HYPER-CONVERGENCE: EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION?

Hyper-convergence: Evolution or Revolution?

Hyper-convergence: Evolution or Revolution?
A flying visit to the US last week highlighted, for me, the frenetic pace of business that seems ever more prevalent in our culture. In all my conversations with CIOs, directors, and VPs, it hit home that there is a growing demand to speed up the pace of business operations. The cycle of strategy, planning and actions shortens by the year – a trend that’s reflected within business technology. Evidently it is not just me who sees this, as the subject is addressed in this week’s Economist.
Whether it is IT driving the business or business driving IT is, perhaps, for another time, but it’s clear that ever faster and better technology is needed to keep businesses marching –should I say running? – forwards. As we all know this is no new challenge: How can IT organisations not just ‘keep the light on’, but also keep pace with new technologies that arrive daily?
From my experience, however, whilst there are many innovative, valuable technologies, there are far fewer ‘game changers’; those that have the capability to change the way businesses operate. To me, an example of such a transformative technology is Hyper-convergence.

Flash in the pan – or a real game changer?

The last decade has witnessed nothing short of a revolution in the way we manage data. New technologies and cloud-based consumption models have reshaped the world around us. In this time, Hyper-convergence infrastructure (HCI) has grown from a niche technology into one of the hottest offerings in IT – a meteoric rise. Two fundamental forces have shaped the growth of Hyper-convergence:

• The drive to create a simple, scalable and cost-effective IT infrastructure, and in particular to simplify storage environments.
• The need to support both existing and next-generation applications.

HCI is a software-defined solution that turns clusters of virtualised servers into a scalable pool of shared compute and storage, eliminating the need to implement, and maintain, a separate external storage area network (SAN). It is more than an evolution from converged infrastructure; it is a revolution in the approach to designing data centres infrastructures.
The real value of Hyper-convergence is not that it just offers a new model for shared storage; it offers a new model for both storage and compute. As such, HCI represents a stark alternative to the prevailing model of running storage as a separate system. It’s the removal of storage as a separate, stand-alone unit of infrastructure.
It is this fundamentally different approach to data services that makes Hyper-convergence a landmark technology, enabling cost-constrained IT organisations to become more agile, simpler and facilitate the relentless drive to faster business change.

Revolution or Evolution?

Looking at the past 20 years, virtualisation stands out as one of the true infrastructure revolutions. It brings speed, efficiency and reduces the overall cost, of on-premise hardware. Perhaps, while maybe not as significant, Hyper-convergence is a complimentary solution for optimising the data centre infrastructure. I believe there are five key differentiators HCI delivers to the business:

Fewer Systems to Manage
Because a HCI system is built upon a set of common commodity servers and a common software infrastructure, it greatly simplifies deployment and management. Consequently, HCI savings come from having fewer moving parts to deploy, manage and pay for, as well as having fewer suppliers to deal with.

Improved Scaling Model
Storage has traditionally been difficult to scale. Normally once a system fills up, it becomes necessary to buy another system and manage it as well – or else migrate to a larger system. Rather than a ‘scale up’ model, Hyper-converged systems are designed to ‘scale out.’ When more processing power or capacity is required, IT simply buys another node and adds it to the existing cluster without requiring downtime or a lengthy migration process.

Virtual Machine (VM)-Centricity
By design, HCI products are VM-centric. Ultimately, what IT admins really care about is managing VMs. And the entire HCI environment can be managed from a single console (either from an HCI vendor or VMware vCenter). This then drives agility, as individual VMs can be quickly moved around the infrastructure according to changing requirements.

Improved Performance
As with many newer storage systems, almost all HCI approaches support flash media. The difference with HCI is the flash tier resides physically within the server – which provides latency benefits compared with external storage systems.

Software Defined
Much has been written about the drive to software-defined everything, a concept that, when it becomes a reality, will make the world a different place. That said, I think that Hyper-convergence is a huge step along that road.

In reality, it matters little whether Hyper-convergence is seen a revolutionary or evolution change. However, the fact that a technology meets so many of the demands and expectations of supporting a faster pace of business, it is not just IT that needs to pay attention; the business needs to comprehend, and realise, its potential impact.

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