The glamour news in data centres for the past couple of years has been all about all-flash arrays, with converged systems providing a growing backdrop. The flash arrays provided hot performance while converged systems (CI) led by #Dell #EMC 's CPSD (Converged Platforms & Solutions Division – formerly #VCE) and #Cisco/#NetApp 's Flexpods provided traditional virtualised server, shared storage array and network systems in integrated racks of components. Customers took to these because they were simpler to order, deploy, operate and manage than buying the three groups of components themselves. In the background so-called hyper-converged infrastructure ( #HCI ) systems were being developed, led by #Nutanix and #SimpliVity, that provided scale-out and virtualised server nodes with locally-attached storage and networking. Clusters of these nodes had a virtual SAN built from the component servers' locally-attached storage. The systems were ordered with single SKUs and made a virtue of being simpler and easier to order, deploy, operate and manage. #VMware's #VSAN became the default HCI storage and all the main server/storage system companies entered the market; Dell, EMC, #HDS, #HPE and #IBM. This year hyper-converged emerged as "the" hot data centre topic, and we're taking a look at why, and how things might develop, by talking to several authorities on the topic. Reasons for moving to HCI and adoption pattern Why are customers moving to HCI? The 451 Group's founder and Distinguished Analyst John Abbott says. "The most often-cited benefits of moving to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) are: fewer systems to manage; improved scaling model; improved agility; VM centricity; and improved performance. As for drawbacks, customers sometimes question the fixed scaling model (buying compute and storage together), potential architectural flaws that arise from co-mingling servers and compute in a single unit of infrastructure, vendor lock-in, and organizational resistance from IT staff." Chad Sakac, President of VCE, EMC's converged platform division, points to the consumerisation of IT and IT being seen as a service: "Hyper-convergence is in the zeitgeist because of changes in how technology is perceived. The consumerization of IT and its focus on end capabilities are abstracting the service levels and service components from the underlying component systems. "The conversation is about how can I efficiently and economically deliver the needed service level,” he continues. “IT service levels used to be a component level conversation (hard disks, stripes, cache sizes, etc…) to build solutions but consumer driven environments do not have an appetite for deliberating about underlying components. Just like the underlying storage and file system of a smartphone are rarely in a consumer’s mind, the same is becoming true for the underlying parts of IT systems. This change in perception makes hyper-converged architectures, which consolidate servers, networking and storage into a single unit, highly attractive to service oriented CIO’s." How and where has HCI been adopted? Abbott reckons, "Initial HCI implementations mostly went into small and midsized businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees, into remote offices of larger organizations, and into some enterprise departments. More recent evidence suggests that adoption of HCI products is growing among larger organizations. "VMware, for instance, notes that adoption of Virtual SAN is divided roughly equally between small, medium and even large organizations with more than 5,000 employees. Pivot3, meanwhile, says half of its customer base is mid-sized organizations (1,000-5,000 employees), with around a third in large enterprises. "SimpliVity’s customer base is split roughly equally between small and medium/large businesses. Nutanix doesn’t break down its customer base in this way, but claims the majority of deployments are in core enterprise data centres." Abbott adds, "Among smaller and mid-sized organizations, we see a strong preference emerging for HCI products delivered in a pre-built, appliance-based form factor. The HCI market today is comprised chiefly of those suppliers that run on VMware and those that support KVM. Though many HCI vendors have a longer-term plan to support multiple hypervisors, initial adoption of HCI is overwhelmingly on the VMware platform."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/13/a_closer_look_at_hyperconvergence/
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