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HYPER-CONVERGED PLATFORMSWHAT TO LOOK FORTURBONOMIC MICRO-EBOOK

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B A C K G R O U N DHyper-converged infrastructure promises to ease management. As such, organizations are heavily investing in these software-defined, tightly integrated compute, storage, and network solutions. Commoditizing infrastructure may make management easier, but these solutions do not match workload demand with infrastructure supply. The question of which workloads go where, how to size them and when to provision is left to the user…and that’s not scalable.

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HYPER-CONVERGED PLATFORMS

Hyper-convergence is a type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute,

storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies from scratch in a commodity hardware box supported

by a single vendor.

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To start, why are there any hyper-converged platforms?There have been a lot of major changes in the way that IT environments are run over the last 10 years. The idea of individual workloads being run by independent hosts has nearly vanished with the few legacy exceptions. The only guaranteed consistency between IT environments today is that there is some form of server virtualization and most of their servers are already virtualized. This helps as it is easier to scale and manage critical data. It creates tremendous amounts of complexity because now they require an understanding of virtualization nuances and all of the disparate pieces within the infrastructure have to work together. Otherwise, they will take down a portion or the whole environment. Everyone has seen some form of this.Enter hyper-convergence. The idea of compute, storage and hypervisor integrated so tightly together that the complexity of the environment is reduced greatly. There is now one vendor to point at if an issue arises, one pane of glass to view and manage the majority of the infrastructure and most hyper-converged platforms are focused around performance with SSDs and caching algorithms. Seems great!

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Well, now we should compare what is out in the market today.

Many of the mainstream vendors have created hyper-converged offerings. I have personally seen some earlier

hyper-converged solutions flop, but that isn’t what this discussion is about : ). At a high level, the focus is usually

around the numbers. Focusing on the amount of the commoditized CPU, RAM, network interfaces and disk space

just makes this a lot simpler, but doesn’t provide the most value for the solution. Because at that level the platforms

look the same, a lot of people then base their decisions around the vendor that they normally buy from.

You should really look at these solutions as new independent vendors and focus on your needs to then match

those needs with the platform’s competitive advantage over the others. Here is a quick chart of popular vendors

(who will probably yell at me), but this information is based on what is readily available and that usually means this

is where their main focus is for a product offering, therefore, most likely more robust in that area. I focused on full

products also as we are talking about reducing complexity and tried to keep the marketing terminology the same.

Chart below:

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Popular Venders

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So, they all basically look the same…

The reason that the competitive advantages all look similar is because they are trying to solve the same main problems

(that we talk about in the next hyper-converged blog). Time of general availability (GA) and installations are also important.

Understand their business history and how much time that the product has been vetted by customers. Customer

environments give a completely different dynamic than the test lab does.

• 1. Compare your business requirements with their competitive advantages

• 2. Understand their company and product history

• 3. Always POC!

You can see above that most of these products have popped up since 2014. If you can’t tell, there are some big companies

that haven’t successfully jumped into this space. They will be coming and can certainly be seen as late bloomers. You can

see some brand new products below from Cisco and HP. Be careful of “bleeding edge” brand new releases so that your

production environment isn’t used as continuation of their testing. I recommend that these brand new products should only

be used in non-production environments. Chart Bellow:

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New Coming Venders

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Read Now

Blog – High Hopes for Hyper-Converged: Read Now

Blog – Ringing in A Hyper-Converged 2016: Read Now

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