Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solutions

What is Hyperconverged in a nutshell some might ask? Also how does it benefit ones organization and help improve an obsolete IT Infrastructure?

Hyperconverged infrastructure streamlines the deployment, management and scaling of datacenter resources by combining x86-based server and storage resources with intelligent software based of industry leading software defined technologies. Which separate servers, storage networks and storage arrays can be replaced with a single hyperconverged infrastructure solution to create an agile data-center that easily scales with your business.

So instead of relying on traditional 3-tier infrastructure to run production or to virtualise your datacentre. You can now start your farm with just a single node. Let’s take a look at a simple diagram below to understand this concept better.

Now with hyperconverged technology, it allows an organisation to simplify a traditional IT infrastructure all into a single box! Imagine how much datacentre footprint an organisation could reduce. Also, not to mention. This also reduces complexity to setup large and complex systems from scratch and reduces deployment times from weeks/months to days!

Some common use cases enterprises and organisation are using Hyperconverged Infrastructure are as follows:

To deploy Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Deployment time for apps and services are crucial for businesses and are especially mission critical for the success of a business. With Hybrid cloud capabilities, this allows organisations to leverage on hyper-scale infrastructure services from cloud providers such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and Microsoft Azure. Off course these are some notable and huge cloud providers, but the possibility are endless with thousands of other cloud providers soon to be recognised and supported by HCI technology.

To Consolidate Workload

From time to time, certain organisations have had already existing server farms which span in the thousands. HCI brings a way to centralise and consolidate workloads to run in newer IT infrastructure, no other better way non other than consolidating it inside a HCI infrastructure! Scalability and Availability concerns will be a thing of the past. With that said, and now that we have gone through what Hyperconverged infrastructure is, we can talk about some of the reputable vendor’s which InfoFabrica is working together with to provide products which operates based on this technology and its principals.

VMware

A reputable and well-known Software company, established in the year 1998, VMware has had profound experience in developing and providing stable and well-known virtualisation software to the market. Info Fabrica currently is partnering with VMware to resell and provide consultation services for some of its Hyperconverged technology such as vSphere (Compute Virtualisation), vSAN (Storage Virtualisation) and NSX (Network Virtualisation). VMware has a vision with SDDC (Software Defined Data Centre) concept whereby all underlying traditional infrastructure is virtualised under one hardware. Do watch the below video to understand more about vSAN offering by VMware and what it does for an organisation.

As of today InfoFabrica has offerings for vSAN that is ready built using Lenovo Servers. With the ThinkAgile VX Series, deployment has been made easy and ready within hours/days instead of weeks or months. Nodes from the Lenovo line-up are vSAN ready nodes, which are server units which has been preconfigured with vSAN out of the box, tested and validated by VMware. This is to give a peace of mind to customer’s, for a worry free experience. Do check out the below video to learn more about the ThinkAgile VX Series by Lenovo.

NetApp

Depending on the business requirements and needs, NetApp has HCI solutions to cater for various needs and requirements. NetApp HCI which is also powered by VMware, allows organisation to focus on other high priority task, without worrying about infrastructure related matters. Also, with NetApp HCI, and with the use of customisable API and plug ins. Customer can take advantage of Hybrid Cloud Features and Software’s such as:

• Advanced networking and cloud integration (AWS)
• Backup design and integration with StorageGRID
• Integration of NetApp HCI with systems running ONTAP® software (FAS/All Flash FAS)
• Integration with ONTAP Cloud (AWS or Azure)

NetApp HCI technology has evolved over first generation HCI technology by providing the following features into its platform:

Intelligent Scale

Unlike first generation HCI, Netapp HCI has independent management over pools of resources, primarily storage performance storage capacity, vCPU’s, vRAM and it even has the ability to manage license costs.

Revised Storage Architecture

A revamped storage technology that prevents data locality issues, stranding of resources and management overhead that reduces capacity wastage while at the same time being able to provide guaranteed industry leading performance

NetApp HCI comes in multiple flavours of configuration. Customer can choose to opt for Storage Tiering, or if performance is mandatory an all flash option is also available for businesses.

Below we can see a fundamental overview of how NetApp HCI Architecture looks like, and what it comprises of, also some of the basic services that it associated with.

As InfoFabrica is a close partner with NetApp, we can help our customers reap from the benefits of NetApp technology offerings with HCI.

AWS Outpost

With ever growing compliance arising and perhaps even to address the needs of physical latency, AWS has just recently introduced Outpost services in their previous keynote. AWS Outpost provides business with option to run VMC or Native AWS Services at customer data centre of choice. Outpost offers flexibility to business to start with a single node and expand all the way to a full rack, Outpost is modular in a way that upgrades can also be done on the go, whereby hardware can be shipped to AWS and exchanged for a better one or replaced in the event a fault is encountered.

Outpost is designed to be fully managed and operated by AWS. Any patches and Updates will be done by AWS. The customer would just use it as it is, without the need to operate the stack. Health Metrics will be provided to the customer via AWS Console.

We expect to see AWS rolling this service by mid 2019. So stay tuned for more !