The SAN Storage has been the foundation on which data center infrastructure has been designed since the 90’s. The primary objective was to ensure data protection as the data revolution began in the 2000s.
That said, the traditional SAN Storage came with its set of limitations that prohibited enterprises to keep up with meeting changing business demands. Keeping up with scalability, reliability, and operational efficiency became a major challenge.
This brought together a group of engineers in 2009 to find a solution by adopting an innovative approach bringing together technologies to enterprise computing. Thus, the concept of Hyper Converged Infrastructure or HCI was born.
Defining Hyper Converged Infrastructure
HCI, simply put, is a unified system that is software defined. This involves the grouping of storage and servers via a distributed infrastructure platform in combination with intelligent software to construct a foundation that is adaptable and flexible. The HCI created is able to replace any existing legacy infrastructure that primarily consists of separate servers, storage and networks.
Moreover, the Hyper Converged Infrastructure is able to function efficiently with a combination of locally attached storage devices with commodity data center server hardware. The platform is powered by a software layer that is distributed in order to remove the usual roadblocks that can be commonly found in legacy infrastructure systems.
The Functioning of Hyperconverged Infrastructure Platform
The hyper converged platform is made up of these integrated software components:
- Storage virtualization
- Compute virtualization
- Networking virtualization
- Advanced management capabilities that include automation
The platform is a meeting point for the total data center stack. This includes computing, all types of storage as well as virtualization. The virtualization software, in turn, extracts and combines all resources which are then dynamically assigned to applications that are being run on containers.
Benefits of Hyper Converged Infrastructure Solutions
There is little doubt about the advantages of Hyper Converged Infrastructure Solutions in comparison to three-tiered, traditional architecture. Let’s deep dive further.
Enhanced IT Efficiency: Remove processes that require manual and isolated execution from the hands of your expert team members. Enable a unified and converged IT team to track and handle resources and enhance storage capabilities. With Hyper Converged Infrastructure in place, IT resources have access to ample storage that in turn can be allocated dynamically to generate the appropriate amount of capacity, performance and security.
More Storage, Less Cost: HCI provides enterprises to scale up architecture by reducing the CAPEX and working with the more affordable purpose built networking, industry standard x86 servers. Additionally, you can increase capacity as per requirement minus any significant disruptions. HCI enables bypassing any vendor lock-ins. Therefore, you only use what you need thereby eliminating overprovisioning resulting in keeping your costs well under control.
Better Potential to Scale: HCI is designed to make your organization more responsive to quickly changing business needs. The hardware set up only requires a few hours that can drive the performance of critical business applications. Compared to traditional infrastructure, the Hyper Converged Infrastructure scales a lot better too. This allows future proofing of the IT environment for the enterprise.
In Conclusion
HCI is the preferred infrastructure platform for the majority of companies. If your business wants to evolve and remain competitive then it is time for you to make the transformation from your legacy systems to HCI. Get in touch with MDS CS to learn more about their range of custom-designed HCI solutions for businesses in the Middle East.