Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI)
Hyperconverged infrastructure is a software-defined, unified system that combines all the elements of a traditional data center from storage, compute, networking, and management. HCI is an integrated solution that uses software and servers such as x86 to replace expensive, purpose-built hardware. With HCI, businesses can decrease data center complexity and improve scalability. While traditional three-tier architectures are costly to build, complex to operate, and difficult to scale, Pappaya’s HCI unifies our compute, storage, and networking components in a single system to effectively integrate and utilize multiple hardware layers. Hyper-converged systems leverage the combination of virtualization using hypervisors.
How does hyper-convergence differ from converged infrastructure?
Hyperconvergence adds more profound levels of abstraction and improved levels of automation. At the same time, converged infrastructure includes a preconfigured package of software and hardware in a single system for simplified management. The components can’t be separated while the software-defined elements are implemented virtually, with seamless integration into the hypervisor environment. This allows organizations to expand their capacity by deploying additional modules efficiently.
Uses of HCI
- Build a private cloud
- Extend to public cloud
- Achieve true hybrid cloud
How can businesses benefit from hyper-converged infrastructure?
IT is continually tasked to do more with fewer resources. Besides taking care of existing IT infrastructure, it must drive new initiatives such as AI, machine learning (ML), and big data. For large and small organizations, HCI’s centralized management, scalable architecture, and cloud-like simplicity offer different benefits such as.
Lower costs
Integrating components into one platform reduces storage footprint, power use, maintenance costs, and TCO. These systems eliminate the need to overprovision to accommodate growth, thus enabling data centers to scale up in small, easily managed steps.
Simplicity and agility
Hyperconverged systems can be deployed in a fraction of the time as compared to traditional IT infrastructure, thus eliminating the need for IT specialists.
Performance
HCI helps organizations deploy any workload and enjoy high levels of performance, such as enterprise apps or SQL Server.
Flexible scaling
Due to their scalability, additional resources can be added by connecting a new node to the cluster. HCI also automatically identifies new resources and integrates them into the cluster
Multi-cloud support
With HCI, reduce the time and cost of transition to a hybrid cloud. HCI offers quick movement data and applications between on-premises servers and cloud(public).
Security and data protection
Security is an integral part of hyper-converged systems, with features including self-encrypting drives and tools that provide high visibility levels. Backup and disaster recovery are also built-in.
Faster deployments
HCI is a single, fully- integrated solution that takes about half an hour to set up, thus reducing installation time.
Reducing data center footprint
HCI significantly reduces space, cabling, and power requirements.
Hyperconvergence vs. traditional 3-tier architecture
HCI offers deeper abstraction and better automation and scalability than traditional converged infrastructure by simplifying administration through a single point of management. HCI can fully integrate with the entire data center, thus eliminating the need for separate servers and network storage to deliver on-demand infrastructure for data-centric workloads.HCI transforms the traditional IT operating model with simple, unified management of resources.
This helps with :
- Increased IT efficiency
- Better storage at lower cost
- Higher ability to scale
Protect data and mitigate disaster with Pappaya’s HCI
- Improve resilience towards hardware resource faults by automatically shifting to working from the secondary appliance in case of failure.
- Improve fault tolerance by replicating data across multiple nodes, making it easy to replace failed nodes with minimal downtime.
- Better data protection by acting as a data backup and disaster recovery medium that helps with instant recovery from crash or disaster.