Did COVID-19 Give a Big Boost to Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

COVID-19 not only disrupted DevOps by forcing human resources off-premise and thus increasing costs; it also accelerated the trend to hyper-converged infrastructureOpens a new window (HCI).

IT Infrastructure in the COVID-19 Environment

IT departments in modern enterprises have been struggling with many issues, including the constraints of on-premise hardware, the need for multiple sets of skilled support staff, the need to roll out new apps quickly through agile DevOps utilizing software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers for database management, application testing, performance tuning, data archive and backup, disaster recovery, and other functions. 

Moving data and processing to the cloud offered some hope for lowering costs and speeding application time-to-market. Still, there were several stumbling blocks, including data security and privacy concerns, network bandwidth, and other factors.

Enter the COVID-19 virus. With off-premise developers and support staff, implementing virtual desktop technology became important. Besides, hybrid cloud configurations that included combinations of on-premise private cloud with multiple public cloud services meant that IT needed to quickly move to a new infrastructure. 

The result was that COVID-19 acted as an accelerator to a trend that began over a decade ago: a move to architecture and infrastructure convergence.

Simple convergenceOpens a new window started as a separation of enterprise amalgamations of hardware and software into discrete components. Server farms were simplified from being combinations of general purpose and special purpose machines into standalone, generic servers. The same was done for storage arrays by moving to single, large data storage units.

Hyperconvergence takes this a step further by making the actual configuration of components software-based. The core technology is thus integrated into a federated system managed by a hypervisor, such that individual components are transparent to applications.

Learn More: Biggest Technology Mistakes During the Rush to Remote Work (Plus How to Avoid Them) 

HCI: Critical for Managing Core Workloads

Hyperconvergence was originally meantOpens a new window as a way to evolve a company’s infrastructure away from a dependence on a few specific hardware-based, network-connected platforms to a software-defined environment. COVID-19 has accelerated this trend away from implementing new applications on a few isolated hardware-based systems toward an environment with hardware and software services bundled into a configuration similar to the cloud. 

In an HCI environment, processes can run on a distributed set of standard hardware servers, with data similarly distributed. All support processes would be managed by a hypervisor.

The most common HCI elements include sets of commercially-available servers, direct-attached storage, federated processing and data management. This results in lower costs since the enterprise can reduce or eliminate the need for multiple physical data centers and concentrate on developing software that will run in an environment where software, network and database services can be leased on an as-needed basis.

Also, IT does not need to provision geography and staff to support multiple hardware, software, database and storage systems and can contract with third-party vendors for such enterprise services as data backup and archive, disaster recovery, performance tuning, and systems management.

Examples of such infrastructure include those built based on open source kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) in OpenStackOpens a new window cloud software, CiscoOpens a new window ‘s HyperFlex (HX), ESXi from VMWareOpens a new window or on Microsoft’s Hyper-VOpens a new window . Storage area networks (SANs) or network-attached storage (NAS) are no longer needed, allowing IT to delegate data storage allocation and management to the hypervisor.

Learn More: How Hyperconverged Infrastructure is Heralding a New Era of Computing for Government Organizations 

HCI Use Cases and Best Fit

In an interview with ZDNet, Krishnan Badrinarayanan, director of product marketing for HCI component provider Nutanix, noted, “The whole point of converging is to ‘de-silo’ infrastructure, and make it a lot more operationally simple and agile, so you can focus on what’s really adding value to the business … At the very fundamental level, hyperconvergence adds value at the physical layer, where it converges those units of storage, compute, and networking, so you’re able to build these incredibly scalable infrastructure platforms, upon which you rely as your applications grow, and as your business demands grow.”

This means that an HCI environment is a cost-effective way to support a hybrid cloud environment. By defining data storage, computation, network and application services through software, differences between multiple public and private cloud components and services can be minimized or hidden from applications. The simplicity and flexibility of HCI means that costs are far easier to predict based on historical resource usage rates such as CPU consumed, data storage volume and network bandwidth usage. This allows for better capacity planning since you no longer must purchase excess on-premise capacity as a contingency for unforeseen increases in transaction volumes or data storage. HCI allows you to lease and provision exactly what you need when you need it.

HCI can also be used to support private cloud in enterprises that are attempting to centralize storage and compute facilities. This is particularly applicable for any company with a suite of applications that depend on software and computing services such as machine learning and AI. By federating these into an HCI with software-defined services and storage, IT can reduce its hardware footprint and better manage support, thus reducing costs.

Learn More: Scality CEO on Why the Future of Infrastructure Is Open Source 

HCI Issues and Competition

There are some pre-existing workloads that will not function well with HCI. These include applications using containers such as Kubernetes and Docker. Such applications execute in a VM-free environment, so IT must prepare to support these applications to co-exist with those running in the HCI.

An interesting alternative to a homegrown HCI is Amazon’s AWS OutpostsOpens a new window . Considered by some to be the next generation of an integrated hybrid cloud environment, AWS Outposts, “… is a fully managed service that offers the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. AWS Outposts is ideal for workloads that require low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency, and migration of applications with local system interdependencies.” A VMware variant of AWS Outposts is expected soon.

The legacy of COVID-19 remains. IT needs to continue to reduce costs, and the distributed and hyperconverged IT environment will remain the best way to address this.

Do you think COVID-19 has hastened the adoption of hyperconverged systems in the data center? Comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!