Hyperconverged Infrastructure: The Power to Simplify IT

What Can Hyperconverged Infrastructure Do for You?

While HCI has strong benefits across enterprise IT, there are a variety of use cases where the technology particularly shines. These include consolidating data centers, building private cloud environments, supporting virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments, serving as backup and disaster recovery platforms, enabling test and development environments, and supporting Big Data analytics. In each of these use cases, HCI provides specific benefits that make it an ideal solution compared to either a traditional data center approach or the use of a converged infrastructure platform.

Data Center Consolidation

As organizations transition from a legacy data center model, they often find themselves with more data center space than they need spread across multiple locations. Data centers occupy expensive real estate, require costly cooling and power infrastructure, and consume space that could be used for other purposes. The increased availability of high-speed networking reduces the need to locate data centers in close geographic proximity to end users and allows for consolidation of data centers to reduce costs. This, in turn, reduces both capital expenditures to obtain and fill data center space and the operating expenses associated with each facility.

Organizations seeking to consolidate existing data centers can take advantage of the fact that HCI products can integrate seamlessly with existing environments. HCI provides a compact, high-density solution that offers computing and storage capacity in a smaller footprint than other approaches, letting organizations increase their infrastructure capacity while reducing the size and number of data centers. The simplified deployment and management of an HCI solution makes it an excellent option for organizations looking to provide flexible computing options in fewer locations with fewer human resources. That all adds up to a strong value proposition for deploying hyperconverged platforms to meet a wide variety of business requirements across the organization.

Private Cloud

Cloud computing promises many benefits to organizations seeking to optimize resource utilization, provide flexible and scalable computing environments, and automate operational activities. While some organizations turn to the public cloud to provide these benefits, many organizations choose to build their own private cloud environments that achieve the same benefits in a self-contained, dedicated computing environment. Whether their goal is to provide greater control of the computing platform, meet security and regulatory requirements, or achieve greater cost efficiency, in some cases the private cloud approach offers advantages over a public cloud model.

Many HCI architectures enable software-defined storage services that deliver the cloud’s flexible and modular scalability within an organization’s own data center space. This elasticity enables a cost-effective approach to building a private cloud platform. HCI also provides powerful management and automation capabilities so that organizations can centrally control resource utilization across the private cloud environment and build cloud-centric applications that can automatically provision and release computing and storage resources as business needs fluctuate.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

VDI deployments appeal to organizations with a wide variety of use cases. In this approach, the organization creates virtual desktops that run on a centralized platform in the data center. Individuals can then use a thin client or a personally owned computer, tablet or other device to connect to that virtual desktop and leverage the shared resource pool. VDI technology has many use cases, including:

· Giving users a secure computing environment that avoids leaving residual data on the untrusted devices they use to connect to the VDI desktop

· Offering a flexible approach to pooling expensive software licenses that may be shared among multiple VDI users

· Reducing support costs by creating a consistent end-user experience that the IT team can manage without modifying the settings on end-user devices

· Allowing compute-intensive processes to temporarily allocate additional processing power to meet short-term needs

· Providing access to centralized data storage without requiring direct access through perimeter firewalls

VDI deployments can be complex, but several HCI vendors produce custom-made appliances that greatly simplify VDI rollout. This enables virtualized desktops that greatly improve security and IT management, without straining current IT staff. Hyperconverged systems also deliver the performance necessary to meet the unique demands of VDI deployments. 

Data Protection

Every IT leader understands the importance of data protection to the continued viability of an organization. Every organization depends upon critical elements of information to provide goods and services, manage ongoing operations and analyze performance. Without that information, operations would be crippled, in the best case, and possibly shut down completely. For this reason, IT leaders must place a significant emphasis on designing and implementing a data protection strategy that incorporates routine backups and disaster recovery strategies. Unfortunately, this work often falls by the wayside due to the complexity of designing a robust data protection strategy, the costs of implementing the design and the routine drudgery of data protection work.

HCI eliminates the complexity that can be inherent in backup or disaster recovery and reduces the cost of operations. Rather than requiring the acquisition, installation and maintenance of separate data protection technology, HCI solutions provide integrated data protection capabilities. For many organizations, hyperconvergence delivers the ability to meet backup and disaster recovery goals that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to achieve. HCI also reduces the cost of maintaining backups by leveraging deduplication technology to reduce the amount of data that the organization must retain.

Testing and Development

Whether an organization develops its own applications, uses commercial software or incorporates elements of both, testing and development environments are crucial to success. Every experienced IT professional has at least one war story of a major outage caused by an error made while updating software, modifying configurations or altering data in a production environment. In many of those cases, the outage would not have occurred if the change had been fully tested in a non-production environment before being rolled out in production.

The main reason that changes aren’t fully tested is that organizations simply don’t have robust test and development environments for all their critical systems. Developers are forced to test changes in a less-than-ideal replica of the production environment or, in some cases, on their own notebooks. That makes it incredibly difficult to maintain high-quality standards and avoid serious outages.

Hyperconvergence makes it possible for organizations to have more robust test and development environments at reduced cost. HCI platforms provide management tools that can quickly clone production environments to create separate test instances and then eliminate the virtual machines belonging to those environments when testing is complete. These same tools also enforce strict logical separations between test and production environments, reducing the risk of an operational impact from testing. HCI facilitates testing, allowing organizations to hold developers and administrators to higher quality standards.

Big Data Analytics

From predicting customer spending patterns to gauging sentiment on social media, Big Data analytics play an increasingly important role in the modern business. As organizations work to achieve valuable business insights from their data, they require new technology infrastructure designed to support the computational and storage needs of Big Data. The specialized architectures of Big Data rely upon distributing data across multiple nodes and rapidly performing sophisticated analyses on that data to reach conclusions that may have an actionable lifetime measured in seconds. For example, decisions about what advertisements to show a customer visiting a website must be made in the fraction of a second between the time the customer requests the page and the server returns the result.

HCI’s virtualization and container technology make it easier, faster and more cost-effective to deploy Big Data applications, such as Splunk. Hyperconvergence delivers cloudlike economics and agility for Big Data infrastructure while keeping operations on-premises. HCI eliminates the infrastructure complexities needed to support sophisticated data analytics tools, simplifying and accelerating their deployment. This lets organizations achieve the benefits and insights of data analytics more quickly.  

Best Practices for Implementing HCI

As organizations plan for HCI adoption, there are several best practices they can follow to facilitate a smooth transition from legacy infrastructure. Investing time in the careful planning of an HCI deployment will ensure that the organization understands its business and technical requirements, conducts an orderly migration of workloads from legacy to HCI, and lines up the appropriate staff and support resources to manage the transition process.

First, it is critical that IT leaders take time to understand the characteristics of the workloads they plan to run on HCI. For most organizations with an existing data center, this means having a good understanding of the workloads they currently run and using this information to design an appropriate HCI environment. It is important to note that there is often a significant disparity between the compute, memory and storage that are provisioned for a service and those that a service actually requires. System engineering has a long history of overprovisioning resources to ensure that resource scarcity doesn’t cause issues down the road. This approach simply isn’t necessary in a hyperconverged environment. If the organization determines its HCI needs by simply summing the resources currently available in the data center, it’s very likely that they will vastly overprovision their HCI environment and miss out on its substantial cost-efficiency potential.

Once an organization understands its HCI requirements, it should turn to the marketplace and evaluate each of the available solutions against those requirements. While all HCI solutions offer the core benefits of a shared resource pool, agile scalability, cost-efficiency and data protection, they differ in the way they deliver those benefits. Key questions to ask when evaluating HCI solutions include:

· Does the solution support a single hypervisor or can organizations choose to run multiple hypervisors on the same platform if this is required?

· What flexibility does the solution provide in terms of hardware modules? Are there specific component requirements? Does the solution support commodity hardware or must hardware be purchased from the HCI vendor?

· Does the solution offer storage capacity only to services running in the HCI environment or is the storage accessible to other data center services?

After selecting an HCI product, the organization should begin to plan the HCI implementation before purchasing and installing hardware. Remember, one of the core benefits of HCI is rapid scalability. Organizations don’t need to purchase the hardware to support their end-state capacity. They can purchase enough to get them through the first few workload migrations and then scale the solution as they bring additional workloads online. This reduces the organization’s upfront capital investment and lowers the risk if the organization decides to pursue another path.

Many organizations choose to begin their HCI deployments with a carefully selected pilot project. This project should migrate a workload that is chosen to meet as many of the following criteria as possible:

· HCI migration will show immediate and needed performance or capacity benefits, demonstrating value to end users.

· The service owner is supportive of the migration to HCI.

· The service and users are tolerant of some disruption of the service’s availability.

· There is a high likelihood of success.

This proof-of-concept deployment will pave the way for future migrations. After successfully implementing the pilot project, the organization may then move on to a phased implementation approach that migrates workloads on a schedule that meets the organization’s business and technical needs. This might mean prioritizing workloads based on the expected risk of migration, the drain they cause on a data center capacity bottleneck, timing within the organization’s business cycle or other situation-specific requirements.

Throughout the planning and implementation process, organizations should remember that they don’t need to possess all the needed HCI expertise in-house. They can consider turning to a vendor, such as CDW, with specific HCI experience that can help them with each step along the road to hyperconvergence.