One of the hottest emerging technologies in IT is hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). What is the hype all about? Is it here to stay?

As defined by Techtarget, hyper-convergence infrastructure (HCI) is a system with a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking, virtualization resources (hypervisor, virtual storage, virtual networking) and other technologies (such as data protection and deduplication) in a commodity hardware box (usually x86) supported by a single vendor.

Hyper-convergence grew out of the concept of converged infrastructure, where engineers took it a little further – using very small hardware footprint, tight integration of components and simplified management. It is a relatively new technology. On the technology adoption curve, it is still at the early adopters stage.

Nutanix is the first vendor to offer hyper-converged solution, followed by Simplivity, and Scale Computing. Not to be outdone, VMWare developed its EVO-RAIL, then opened it for hardware vendors to OEM the product. Major vendors, including EMC, NetApp, Dell, HP, and Hitachi began selling EVO-RAIL products.

One of the best HCI product that I’ve seen is VxRail. Jointly engineered by VMware and EMC, the “VxRail appliance family takes full advantage of VMware Hyper-Converged Software capabilities and provides additional hardware and lifecycle management features and rich EMC data services, delivered in a turnkey appliance with integrated support.”

What are the advantages of HCI and where can it be used? Customers who are looking to start small and be able to scale out overtime, will find the HCI solution very attractive. It is a perfect fit for small to medium size companies, to be able to build their own data center without spending huge amount of money. It is simple (because it eliminates a lot of hardware clutter) and highly scalable (because it can be scaled very easily by adding small standardized x86 nodes). Since it is scalable, it will ease the burden of growth. Finally, its performance is comparable to big infrastructures because leveraging SSD storage and bringing the data close to the compute enables high IOPS at very low latencies.

References:

1. Techtarget
2. VMware Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: What’s All the Fuss About?