For decades, enterprise technology has been dominated by a best-of-breed approach that combines multiple point-products in a complex technology stack, where each solution is designed to solve a specific problem, and each is managed by separate teams of IT specialists. The cost and complexity of the legacy IT stack is driving more and more IT leaders to seek alternative forms of infrastructure such as public cloud and, increasingly, hyperconvergence – but not all hyperconverged solutions are created equal.
How we got here
With the emergence of the modern data center, the underlying infrastructure has undergone a powerful transformation due to virtualization. In the last few years, the attempt to simplify enterprise technology has resulted in what is known as converged infrastructure.
More recently, further development of converged infrastructure has resulted in hyperconverged infrastructure, which essentially combines the economic benefits provided by virtualization and cloud computing, but goes a few steps further—by leveraging a software-centric focus for adding functionality.
Your hyperconverged solution is not the same as mine
But here’s where things get interesting, as not all hyperconverged solutions are created equal. Actually, there are substantial differences between types of hyperconverged infrastructure solutions.
- First-generation converged infrastructure
The development of reference architectures (RAs) for integrating hardware components such as servers and storage was a big step forward. These initial RAs were not optimized to use software as the basis for innovation. They also did not offer holistic management of the entire infrastructure, and required data protection to be bolted-on separately.
- Second-generation partial hyperconverged infrastructure
Moving from reference architectures to a more tightly integrated hardware stack that combined compute and storage components was another important improvement. It allowed organizations to begin using software building blocks to run on x86-based hardware, separating the hardware and software layers to improve performance and ease management. The downside, however, was that these solutions focused on the integration of the compute and storage layer only. Notably, this second-generation converged infrastructure typically included some limited snapshot capabilities, but no real data protection.
- The brave new world of complete hyperconvergence
Solutions that consolidate 8-12 IT components below the hypervisor have evolved as the next level of convergence. Very few vendors are at this level today. Such solutions deliver optimised management, performance, and also built-in data protection. This level of hyperconvergence is referred to as "Convergence 3.0."
What's in a name: Convergence 3.0
In this new era of hyperconvergence, several essential concepts have emerged as guidelines for optimised solutions, each rooted primarily in software as the foundation for dramatic economic and operational benefits.
These include:
- Built-in data protection
A leader in hyperconverged infrastructure, SimpliVity’s focus on data protection is predicated on its OmniStack Data Virtualization Platform. SimpliVity is the only hyperconverged infrastructure to offer built-in data protection, enabling businesses to shrink RPOs and RTOs dramatically, and restore and backup large VMs in minutes or even seconds.
- Data efficiency
The amount of data that needs to be captured, stored and backed up continues to be an ongoing challenge for IT organizations. SimpliVity’s approach pushes the boundaries of what it means to persist a write. The OmniStack Accelerator Card offloads the heavy lifting (deduplication, compression, and optimization) from the Intel server CPUs to leave as many resources as possible available for other business applications. The result is an average 40:1 data efficiency ratio across primary and backup storage, with 10:1 data efficiency guaranteed. Combined with SimpliVity’s built-in data protection, this approach greatly simplifies replication, backup, restore, and recovery, often reducing backup windows from hours or even days to mere minutes.
- VM-centric management
Virtualization has given organizations the opportunity to view and treat their systems as a collective, integrated pool of resources, rather than as a mix of discrete components. By using a centralised management platform with a single administration console and common application programming interfaces, infrastructure administrators can spend less time and effort manually managing and tuning infrastructure, relying instead on software and automated tools to handle most of the complexities of infrastructure. Concepts like LUNs and volumes do not apply, as all management functions are at the VM level, and have been completely abstracted from the underlying infrastructure.
Conclusion
Most hyperconverged infrastructure solutions in the market today combine server and storage layers. While some of these solutions have built credibility for the category of solutions for which they cater, only a true Converged 3.0 solution can simplify data center technology for organizations at all levels.
At the end of the day, organizations looking to explore hyperconverged infrastructure are encouraged to ask questions about the platforms they are investigating. SimpliVity designed the OmniStack Data Virtualization Platform from the ground up to protect mission-critical customer data. Unfortunately, not every vendor in the market provides the same commitment to data protection.
Scott Morris is Vice President, Asia Pacific, at SimpliVity