Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions are based on proven technology that reduces migration risks to a business, and can now be seen as a shift in operational practices rather than a shift in technology, according to Jessie Quek, Country General Manager, Lenovo Singapore.
In an email interview with Networks Asia, Quek says that Lenovo and Nutanix are taking advantage of the rapidly growing demand for hyperconvergence platforms, by introducing a new family of hyperconverged appliances built on Lenovo’s enterprise system and powered by Intel Xeon processors.
The following is the excerpt of the interview:
Q: What does hyperconvergence mean exactly? What will hyperconvergence mean for traditional storage vendors? Are moves towards all flash arrays enough? What is the difference between an all flash array and a hyperconverged solution? How will the features of hyperconverged storage compare to my legacy storage?
A: An all flash array is a hardware solution which gives faster IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second.) Hyperconverged systems are an emerging breed of integrated systems that consolidate core storage, compute, and storage networking functions into a single software solution or appliance – this can also include flash storage for IOPS. It reduces power and space, and dramatically eliminates complexity. The hyperconverged market is currently growing at 116 per cent and reached approximately USD$800 million in 2015. In 2016, the growth rate is expected to be 94 per cent and the market should exceed USD$1.5 billion worldwide.
To take advantage of this rapidly growing demand for hyperconvergence platforms, Lenovo and Nutanix has introduced a new family of hyperconverged appliances built on Lenovo’s enterprise systems. The new Lenovo hyperconverged appliances, powered by Intel Xeon processors, will allow IT teams to deploy business applications faster by accelerating procurement, installation, configuration, management, upgrades and expansion of the IT infrastructure.
The integrated approach of Lenovo HX Series accelerates time-to-value, helping IT deploy and scale applications faster
These innovations are in direct response to industry demands for flexible hyperconverged solutions to power any workload at the highest performance, and for deployment into any enterprise infrastructure. The Nutanix web-scale architecture enables such technology advancements without hard-to-maintain investments in proprietary hardware or deep integration into virtualization stacks that limit customer choice.
Q: 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?
A: Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions are based on proven technology that reduces migration risks to a business, and can now be seen as a shift in operational practices rather than a shift in technology.
The Nutanix hyperconverged solution is an ideal, pay-as-you grow solution for server virtualization. Using a web-scale architecture that integrates compute and storage resources into a 100% software-defined appliance, Nutanix empowers both large and small IT organizations to efficiently consolidate and run all virtualized workloads on a single system. 100% feature parity across all popular hypervisors delivers the ultimate in flexibility.
Designed with intelligent data tiering, high-performance flash storage, and dense hard disk drives for high performance and low latencies across a large storage capacity, Nutanix services all of IT’s critical enterprise applications and development operation environments on one platform, under a common management framework. Enterprise-grade features, including self-healing storage and VM-granular policies combined with consumer-grade management, enables IT to eliminate the operational complexity typical of server virtualization environments with 3-tier infrastructure and easily manage deployments around the world through global management.
Q: What applications can I run on it? Are multiple hardware platforms supported and if so which ones?
A: The Lenovo-Nutanix HX series can run multiple applications from IT Infrastructure for VDI, Cloud, Virtualized Datacentre, Video Surveillance and other workloads like Big Data, Databases. It can also run collaborative applications.
Q: How will moving to hyperconverged infrastructure affect my refresh cycle and IT department?
A: Prior to the hyperconverged phase, one of the more painful aspects of enterprise IT is that data center administrators find themselves replacing hardware every couple of years. Depending on the current configuration of the data center, major refreshes were plagued by potential interoperability issues, opportunity for human error, and limitations in platform design. It was also time consuming and risky given the potential loss of data.
Hyperconvergence can have a dramatic impact here, as the converged architecture makes upgrading a snap. Because the SDS component of an HCI solution fully abstracts underlying storage hardware from the storage platform presented to the hypervisor, refreshing storage is easy now too. Rather than keeping 20 different plates spinning in a legacy architecture, wouldn’t it be nice to purchase a pile of HCI nodes and a couple of switches and be done with it? The burden on both CIO/CTO’s and the IT administrators doing the work is significantly reduced when an organization is fully shifted to a hyperconverged model.
Q: How should it be managed in a partnership like Lenovo's and Nutanix's? 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 4hr response or can you settle for a lower service level due to the resiliency, redundancy and reliability of the solution?
A: To take advantage of the rapidly growing demand for hyperconvergence platforms, Lenovo is making sizeable investments in a dedicated skilled global sales team. The combined solution will also be sold through Lenovo channel partners worldwide, as well as by Lenovo's broader enterprise sales teams. To offer our customers better peace of mind, we also manage the hyperconverged stack end-to-end, providing support for the entire HX series stack 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Additionally, Lenovo and Nutanix are planning substantial investments in platform engineering and development, as well as aggressive go-to-market initiatives.