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Confused about hyperconvergence? Well, who wouldn't be? With so many vendors using the term, how do you determine what is TRUE hyperconvergence?

What Is Hyperconvergence?

Hyperconvergence is a computing infrastructure for virtual workloads. Specifically, it's one that seamlessly combines all of the IT components and services below the hypervisor into an x86 building block. Hyperconvergence means there are no silos of independent IT components. And, there's no need to manage discrete devices or have specialized training in component-level technology, such as storage area networks (SANs). Hyperconvergence greatly simplifies IT infrastructure, which makes operations more efficient. It improves the speed and agility of deploying resources for virtual workloads. And, importantly, hyperconvergence significantly reduces costs.

What's Not Hyperconvergence?

Hyperconvergence is an often-misunderstood or misused term. Hyperconvergence does not accurately describe solutions that only package a few independent legacy IT stack components together. While they may have the appearance of delivering some simplicity and speed of infrastructure acquisition and deployment, they are still separate products to manage and support at the component level.

There are still other so-called hyperconvergence solutions consisting of modular appliances based on commodity hardware. These systems aggregate compute and storage functionality and scale by adding building blocks or appliance nodes. While the time to deployment is improved and acquisition cost is lower, this class of solution does not address any of the other data center services.

Some of the newest market entrants claiming hyperconvergence also consist of modular building block appliances that aggregate compute and storage functions. However, these bundle additional standalone products, such as backup and replication, into the offering. These solutions are a simple convergence of compute and storage on an x86 system that hosts virtual appliances running services like backup and replication.

True Hyperconvergence To Transform IT

True hyperconvergence delivers the highest degree of efficiency and value. True hyperconvergence has several characteristics.

Single Vendor Solution

Hyperconverged infrastructure that's developed, delivered and supported by a single vendor creates efficiencies. It streamlines the acquisition, deployment, management and support of the solution. It also reduces complexity, interoperability issues and operational expenses. SimpliVity architected its hyperconverged infrastructure from the ground up with these efficiencies in mind.

Single Shared Pool of x86 Resources

Combining all IT infrastructure and services below the hypervisor into a single shared pool of x86 resources eliminates the need for discrete IT components. It creates an environment that's optimized for virtualized applications. And, it creates an environment that reduces costs to enable cloud-level economics. There's no need to manage multiple policy engines through multiple component interfaces. SimpliVity assimilates eight to 12 data center components in an x86 building block. Deploying a network of two or more hyperconverged building blocks creates a global federation that facilitates efficient data movement, resource sharing and scalability.

Ease of Scale

True hyperconvergence solutions easily scale to meet changing business demands by adding x86 building blocks. Augmenting SimpliVity's hyperconverged infrastructure with additional nodes, as needed, enables on-demand expansion of resources.

Centralized Management

Efficiency extends to management. The ability to centrally manage virtual environments globally through a single interface is key to improving operational efficiency and reducing operational expenses. SimpliVity Global Unified Management provides centralized management of all SimpliVity-powered hyperconverged infrastructure resources and workloads. SimpliVity takes advantage of the virtualization framework (vCenter) for single and multi-site management, which minimizes training and creates operational savings.

Hyper-Efficient Use of Resources

Hyperconvergence maximizes efficiency of resources in a few ways:

• Siloed environments maintain purpose-built components, such as backup, WAN optimization, replication and deduplication. The resources associated with these devices remain idle most of the time. SimpliVity hyperconvergence eliminates duplicate devices and services, making more efficient use of resources and reducing capital costs.
• Hyperconvergence efficiently handles data by deduplicating, compressing and optimizing data inline in real-time. This saves IOPS by eliminating duplicate writes, ensuring that business applications get the IOPS they need. Storing less data lowers capacity requirements-and costs-for disk and bandwidth.
• In a shared resource environment, contention for any resource causes disruption to business applications. SimpliVity's OmniStack Accelerator Card is a specially architected PCIe module that offloads processing of HDD writes in real time. By offloading intensive processing from x86 processors, SimpliVity ensures that maximum CPU resources are available for application requirements.

VM-centricity

With hyperconvergence, the management focus is not at the IT component level. The management paradigm shifts to the application or virtual machine. SimpliVity hyperconvergence decouples workloads from the physical infrastructure to enable greater mobility, and offer VM-centric policies and management. This eliminates the need for infrastructure specialists and provides greater flexibility.

Native data protection

Hyperconvergence of all IT components and services below the hypervisor includes data protection. VM-level backup and replication of backup data between sites eliminate the need for third-party backup and replication software and hardware, and backup specialists. SimpliVity includes native full backup/recovery of VMs and replication of backups between hyperconverged infrastructure nodes within the SimpliVity federation to improve RPOs and RTOs.

Software-centric design

Hyperconvergence meets software-defined data center requirements, enabling automation to improve operational efficiency. SimpliVity OmniStack is a software solution enabled to run on x86 systems that meet minimum requirements and is designed to be hypervisor agnostic.