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Hyper-converged infrastructure is a software-centric architecture that integrates compute, storage and virtualization resources on commodity hardware.
Before discussing hyper-converged infrastructure, it’s necessary to understand converged infrastructure and the problem that it tries to solve. Traditionally, IT infrastructure has been relatively siloed with different IT groups. These groups are responsible for provisioning, managing and supporting server, storage, virtualization, and network resources. For example, the IT storage team is responsible for all storage hardware and software purchase and support.
The concept of converged infrastructure seeks to break down these silos by combining them in various configurations. This means that compute, networking, virtualization, and storage resources are tightly coupled in pre-engineered packages linked together with software.
Hyper-converged Infrastructure takes this a step further. While converged infrastructure is separate components engineered to work well together, hyper-converged systems are modular appliances sold by a single vendor. These appliances are usually commodity hardware boxes, containing computing, virtualization, and storage resources. These can be added together for simple scaling; the more appliances, the greater the capacity.
With simple converged infrastructure, a vendor provides a pre-configured bundle of hardware and software which can be used separately. Hyper-converged infrastructure does not allow the components to be used independently. Each appliance is so tightly integrated that it functions as an indivisible unit.
The modular approach of hyperconvergence presents many advantages and a few disadvantages. Among the advantages: ease of scaling, decreased maintenance overhead, simplified vendor management, and lower cost.
The price for these advantages is an inability to tweak the systems. For example, if more storage is needed for a particular cluster but not more compute, it’s not possible to just add storage. Instead a new appliance including all resources must be added. There can also be challenges in breaking down entrenched IT silos, although this is likely to be worth the effort in the long term.
Management Tools: Many Hyper-converged infrastructure tools come with administration panels where all resources can be accessed and managed. Consider what management tools you need when selecting an HCI tool.
Integrations: Hyper-converged infrastructure tools include built in integrations with other data tools, and provide APIs for building new integrations. If you aren’t able to build your own integrations, consider what integrations are offered by each HCI solution out of the box.
Included Components: Since HCI solutions are modular, not every solution includes the same pieces. If you are looking for a specific feature or specific hardware specs, check what is included in each modular HCI solution.
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Scale Computing offers edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions for customers around the globe. Scale Computing HC3® software promises to eliminate traditional virtualization software, disaster recovery software, servers, and shared storage, replacing these with…
Nutanix in San Jose, California offers their software-defined Enterprise Cloud as a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud solution combines the Nutanix Acropolis virtualization solution, Nutanix AHV hypervisor (though Acropolis works with other hypervisors)…
The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. HPE acquired SimpliVity for its Omnicube line of products in January 2017.
Cisco HyperFlex Systems is a hyper-converged infrastructure product, based on technology acquired with SpringPath (acquired September 2017).
DataCore SANsymphony software-defined storage aims to deliver flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency in a HCI platform. Powered by a block-level storage virtualization technology, SANsymphony is designed to provide flexibility to control how data is stored, protected, and…
Dell EMC PowerFlex (formerly VxFlex) software-defined storage solutions aim to enable transformational agility for organizations looking to modernize their datacenter operations. The vendor states PowerFlex enables extreme flexibility, massive scalability, and enterprise-class performance…
Pivot3 in Austin, Texas offers Pivot3 Acuity (formerly the vSTAC line of products), a hyperconverged infrastructure solution.
Riverbed Technology in San Francisco offers SteelFusion Edge, an HCI solution featuring SteelFusion Edge, a hyperconverged appliance, and SteelFusion Core, a storage delivery controller.
FusionCube from Chinese company Huawei is a unified, pre-integrated hyper-converged infrastructure solution.
StorMagic is a data backup and recovery solution from the UK company of the same name.
The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series (Hitachi UCP HC) from Hitachi Vantara provides a hyper-converged infrastructure designed to support a VMware environment.
The Dell EMC XC Series Hyperconverged Appliances support virtualized workloads boasting scalability, efficiency, and a low footprint.
IBM CS821 and CS822 are hyperconverged systems designed to work with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud to support mission critical and deep learning applications and analyses.
The Lenovo ThinkAgile SX Series for Microsoft Azure Stack supports a hyper-converged infrastructure and includes the entry level SXM4400, the Enterprise Starter SXM4400, and the Enterprise Full SXM6400 rack options.
Lenovo provides the ThinkAgile HX series appliances to support a hyperconverged data center infrastructure. The ThinkAgile HX series is designed to work with Nutanix software. The HX series includes ThinkAgile HX 1000 (including models HX1320 and HX1520-R), the ThinkAgile HX 2000…
Lenovo offers the ThinkAgile VX Series of hyper-converged appliances, designed to support easy deployment of VMware vSAN. Presently the series includes the ThinkAgile VX 3000 series (including the VX3320 model), the VX 5000 series (including the ThinkAgile VX5520 model), and the…
CenturyLink® Private Cloud on VMware Cloud Foundation™ is a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) solution that brings VMware’s vSphere®, vSAN™ and NSX® into a natively integrated stack, delivering enterprise grade, globally available hyper-converged-infrastructure based on HPE® with…
Microsoft offers hyperconverged infrastructure solutions via Azure Stack HCI. Azure Stack HCI provides a variety of preferred hardware solutions for building a hybrid cloud infrastructure, allowing the user to run virtual machines on hyperconverged systems and use Windows Admin Center…
Acronis Cyber Infrastructure is a software-defined infrastructure solution that can be deployed on industry-standard hardware or comes in an easy-to-deploy, plug-and-play appliance. It is used to store and manage more than 200 PB of data backed up from more than 125,000 servers, PCs…
NetApp HCI is a scalable, on-premises hyper converged infrastructure for hybrid clouds. NetApp states users can build a private cloud into a deployable region of their multicloud, and bring public cloud on-premises and develop anywhere, on any cloud, with one experience.
VMware Cloud Foundation is a hybrid cloud platform for managing VMs and orchestrating containers, built on full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology. With a single architecture that is desribed by the vendor as easy to deploy, VMware Cloud Foundation aims to enable…
