Introduction
From a hardware solution perspective, many organizations today are looking at Hyperconverged Infrastructure or HCI solutions for their various hardware refresh cycles. Software-defined technologies have certainly driven the Hyperconverged Infrastructure revolution since compute, network, and storage can all be abstracted from the underlying hardware layer. Additionally, hardware costs have gotten much cheaper. HCI solutions additionally allow more commodity hardware solutions to be utilized in deploying HCI solutions.
However, are Hyperconverged Infrastructure solutions always the answer for hardware refresh projects?
Table of Contents
- What are the benefits of utilizing HCI?
- A Closer Look at Hyperconverged Infrastructure
- Hyperconverged Infrastructure Pros and Benefits
- Simplicity
- Scalability
- Cost Savings
- Hyperconverged Infrastructure Cons and Drawbacks
- Vendor Lock-in
- Scaling Granularity Limitations
- Cost
- Concluding Thoughts
What are the benefits of utilizing HCI?
Are there drawbacks to choosing HCI as a platform for virtualization infrastructure?
There are certainly strengths and weaknesses in any hardware/software solution and HCI platforms are no exception to that rule.
Let’s take a look at Hyperconverged Infrastructure Pros, Cons, Benefits and Drawbacks to see the determining factors that organizations can use to decide whether or not HCI is a worthy successor for their next hardware refresh for virtual environments.
A Closer Look at Hyperconverged Infrastructure
We have already touched on Hyperconverged Infrastructure as a platform.
However, just to be clear,
What is Hyperconverged infrastructure and how is it defined or characterized?
When we think about what makes virtualized environments possible, there are three core requirements that are necessary to have a functioning virtualized infrastructure. They are compute, network, and storage.
In traditional virtualized environments, these requirements are satisfied by the typical 3-2-1 architecture in many environments. To use this as an example, the 3-2-1 architecture is comprised of (3) hosts, (2) storage switches, and (1) SAN. The host network/VM network plumbing can be accomplished through the SAN switches, but typically are cabled to upstream network switches for keeping the storage switches/SAN network isolated, eliminating competing network traffic, security, etc.
This is the typical footprint of virtual configurations from years past. Granted this is still a very viable solution for many organizations. However, with the Hyperconverged Infrastructure, what virtual environments look like changes. This helps to get an idea of what defines Hyperconverged Infrastructure.
HCI combines compute, network, and storage into a single system. In other words, it is basically an entire virtualized solution “in a box”. This means there are no separate storage switches, no SAN that hosts are connected to and nodes are running software-defined storage solutions to deliver the storage architecture.
This is a shift from the way organizations are accustomed to delivering the components of virtualized environments. In traditional configurations, the network and storage were physically separate from the compute nodes. They entail discrete components that comprise how the compute, network, and storage components are delivered. In other words, these are components that you can place your hands on, touch, and discretely configure. With HCI solutions, all of these components are contained in the box and are configured through software.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure Pros and Benefits
With this new approach to delivering the components required for virtualized environments and having them all contained “in the box”, there are many benefits to this type of solution.
We will take a look at the following benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure:
- Simplicity
- Scalability
- Cost Savings
Simplicity
Perhaps the prominent benefit of HCI is the simplicity of managing the solution. Since all of the components that deliver virtualized workloads are contained in the same system (compute, network, and storage), the management of the solution takes place in one location as a single solution. When compared to the traditional architecture of virtualized environments that require provisioning and configuring compute hosts, configuring the storage switches, and then configuring the SAN all as separate entities, you can begin to realize the advantages of being able to manage the solution in a single location.
This also helps with troubleshooting and monitoring as most HCI solutions provide good tools to see all of the components of the solution in one place or dashboard. In traditional environments, troubleshooting and monitoring can be disaggregated and difficult to understand since everything operates as an autonomous system.
Additionally, when you provision an HCI solution, all of the components are provisioned together as a single system. When you provision a traditional virtualized solution, you have to individually provision and configure the hosts, the switches, the storage, and the hypervisor software that runs on top of the hosts. It can be complex to procure and provision solutions, all from different vendors, that work correctly and are compatible.
Scalability
The simplicity of which HCI solutions can be provisioned and managed translates into easier scalability of the solution. Since all the components are found in the same system, scaling an HCI solution is as simple as adding another host to the solution and you automatically gain more compute and storage capacity. The complexities of compatibility or worrying about older hardware are not as prevalent when compared to traditional compute, network, and storage infrastructure.
Cost Savings
No matter what the technology or platform, often, the driving force behind the selection of technology is cost. When thinking about Hyperconverged Infrastructure, cost-savings can indeed be a benefit of the solution. The inherent benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure can translate into financial savings for organizations. Management complexity generally adds to cost. HCI by its very nature simplifies the management of infrastructure since all the required components are contained in a single system. This allows management to be greatly simplified and cost-savings can be gained from the simplified approach of the solution.
Support of an HCI solution will be simplified as well since there is a single management plane. The fewer man-hours that are spent in supporting infrastructure, this also yields cost savings. Additionally, with support, you have one vendor to contact if there is an issue. When different vendors are involved with troubleshooting an issue, there is generally time spent/wasted attempting to determine which vendor is responsible for triaging the issue. This translates into money wasted.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure Cons and Drawbacks
So, with all the benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure, will customers want to use HCI in all uses cases and environments? While HCI touts many tremendous benefits, there are certainly cons and drawbacks to being considered when looking at HCI solutions. What are these? We will take a look at the following:
- Vendor Lock-in
- Scaling granularity limitations
- Cost
Vendor Lock-in
When thinking about the fact that a single vendor is providing the compute, network, and storage, when customers choose an HCI solution from a vendor, they are locking into the single vendor for all of their infrastructure contributing to their virtual workloads. As mentioned, this can be an advantage in a sense, with the ability to approach a single vendor for issue troubleshooting. However, this also becomes a disadvantage with the so-called vendor lock-in. Customers are now locked into a single vendor and their future roadmap of capabilities in all areas of the infrastructure. Customers will no longer be able to choose the vendor providing the best balance of performance and capabilities in the areas of compute, network, and storage.
Scaling Granularity Limitations
Hyperconverged Infrastructure scales by simply adding more nodes to the environment. While this allows for easily scaling the solution, it also leads to a drawback to the solution.
What if you simply need more storage in the environment?
To get the added storage in an HCI environment, you have to add a node that contains not only the needed extra storage, but also contains additional compute, memory, and network resources. You may not need these additional resources. The same is true with compute/memory. To get the added compute, you will be adding additional storage to the environment with an additional node. HCI solutions do not lend themselves to granularly scaling the capacity of specific resources.
Cost
As already seen, many of the advantages of HCI can also be disadvantages. Due to the lack of granular scaling of resources with HCI, any realized cost savings may be offset by the wasting of resources that may come about by the inability to granularly scale those resources in an HCI environment. Organizations will need to consider their resource and capacity needs and determine if the proposed HCI solution scales in a linear way with those requirements.
Concluding Thoughts
Today’s Hyperconverged Infrastructure solutions are powerful and provide a great way for organizations to easily provision and scale their infrastructure. The simplicity of managing HCI solutions through a single pane of glass translates into lowered costs in terms of management and support by engineers managing the solution. While HCI provides a great platform for today’s virtualized environments, there are certainly cons and potential drawbacks to the solution that may offset many of the benefits of HCI. Each customer needs to evaluate their particular business needs and use cases to determine if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. HCI solutions are getting better and new capabilities are being introduced with the various platforms that are taking advantage of the newest capabilities provided by today’s hypervisor solutions.
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