HCI - an alternative to complex and expensive traditional solutions

According to experts, the hyperconverged solutions market will continue to grow at about 24% per year over the next ten years, taking back shares from traditional solutions. О популярности гиперконвергенции свидетельствует появление магического квадранта HCI от компании Gartner. In this article, we describe the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure and its advantages over traditional solutions.

What types of IT infrastructure are relevant in 2023

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Today’s companies use two types of infrastructure: convergent and hyperconvergent.

Converged infrastructure, or CI, replaced classic infrastructure more than twenty years ago. They can be used to create infrastructures where components are separated based on the roles they perform. The best example of this separation is storage. The convergent approach can be compared to a division of labor, where the advantages prevail over the disadvantages. However, due to the discreteness of such infrastructure, as the volume of data and complexity of information systems grew, a new order problem emerged. Along with the discreteness of the infrastructure, the complexity of managing it grows, as does the time it takes to make changes to that infrastructure.

As a result of the evolution of converged solutions, hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, has emerged on the market. Hyperconverged is a software-defined infrastructure in which the roles of compute, storage and network resources are not tied to its individual elements, but are performed by all elements at once. Because all components are homogeneous and managed through a single interface, HCI is easier to manage and scale, and cheaper and easier to maintain.

What are the reasons for the popularity of HCI

Hyperconvergence is a modern approach to building IT infrastructure that does away with the traditional siloed model. It simplifies the tasks of deploying, managing and scaling the infrastructure.

Among hyperconverged solutions it is possible to choose those that allow you to save on equipment without loss of performance. In Russia this solution is hyperconverged platform vStack. Its implementation allows to optimize IT infrastructure management process with a single interface, reduce personnel costs, increase flexibility and scalability of systems.

HCI vStack advantages also include:

• the ability to choose the hardware that meets the needs of the company and save when buying servers and SSDs;
• increasing economic efficiency by paying only for the resources used;
• reducing the gap between the performance of the real server and the virtual machine from 10-15% to 2-5%;
• reducing the time to create virtual machines to 15-30 seconds.

For these reasons, today’s companies are increasingly looking at hyperconverged infrastructure as an alternative to traditional solutions.

Why HCI is one of the best alternatives to traditional solutions

Building and deploying applications in public clouds requires specialized skills, advanced technology and does not always guarantee increased performance. And the need to protect data and keep applications running reliably imposes additional costs. For this reason, many companies choose a hybrid scheme. В этом случае основные рабочие нагрузки приходятся на корпоративные ЦОД, а менее критичные и требовательные приложения переносятся в публичное облако.

Properly designed hyperconverged solutions offer the same benefits as public clouds:

The ability to scale quickly;
Flexibility to respond to changing business requirements;
granular control over workloads;
lower costs by reducing capital and operating expenses.

Hyperconverged infrastructure also increases performance, improves availability through automatic redundancy, protects data and simplifies virtualization.

Hyperconverged systems don’t require the hiring of highly specialized specialists. Compute, memory and storage are combined into a single platform and managed through a common interface. The administrator doesn’t have to worry about expanding storage capacity in a timely manner.

Conclusions

Hyperconvergence combines compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources into a single system. It enables more efficient and cost-effective management of the IT infrastructure. Compared to traditional solutions, hyperconverged infrastructure offers a number of advantages, including scalability, faster deployment, flexibility and cost savings. With hyperconverged infrastructure, you can forget about massive, costly upgrades every three years. Hyperconvergence eliminates the need for specialized personnel to manage the infrastructure. All this makes HCI more attractive than traditional solutions.