperconverged infrastructure and how can it benefit your business? The following article will provide the answers to help you understand the importance of this technology.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure Explained
Combine networking, computing, storage, and virtualization under one roof and you get hyperconverged infrastructure. The idea is to have a solution that replaces costly legacy infrastructure which consists of separate units – each one performing a single function.
Each hyperconverged infrastructure has two main components – the management plane and the distributed plane. As they have important roles, it pays to take a closer look.
This plane is responsible for providing virtualization, storage, as well as networking services. The latter usually applies to guest applications, plus it works with container-based software and virtual machines.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) allows you to take advantage of all the given resources from a single view (e.g. dashboard) and place. Therefore, companies don’t require separate solutions for server management, storage, virtualization, etc.
With this in mind, you should know that this infrastructure is completely defined by the software. That is, it operates independently from the hardware. And at this point, you’re probably wondering how it all runs.
Digital Elegance – HCI Inner Workings
First, the key data center functions are at the software layer. To operate efficiently, this layer is tightly integrated, eradicating most quirks of the legacy hardware. And the virtualization layer is responsible for pooling and abstracting the resources.
From thereon, the virtualization layer allocates the resources to apps that usually run in containers or virtual machines. Specific applications dictate the configuration polices, doing away with complex solutions such as volumes and LUNs. The icing on the cake comes from the HCI management features. These are designed to minimize or completely eliminate manual tasks, so the HCI offers a level of automation that’s hard to rival.
Important Considerations – What Makes HCI the Right Fit?
Impressive as it may sound, understanding the HCI features and inner workings only hint at the benefits this solution provides.
For example, opting for a single tool to manage everything lowers CAPEX and OPEX of running the infrastructure. As said, you’re not cutting the cost at the expense of scalability, security, and flexibility. And the important thing is that an enterprise shouldn’t go for HCI just because it needs to address a specific hardware pain point.
Good HCI solutions let you choose the preferred platform to seamlessly integrate with the existing infrastructure. In turn, enterprises get to optimize and protect IT investment. The idea is to future-proof the infrastructure, introduce standards across the board, and be able to easily deploy applications.
Full-stack HCI helps the IT department to remain native to the leading Cloud solutions and hypervisor – the virtual machine monitoring software. In addition, it gives you the option to use the virtualization tools that are already there.
Policy-based management unifies all resources and, of course, makes them more efficient. If the multi-Cloud capabilities might just be the best thing about HCI. On the surface, this means there’s improved operational consistency between edge, core, and the Cloud itself.
Companies are able to get internal security for all the data and some HCI solutions offer the option to choose different Cloud providers. Admittedly, some of these features are solution-specific, but you now know exactly what to look for.
Digital Tower of Babel
Implementing HCI is a logical step forward to streamline the IT within a company. Like any other software solution, this one takes time to integrate and may lead to certain organizational changes. However, it’s all for the greater good and you might be surprised just how cost-effective it is.