Eight Key Attributes That Identify a Truly Hyperconverged IT System

by Chris Preimesberger

This is developed, delivered and supported by a single vendor to streamline acquisition, deployment, management and support and reduce complexity, interoperability issues and operational expenses.

This is a single pool of shared x86 resources that seamlessly combines all IT/services to 1) process data with a single-policy engine, 2) eliminate infrastructure silos and the need for discrete components, 3) create a virtualization-ready environment and 4)reduce costs.

A hyperconverged infrastructure easily scales by adding x86-based building blocks—they could be servers, storage or networking appliances—to provide elasticity to meet changing business demands.

A truly hyperconverged infrastructure centrally manages aggregate resources and virtual machines within and across data centers via a single interface. This streamlines multisite management, minimizes training and creates OpEx savings. When it’s all in one place, actions can be taken much faster and decisions made more efficiently.

In a hyperconverged system, data center components are not idle resources, contributing to a reduction in discrete infrastructure components and capital costs. An HC system deduplicates, compresses and optimizes data before it’s written to a disk to reduce capacity, bandwidth and IOPS requirements, thereby reducing the cost per gigabyte of storage per VM. This lowers bandwidth costs and ensures that IOPS are available to fuel application requirements. It also offloads processing from Intel processors to ensure that CPUs serve business applications correctly.

The management paradigm shifts from a hardware approach to an application-oriented one, with policies, management and mobility at the virtual machine level. This eliminates the need for infrastructure specialists and provides greater flexibility.

A hyperconverged system meets SLAs with native data protection (backup, recovery and disaster recovery) to eliminate the need for third-party backup and replication software and hardware and backup specialists.

Its software-centric design meets software-defined data center requirements, enabling automation and on-demand deployment in order to improve operational efficiency.