Hyper-converged infrastructure
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Virtualized environments have become standard for organizations seeking benefits like reduced costs and flexibility. However, infrastructure elements often remain separated. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) integrates compute, storage, and networking through software to provide these benefits. This document examines the pros and cons of HCI for small and medium-sized businesses, discussing how HCI simplifies management but may also create challenges around security, staffing needs, and scalability.
![ABOUT LANWORKS
For over 25 years, Lanworks has been committed to delivering
the best IT solutions to businesses, by investing in partnerships
with clients, building relationships with vendors and distributors,
expertise in its service portfolio—Life Cycle Management,
Security, IP Communications, Advanced Infrastructure and
Collaboration—Lanworks is positioned to assist its clients
through the entire cycle, from early stages of evaluating IT
solutions to post-implementation support.
REFERENCES
1
Technavio, “Global Disaster Recovery Services Market 2015-2019”, December 24, 2014.
2
MarketsandMarkets, “DR as a Service Market [RaaS; Cloud DR; Disaster Recovery
as a Service; Business Continuity as a Service] - Worldwide Forecasts and Analysis
(2013 - 2018)”, March 2013.
3
Aspect Software and The Center for Generational Kinetics, “The Aspect Consumer
Experience Index: Millennial Research on Customer Service Expectations”, April 2015.
4
Bret Longlois, Catalyst Canada, “With Growth Comes Changes:
The Evolving Canadian Mobile Landscape”, March 2015
5
Leon Spencer, “16 million mobile devices hit by malware in 2014:
Alcatel-Lucent”, ZDNet, February 13, 2015.
6
Panda Security, “PandaLabs Quarterly Report, Q2 2014”
T. 905.212.1555
F. 905.212.1560
5155 SPECTRUM WAY . UNIT #11
MISSISSAUGA . ON . L4W 5A1 . CANADA
WWW.LANWORKS.CAWWW.LANWORKS.CA
T. 905.212.1555
F. 905.212.1560
5155 SPECTRUM WAY . UNIT #11
MISSISSAUGA . ON . L4W 5A1 . CANADA
ABOUT LANWORKS
For over 25 years, Lanworks has been committed to delivering
the best IT solutions to businesses, by investing in partnerships
with clients, building relationships with vendors and distributors,
and truly valuing our employees. Through the five pillars of
expertise in its service portfolio—Life Cycle Management,
Security, IP Communications, Advanced Infrastructure and
Collaboration—Lanworks is positioned to assist its clients
through the entire cycle, from early stages of evaluating IT
solutions to post-implementation support.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/9366a7f0-b3af-400b-acfa-5ad947701656-151211165403/85/Hyper-converged-infrastructure-11-320.jpg)
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Hyper-converged infrastructure
- 1. WWW.LANWORKS.COM Written By ERIC RYDZKOWSKI DEMYSTIFYING HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTIGATING THE PROS AND CONS OF HCI FOR CANADIAN SMBS
- 2. VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become the standard. As awareness around its benefits has grown, visualization has become a go-to for organizations seeking reduced power consumption, high-availability, more streamlined IT deployment and support for rapid change. Still, even in virtualized environments, IT infrastructures exist in figurative silos, with different infrastructure elements of network, storage, compute, software operating on different systems (often with different experts). But for many organizations that division is disappearing. Large cloud providers, such as Amazon or Google, have developed an infrastructure model to extend the benefits of virtualization to meet their exponentially expanding IT infrastructure needs, dubbed hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). A great deal of confusion still exists around converged infrastructures, their benefits and challenges, and what businesses and environments for which they are well suited. This whitepaper looks at HCI and what small and mid-sized businesses must consider in evaluating such solutions. PERSONALIZED IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS VIRTUALIZEDVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTSVIRTUALIZEDVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly becomeVIRTUALIZEDhave increasingly becomeVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly becomeVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTSVIRTUALIZEDVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly becomeVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS ENVIRONMENTS VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS ENVIRONMENTS VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly becomeVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly becomeVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS ENVIRONMENTS VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly becomeVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS the standard. As awareness around its benefits has grown, visualization has ENVIRONMENTSthe standard. As awareness around its benefits has grown, visualization has become a go-to for organizations seeking reduced power consumption, ENVIRONMENTSbecome a go-to for organizations seeking reduced power consumption, high-availability, more streamlined IT deployment and support for rapid change.ENVIRONMENTShigh-availability, more streamlined IT deployment and support for rapid change. 2
- 3. LEGACY INFRASTRUCTURE Many current or “legacy infrastructures” have computers as a distinct group of servers that connect to an external set of Ethernet switches for network connectivity and also connect to fibre channel switches for access to SAN storage. This is a proven design, but in some cases this architecture does not scale well for a dynamic organization requiring rapid growth. Legacy Infrastructures are very open in nature as it is quite common to have servers from one manufacturer, fiber channel switches from another manufacturer and a SAN from yet another manufacturer. This “best of breed” model has served us well for many years as open compute, storage and network standards allow all the discrete components to work together quite seamlessly. If you don’t like your SAN vendor, it is quite easy to purchase and migrate over to a different SAN product with little or no disruption to the business. PERSONALIZED IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS Ethernet Servers Fibre Channel Storage LEGACYLEGACYLEGACYLEGACY 3
- 4. CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE A converged infrastructure is well suited to cloud environments since they pool resources, automate provisioning and allow for rapid and dynamic scaling. The market for converged infrastructure is growing as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud-based models become more popularly embraced. Forecasts estimate the converged infrastructure market will see a compound annual growth of 24.1 percent in the next several years, growing from $11.53 billion in 2014 to $33.89 in 2019. Virtually all major infrastructure companies are looking at and developing solutions for the converged infrastructure space. Open source analyst firm Wikibon has estimated that by 2017 nearly two-thirds of all infrastructures that supports enterprise applications will be packaged as converged solutions. PERSONALIZED IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS Embedded Ethernet Server Blades Embedded Fibre Channel Embedded Network Storage A converged infrastructure is one in which the multiple IT infrastructure components—server, storage and networking— are combined into a single unified computing package. These are often called blade centres or unified computing. This approach is still hardware-based and each function of the server can, if required, be used for its particular purpose. That is, a particular server can be separated and used to run a particular discrete function or isolated application. CONVERGEDCONVERGEDCONVERGEDCONVERGED 4
- 5. HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE Hyper-converged infrastructure takes the decoupling of function and hardware even further by delivering the function using software. In this software-defined approach all infrastructure components run across a mesh or fabric of low-cost hardware components turning them into a single pool from which resources can be drawn. For example, in solutions from HCI vendor Nutanix, the storage logic controller normally found in SAN hardware is treated as a service found on every virtual machine (VM) and software-defined storage takes all the local clusters and configures them into a single pool. For performance, data is dynamically moved to the local node on which it is being used, and replicated on other nodes in the cluster for resilience. PERSONALIZED IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS Servers Single Solid State Drive for performance of local VM’s Remaining Magnetic Drives are part of a large drive pool shared among all servers. Standard low cost server 1 Converged Infrastructure Market by Components (Server, Networking, Storage, Infrastructure Software, Support Infrastructure), Services ( Installation & Integration, Consulting & Professional, Maintenance & Support), Architecture Type, and End Users (Enterprises, Cloud Service Providers, Collocation Service Providers) - Worldwide Forecasts & Analysis (2014 - 2019), marketsandmarkets.com, August 2014. HYPER- CONVERGEDHYPER-CONVERGEDCONVERGEDHYPER-CONVERGED 5
- 6. In short: hyper-converged is exciting, up-and-coming technology with some exciting potential. However, we have found through experience with medium-sized business customers that hyper-converged systems are likely to create some significant challenges for SMBs. Typically, each node is configured with a single Solid State Drive (SSD) so that frequently accessed data is served-up lightning fast for VM’s on that physical host. If you take a host offline (or it fails), the VM’s will auto-migrate to other hosts in the farm but the process of moving the data local and caching on local SSD will start over so performance will suffer until things stabilize. Also increasing in popularity, the HCI market is currently growing at 116 percent, and is expected to reach $800 million by the end of 2015 and to pass $1.5 billion worldwide in 2016, according to IDC. At their simplest, converged infrastructure is based on blocks of hardware and hyper-converged is software-defined. But this distinction creates significant concerns that SMBs must consider. PERSONALIZED IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS 6
- 7. ALL FOR ONE: THE BENEFITS OF HCI BENEFITSBENEFITSALL FOR ONE:BENEFITSALL FOR ONE: For the right business, with specific needs, HCI provides some exceptional benefits, in particular: • Simplicity in management: One hardware system can result in simplified management, at least from a hardware perspective. Hyper-converged infrastructure centralizes management and offers a single console to manage compute, storage and network. This may not, however, ultimately result in an easier-to-manage infrastructure as we will look at later. • Economics: Because infrastructure elements are distributed across a mesh of lower-cost servers, HCI provides a granular and linear, pay-as-you-grow economic model for IT investment. Need to scale up, simply add a node to the HCI fabric where it is joined into the “collective.” • Distributed architecture: The mesh-like approach taken by an HCI solution is fault-tolerant. Since functions aren’t tied to one particular server, multiple failures can occur simultaneously and the system “heals itself” by simply using the nodes remaining. • Storage consumption: Load balancing between nodes and capacity savings mechanisms in HCI systems reduce storage consumption. In addition, with systems like Maxta’s VM-centric HCI solutions, storage administration demands are reduced, since VMs are being managed rather than storage. • Replication & disaster recovery: In addition to the benefits of the distributed architecture already managed, many HCI solutions have integrated replication and disaster recovery technologies built in to the underlying software. • Smooth and non-disruptive upgrades: In a traditional IT infrastructure a mismatch can occur between various systems as they age and, say, compute or storage functions become individually upgraded. This can be a particularly prominent problem in SMBs with high capital costs. With HCI the entire stack becomes upgraded by adding new nodes and removing old low- performance nodes in a non-disruptive and (again) granular way. PERSONALIZED IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS 7
- 8. HCI CHALLENGES FOR SMBS CHALLENGESCHALLENGESHCI CHALLENGES CHALLENGESHCI CHALLENGES Hyper-converged infrastructure operates a little like the Borg on TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, assimilating all functions under one great big infrastructure mesh. While that may seem like a great idea, SMBs should consider the effect such a collective would have on security, staffing and scalability in their specific environments. These are no small issues that you would need to contend with in an HCI environment. These are further complicated by changes between what national markets consider “small and mid-sized.” For example, while certain aspects of HCI might be ideal for a U.S. “small business,” it is often referring to a much larger company than found in the Canadian market. • Security and compliance: Security is always only as strong as its weakest link, but consider the effect of all data, storage, compute, system and networking functions existing on the same hardware and distributed across nodes of a hardware fabric. What happens when one of those functions is compromised, or one of those nodes? • In addition, regulatory compliance often requires a firewall or direct separation between particularly sensitive information—for example, payment card information in PCI—and other data. How is such a barrier put in place across such a distributed infrastructure? While not impossible, it is certainly more difficult to achieve. • Staffing challenges: Staffing is almost always a challenge for Canadian SMBs, but it is one that is only becoming more difficult in the years to come. A recent report from the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) suggests the expected growth of smart and hyper-connected marketplace mean that cumulative hiring requirements in Canada for ICT Talent are expected to be over 182,000 by 2019. According to the report, 31 percent of surveyed PERSONALIZED IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS 8
- 9. employers in Canada already have difficulty or delays in filling ICT positions due to a lack of suitable talent. • In traditional infrastructures different experts often handle different functions, with network administrators handling the network, or storage experts dealing with storage solutions. An HCI environment requires managers with some degree of expertise of all elements, exacerbating the challenge of finding the talent needed. • Scalability: While HCI provides benefits around scalability, allowing it to be granular and more dynamic, it also creates challenges around scaling any one infrastructure component independently. HCI scales in a linear way, making it ideal for large scale organizations with huge growth needs across the board, but inefficient for a smaller organization that perhaps need to ramp up a great deal of storage without adding compute performance. • Although some HCI vendors offer, for example, storage- only nodes so scaling can occur independent, they are limited in number making it still more of a challenge to scale storage independent of compute than a traditional environment. • Since control planes and data are converged, mixed together as VMs and VM data storage, scaling one means automatically scaling the other. For most SMBs if performance degrades you upgrade only the node on which the control plane is running, for example; this is impossible in an HCI environment. • Lock-in: Vendor lock-in must also be considered. To control costs and maintain flexibility, you may want to be able to select server and storage vendors independently. Not possible, of course, in a HCI environment. You become locked into one manufacturer for your entire infrastructure, limiting flexibility, and you become married to their support and SLAs. PERSONALIZED IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS 9
- 10. A hyper-converged infrastructure certainly makes a great deal of sense for a number of verticals and businesses, especially those with extreme needs to grow and scale on a dime. That’s why companies like Google and Amazon have developed and used such technologies for years, so they can scale their infrastructure quickly with inexpensive hardware. For companies with a linear growth pattern, where each technology consumer would have a reasonably similar growth across the organization (or its customers in the case of a cloud provider) HCI is a perfect solution. For others, traditional compute and storage infrastructures absolutely will still have their place when aggressive and massive (and, again, linear) scaling is not a requirement. Those outside of the sweet spot of service providers or up- and-coming industries experiencing explosive, extensive and rapid IT resource growth will want to consider the impact of HCI on their environment very closely and may want to wait until solutions to the challenges discussed have been better developed. PERSONALIZED IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS MAKING SMART DECISIONSIDEAL FOR SOME, BUT… 10
- 11. ABOUT LANWORKS For over 25 years, Lanworks has been committed to delivering the best IT solutions to businesses, by investing in partnerships with clients, building relationships with vendors and distributors, expertise in its service portfolio—Life Cycle Management, Security, IP Communications, Advanced Infrastructure and Collaboration—Lanworks is positioned to assist its clients through the entire cycle, from early stages of evaluating IT solutions to post-implementation support. REFERENCES 1 Technavio, “Global Disaster Recovery Services Market 2015-2019”, December 24, 2014. 2 MarketsandMarkets, “DR as a Service Market [RaaS; Cloud DR; Disaster Recovery as a Service; Business Continuity as a Service] - Worldwide Forecasts and Analysis (2013 - 2018)”, March 2013. 3 Aspect Software and The Center for Generational Kinetics, “The Aspect Consumer Experience Index: Millennial Research on Customer Service Expectations”, April 2015. 4 Bret Longlois, Catalyst Canada, “With Growth Comes Changes: The Evolving Canadian Mobile Landscape”, March 2015 5 Leon Spencer, “16 million mobile devices hit by malware in 2014: Alcatel-Lucent”, ZDNet, February 13, 2015. 6 Panda Security, “PandaLabs Quarterly Report, Q2 2014” T. 905.212.1555 F. 905.212.1560 5155 SPECTRUM WAY . UNIT #11 MISSISSAUGA . ON . L4W 5A1 . CANADA WWW.LANWORKS.CAWWW.LANWORKS.CA T. 905.212.1555 F. 905.212.1560 5155 SPECTRUM WAY . UNIT #11 MISSISSAUGA . ON . L4W 5A1 . CANADA ABOUT LANWORKS For over 25 years, Lanworks has been committed to delivering the best IT solutions to businesses, by investing in partnerships with clients, building relationships with vendors and distributors, and truly valuing our employees. Through the five pillars of expertise in its service portfolio—Life Cycle Management, Security, IP Communications, Advanced Infrastructure and Collaboration—Lanworks is positioned to assist its clients through the entire cycle, from early stages of evaluating IT solutions to post-implementation support.