Best Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Solutions

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions are a software-defined, unified system that combines server, storage resources, networking components, and management software. It combines traditional IT hardware into a unified platform powered by a software layer. 

Traditionally, IT hardware and software were treated in siloes. They can be viewed as pieces of a puzzle, where standalone pieces did not make much sense, but together they make a complete picture. But handling each piece and making sure how it fits together is a time-consuming task. Having separate components also means requiring different teams specialized in managing that particular component. This is where hyperconverged infrastructure comes in.

HCI software converge all these components and offer it as a single unified system. An application or workload uses a server CPU to compute or process information, data is stored in a conventional storage offering, and networking manages the communication between all different components in the IT infrastructure realm. With hyperconverged solutions, servers and storage resources are combined within a distributed infrastructure platform. The combination of server and storage and network is powered overall by a software layer.

A HCI solution converges the entire single data infrastructure components, which includes server, storage, networking, and virtualization. The solution acts as a single distributed platform running on standard servers that can scale and support flexibility as required. A software layer running across multiple server nodes is used to manage and distribute all the operating functions within the server cluster. Having software to act as a control layer helps improve performance and build IT infrastructure resilience.

Hyperconverged software systems are available in a variety of configurations, which include all flash or hybrid flash storage, with or without GPU cards. These myriad configurations provided by HCI solution vendors offer customers several different options that they can opt for to improve their IT infrastructure. Using these solutions allows customers to improve maximum input/output (I/O) throughput with reduced latency.

What can a user run on an HCI software?

One of the first applications that were run for HCI was a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution. At present, however, HCI solutions have developed and expanded to ensure more different and complex workloads are being run. Some of the key examples include databases, cloud-native applications, mission-critical applications, big data, VDI, remote office/branch office (ROBO), and collaboration applications.

The relationship between hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and cloud 

To support private cloud and hybrid cloud deployments, the underlying infrastructure needs to be designed in such a way that it supports cloud capabilities such as scaling up. Workloads thrive in an environment where they can operate continuously without any faults or errors. If a workload or application needs to scale up, then the underlying infrastructure needs to support this. This is where HCI solutions come in since it provides agility to leverage scale-out storage as required by the user.

What Does HCI Stand For?

HCI stands for hyperconverged infrastructure. This platform usually supports a single pane of view to ensure infrastructure management. HCI is different from converged infrastructure (CI). 

The main difference between HCI and CI is that the latter is usually preintegrated by a vendor and is still built on the same IT hardware components. In contrast, hyperconverged systems are built from the ground up, and the components cannot be separated since the elements are software defined. These software capabilities allow IT infrastructure to scale and be flexible as required by growing workloads. 

The following are some core features within HCI solutions that can help users in numerous ways:

Consolidation: Consolidation is a key feature of hyperconverged infrastructure. Data centers are stacked with numerous servers, storage solutions, and networks which can be replaced with HCI. Consolidation has several advantages such as reduction of complexity, compatibility issues, easier administration, and so on.

Simplicity and flexibility: HCI platforms ensure simplicity in IT operations. Complexities associated with managing and monitoring several IT hardware components are reduced.

Greater ability to scale: The ability of hyperconverged systems to scale as a business needs change is one of the key features of this software. Engineers can scale up their IT infrastructure capabilities in a matter of minutes using software-defined storage capabilities. By using HCI solutions, companies can ensure that their IT infrastructure is future proof since applications can scale up or scale out as required.

Space optimization: When traditional IT infrastructure is replaced by scalable blocks, data center footprint is drastically reduced. Since HCI solutions take up much less space, these are being looked at for edge infrastructure as well.

Predictability: HCI software keep track of every single application. The control is granular in nature, which means that HCI solutions are able to predict which applications would require more resources, which one performs better under different circumstances, and other possibilities. This predictable nature of HCI helps organizations to solve various challenges that they might face with regard to capacity utilization and resource allocation.

Lower costs: A key benefit of HCI software solutions is the lower cost involved in deploying this solution. A company does not need to spend on server, storage infrastructure, networking, and management capabilities separately since they only need to purchase the hyperconverged systems which combine all these commodity hardware. In addition, when a customer chooses to scale a traditional IT infrastructure environment (SAN environment), there are a ton of costs that need to be considered such as licensing costs, increasing power and cooling costs, and hiring costs since more specialists and additional employees are needed to handle the growing IT infrastructure. By choosing a highly scalable and flexible HCI solution, customers can obtain significant savings.

Improved IT efficiency: Since IT components are not in silos but are consolidated under a single hypervisor software layer, hyperconverged infrastructure eliminates any need for processing each component separately. There is no latency in communication between different components, helping to increase overall IT efficiency. In addition, the management structure is simplified since it is a single solution, which reduces complex maintenance and integration challenges.

Single pane of view: HCI solutions often come with a management pane that the user can use to view and control all HCI sources from a single control panel. The biggest benefit of having a unified view is that there is no need for different management tools and software separately to manage and monitor servers, storage, networks, and virtualization.

Faster deployment times: While opting for a HCI solution, infrastructure plans can be deployed within minutes. Once the infrastructure has been set, teams can immediately work on applications and workloads rather than spend time figuring out how to install IT infrastructure and face several technical challenges. In addition, HCI systems support infrastructure automation, governance, and smooth, consistent operations.

Virtualization: Virtual environments, virtual servers, virtual desktops are key use cases of HCI solutions. This is achievable since a key benefit of HCI solutions is virtualization. Virtualization is used for high-performance sensitive applications, where there is a need to deploy hardware. 

Software-defined data center: The HCI solution can support numerous hardware platforms offered by different vendors. The software capabilities of the HCI software ensure that the underlying hardware does not pose a problem to the user, but instead allows HCI solutions to be deployed anywhere.

Reduces complexity: Although the conversation lies around consolidating server, storage, and networking, there are numerous other hardware and software components that add complexity to the environment. These include cables, hypervisors, server frame and cabinets, network server racks, server enclosures, and others. Since HCI is a single-point offering, it helps to consolidate the data center by reducing its footprint.

Improved productivity: With the integration of HCI into an IT environment, users do not need to babysit the infrastructure to manage alerts, schedule maintenance, and identify upgrade or downgrade times. Instead, HCI is a self-healing solution. Upgrades are just a click away, can be done remotely, and there is no need to physically visit the data center to resolve any hardware issues.

Multicloud services support: HCI solutions make it simple to move data between multiple clouds, or from on premises to private and public cloud platforms. It simplifies the hybrid cloud environment.

Helps shift focus toward business priorities: When businesses have a solid, self-healing IT infrastructure in place, time and resources of the organization can be moved to other business priorities. HCI shifts the focus off infrastructure and more on using the infrastructure—either to automate applications, deploy methodologies to improve workload processing, integrating IoT practices, and several other value-added activities.