Moving to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) will completely disrupt your refresh cycle and IT department in a good way, according to Matt Young, Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Nutanix.
In an interview with Networks Asia, Young explains that moving to HCI enables companies to pay for infrastructure as they need it. “HCI offerings eliminate the need to budget and plan for massive refreshes every three to five years. IT departments can instead buy the resources to meet the demand they currently have and then add to them over time as the need arises.”
Young adds that because HCI consolidates silos of infrastructure into one platform, the IT department in general will benefit from reduced complexity and an infrastructure that is much simpler to manage.
The following is the excerpt of the Q&A conducted via email:
What does hyperconvergence mean exactly?
Hyperconverged infrastructure natively integrates compute, storage and data protection services into a single x86-based server deployed in scale-out clusters. In addition to reducing the total cost of ownership, it enables enterprises to gain greater operational simplicity by adopting cloud attributes such as starting small, expand fast and pay only as they grow. It also obviates the need to have silos of specialists within the data center.
The Nutanix enterprise cloud platform goes beyond hyperconvergence by integrating a state of the art virtualization solution, advanced systems management and virtualization operations. Nutanix weaves web- scale engineering and consumer-grade design to deliver a comprehensive cloud platform.
What if I need more compute but not more storage (and vice versa)? How is data resiliency and protection achieved? Can the solution be scaled down as well as being scaled up and if so can it be done non- disruptively?
With the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform, it is able to offer customers the ability to mix and match appliances to scale up compute or storage independently as needed. There are a wide range of hardware platforms with varying levels of compute and storage. Our software quickly integrates these appliances into existing clusters non-disruptively.
The software also allows customers to non-disruptively scale their environments as they grow, similar to public cloud environments. This removes the need for customers to plan their data center capacity needs years in advance and pray their requirements do not change over the course of three to five years.
How do I migrate from my legacy infrastructure to hyperconverged infrastructure? Purchasing and Acquisition. Local partner, ease of acquisition, initial units or quantity required, cost alignment to consumption and utilization, purchase on demand, pay as you grow, flexibility to change components or mix and match components after initial purchase based on business or technical requirements.
There are a wide variety of solutions available for customers to migrate from legacy infrastructure. Storage vMotion on VMware, Storage Live Migration on Hyper-V can be used to move the VMs seamlessly without downtime. Additionally, Nutanix Global Services (GSO) team offers a wide variety of solutions to migrate applications. Since customers can start small and grow as and when needed, deployments can start with as little as three nodes, so customers can start with one applications and move other applications over a period of time.
What applications can I run on it? Are multiple hardware platforms supported and if so, which are the ones that are supported?
Hyperconverged infrastructure and specifically Nutanix can be used for all enterprise applications – inclusive of Oracle, SAP, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange, VDI to name a few. Nutanix solutions enjoyed great initial success and adoption as a perfect fit for virtual desktop implementations (VDI). Using traditional infrastructures, VDI was simply too expensive to implement but hyperconverged approaches were able to balance the performance requirements of VDI with dramatic cost and complexity savings, making it an attractive offering for customers. As these customers experienced the simplified delivery of our solutions for their VDI workloads, they began turning to Nutanix offerings to increasingly support other workloads.
Now, enterprise applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, SAP NetWeaver and Oracle databases and applications account for more than 51 percent of all workloads deployed on Nutanix enterprise cloud solutions over the past three quarters. Because of its software-defined nature, customers have the flexibility to deploy Nutanix on commodity X86 servers that we ship or on servers from Nutanix OEM partners Dell and Lenovo.
What is the potential scale of hyperconverged infrastructure? How can I determine delivery and deployment, expected delivery timeframes, expected deployment timeframes, expected timeframes and effort required to scale up, or scale out a solution, expected time to productivity?
For Nutanix, the only boundaries to scalability are based on the constraints of the hypervisor. For customers deploying Nutanix with the built-in hypervisor AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor), there are no limits on scalability though customers typically prefer to limit cluster sizes to limit the impact of any potential failures.
Customers can determine factors related to delivery, deployment and time to productivity by working with a local channel partner to determine the specifics of the environment. Deployments can scale out without any downtime at all.
How will the features of hyperconverged storage compare to my legacy storage?
Our hyperconverged solutions offer all storage capabilities that traditional storage solutions offer and more. Capabilities such as deduplication, compression, Erasure Coding, tiering, snapshots, disaster recovery are natively integrated in the solution.
How will moving to hyperconverged infrastructure affect my refresh cycle and IT department?
Moving to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) will completely disrupt your refresh cycle and IT department in a good way. Because they enable companies to pay for infrastructure as they need it, HCI offerings eliminate the need to budget and plan for massive refreshes every three to five years. IT departments can instead buy the resources to meet the demand they currently have and then add to them over time as the need arises.
Because HCI consolidates silos of infrastructure into one platform and, in the case of Nutanix, offer elegant management tools which are built using consumer-grade design elements, the IT department in general will benefit from reduced complexity and an infrastructure that is much simpler to manage.
How should it be managed? What about support? Should an enterprise look for integrated support for full solution stack from single or multiple points, spare parts, availability of parts, location of parts, service and response times, location of support, frequency of software updates, consequences for missed SLA’s. Do you really need 24/7/365 with 4-hr response or can you settle for a lower service level due to the resiliency, redundancy and reliability of the solution?
Management is done through a distributed native management solution called Prism. We offer enterprise- grade round the clock support for customers across the world including four-hour part replacements. The type of support that is required and chosen by the customer depends on the application service level agreements (SLA) each customer wants to guarantee.
Where do OpenStack and hyperconvergence intersect? How are they related? Does it support hypervisor storage acceleration or offload and space saving features (VAAI for vSphere, ODX for Hyper-V)? Does it Support API’s for Data Protection and Backup (Such as VMware VADP)?
Nutanix integrates seamlessly with OpenStack and provides drivers for storage, virtual machine, image management and network management. We also supports ODX, VAAI and VADP
How much time do you need to invest in architecting the solution, sizing the initial solution, and determining how the solution would best fit your requirements? If the solution is engineered from the factory this will reduce your effort. Are you expected to be the platform architect and build all the individual components and do all the integration?
Architecting and sizing is extremely simplified with Nutanix. We offer a Nutanix Sizer tool to help customers size their deployment and understand the exact hardware requirements to meet their specific needs. With a scale-out deployment model, installation and scaling is extremely simple.
Our Nutanix services team also offers help with migrations and architecting a right solution for different workloads. For customers choosing Nutanix AHV, the virtualization solution is shipped from the factor floor, allowing for simpler deployments in a shorter period of time.