What Is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined, unified system that combines all the elements of a traditional data center: storage, compute, networking and management.
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What is hyperconvergence? Discover what’s involved and why organizations across industries are consolidating to help reduce complexity, cost and risk.
Four tightly integrated software components make up a hyperconverged platform:
The virtualization software abstracts and pools underlying resources, then dynamically allocates them to applications running in VMs or containers. Configuration is based on policies aligned with the applications, eliminating the need for complicated constructs like LUNs and volumes.
The virtualization software abstracts and pools underlying resources, then dynamically allocates them to applications running in VMs or containers. Configuration is based on policies aligned with the applications, eliminating the need for complicated constructs like LUNs and volumes.
Eliminate manual processes and the need for siloed operational expertise on your team. Now, a single, converged IT team can monitor and manage resources and improve storage capabilities. Plus, with HCI, IT resources are presented as pools of storage that can be dynamically allocated to deliver the right amount of capacity, performance and protection.
Reduce your CAPEX by using a scale-up/scale-out architecture that requires only industry-standard x86 servers, not expensive, purpose-built networking. Then simply add capacity as needed with no disruptions. With HCI, you avoid vendor lock-in and eliminate overprovisioning, meaning greatly reduced infrastructure spending across your data center.
Be more responsive to rapidly changing business needs. Set up hardware in a few hours; spin up workloads in minutes. Accelerate the performance of business-critical applications like relational databases. HCI scales better than traditional infrastructure. It enables a future-proof IT environment that allows you to scale up and scale out to easily meet specific application needs.
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Check out the infographic to see why more organizations are making the switch to address today’s IT challenges.
Learn how to build on your technology investments and future-proof your infrastructure environments.
Understand what HCI is all about, how you can get started, and where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck in this Dummies guide.
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Find out which factors to consider when deploying hyperconverged infrastructure, explore the countless options, and then choose the one that’s right for you.
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Eliminating traditional IT silos and managing everything from a single tool means lower OPEX and CAPEX for your IT infrastructure. And with HCI, you don’t have to sacrifice security, flexibility or scalability. But some solutions make capitalizing on HCI efficiency easier than others. Learn why VMware has the most HCI customers in production worldwide in this infographic.
The components of hyperconverged infrastructure can be implemented separately and one at a time, depending on existing architecture and your IT needs. To deliver on its potential, an HCI solution shouldn’t be tied to a specific hardware platform. VMware HCI allows you the freedom to choose your preferred platform, fully integrate with your existing infrastructure, and protect and optimize existing investments.
Data center scaling and evolving can be a costly, complicated process. Luckily, a key benefit of HCI is its ability to scale and change as needed. VMware HCI in particular is designed for simplicity and scalability for rapidly changing business needs. Only VMware has the complete set of offerings for a fully software-defined data center in production today.
Hyperconverged and converged IT infrastructures both integrate the four components of a data center: storage, compute, networking and management. While hyperconverged systems accomplish this through software, making it hardware-agnostic, converged solutions rely on hardware. A converged infrastructure data center uses many of the same products as traditional IT, just with a simplified architecture and easier management.
Companies are using hyperconverged infrastructure to run most types of business-critical, or tier-one, applications thanks to its high availability. Other common workloads that run on hyperconverged systems include database software like Oracle, virtual desktop infrastructure, collaboration applications, analytics, remote management, and testing environments.
VMware HCI allows you to integrate your existing storage within the hyperconverged infrastructure solution. vSAN is VMware’s software-defined storage solution for hyperconverged infrastructure. vSAN is natively integrated with VMware vSphere, which manages compute resources, including storage. This means you can access and use traditional datastores along with hyperconverged storage—all in the same cluster.
For more information, read the Solution Overview.
A hyperconverged infrastructure appliance combines all the data center components—storage, compute, networking and management—within a single, pre-configured hardware box. Deploying HCI with an appliance reduces operational costs and simplifies set-up and maintenance. You don’t have to worry about building the architecture or configuring and managing the underlying infrastructure. Dell EMC VxRail is a turnkey HCI appliance jointly engineered by VMware and Dell.
Common uses of hyperconverged infrastructure include:
“We’re using vSAN for hyperconverged infrastructure because of its reliability; it’s stable and lives depend on it. VMware systems are designed to just keep running…it’s an unstoppable system.”
- Tom Lynott, Director of Software Architecture
“Moving to hyperconverged and cloud infrastructure in one year, we’ve reduced [costs] by multiple, multiple millions.”
- Matthew Douglas, Chief Enterprise Architect, Sentara Healthcare
“Without VMware, I don’t think we would have the uptime or reliability to be able to perform what we do on a global scale and do at 40,000 feet on a global scale and do what we do best, save patient lives.”
- Paul Green, CIO Angel MedFlight
Ready to get started on the simplest path toward hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud? Start by evaluating the readiness of your current environment for HCI with a free, online assessment.