The case for
Hyperconvergence

Infrastructure has been kind of an unsung hero in the history of IT. In fact, storage, servers and networks which make up Infrastructure are the bedrocks on which IT of any organization is structured.

What about applications then? Isn't everything in IT about applications? Yes, but a powerful application cannot exist without a powerful Infrastructure.

Companies understand this and they have been investing on shiny infrastructure for years now. It wasn’t long till everyone realized that Infrastructure not only comes with a hefty price tag but is hard to manage and is embedded with tones of complexities which is not everyone's cup of tea.

In addition, infrastructure cannot come in the way as companies jostle against each other in this race of digital transformation. Digital transformation is a transformation of culture which has only one objective: How IT and customer service can help companies reach and retain customers? Infrastructure must be a facilitator rather than a roadblock when companies take steps in their digital journey.

Now a days, companies want to keep their IT costs down and at the same time extract maximum benefits. They want smart investment. They cannot cut their way to prosperity but they can be smart about their spending. That's the key idea.

Let us now see what are the drawbacks of traditional Infrastructure and why there was the need for hyperconverged infrastructure.

The Three Tier Infrastructure

Storage, networks and Servers- the three tiers of infrastructure. It seems that they had been with us forever and while everything else in IT has drastically changed, the fundamentals of infrastructure has remained the same.

The three-tier infrastructure philosophy dictates that companies buy the "best of breed" in every component and then integrate them together. It sounds simple but it is anything but simple.

As the end users, you need to plan on how you are going to buy and build these three tiers. You need vendors who specializes in different things and you have to be the bridge between these vendors when anything goes wrong. Complexities come at a price and when a puzzle has more pieces, you have more complexities. With more complexities, your expenses shoot up. The three-tier infrastructure becomes more of a liability than an investment.

How do you solve it? Enter Converged Infrastructure

Somebody realized that complexities regarding these three-tier infrastructures was real and converged infrastructure was proposed as a possible solution.

Converged infrastructure, like the three-tier infrastructure consists of storage, servers and networks. However, these three components are bundled into one single offering which is easier and quicker to deploy as compared to the traditional infrastructure. These converged bundles ensure that the networking, storage and virtualization components of infrastructure run parallel to one another.

Why Converged Infrastructure isn’t enough?

Converged infrastructure eases your complexities but it doesn’t remove them. You still have servers, you still have storage and you still have a complex networking fabric. It differs from the traditional infrastructure in the sense that now you don’t have to buy the end pieces and build it all. The hard work is done for you. And that’s where your benefit ends. Converged infrastructure reduces but not eliminates the core Infrastructure issues.

Introducing Hyperconverged Infrastructure

In the past few years, something very significant happened inside datacenters. Intel and other companies started releasing processors packed with more and more cores and the once required hardware became a software component. Yes, you read that right!

The once single instruction pipelines became massively parallel and provided servers with enormous amount of computing power. Thus, hyperconvergence was born.

Why is Hyperconvergence so special?

Hyperconvergence is loaded with benefits. It is a transformative solution which is poised to take over the Infrastructure market. For example, Storage, which has always existed as a tier of infrastructure in the datacenter is effectively eliminated by the HCI. They are added to the server hosts and managed by a software. Compute resources too are added to the server hosts and are now controlled by the same software. They have now become additional resources which businesses can consume as required.

Virtualization technology is a key aspect of modern workloads and is central to the entire HCI concept. This is the reason, every HCI cluster contains a hypervisor as its key integral component.

In a nutshell, we can define HCI as a system which consolidates servers, storage, the hypervisor, and some network functions into a software-centric solution deployed on commodity hardware.

Summing up

Necessity is the mother of invention and hyperconvergence was born out of the necessity to transform Infrastructure and make it economical, effective and simple. There is just too much clutter and complexity and hyperconvergence hits the home run in solving every organization’s infrastructure need. It is also rapidly spreading its wings in the market. GartnerR predicts that by 2023, 70% of enterprises will be running some form of HCI (i.e., appliance, software, cloud-tethered), up from less than 30% in 2019.

ISSQUARED would be delighted to partner with you on this hyperconvergence journey. Our state-of-the-art solution, Fabulix is a hyperconverged infrastructure platform that combines computing, storage, networking and virtualization resources into a single, easy-to-use system. Built-on Microsoft Windows Server 2019 HCI, Fabulix provides a cost-effective solution and meets your most demanding workloads. At ISSQUARED, we would love to introduce Fabulix to you and discuss how it can bring about the infrastructure transformation at your organization.