Why Hyperconverged Infrastructure is the Future of Data Centers
The information technology sector has a long history of chasing the so-called next big thing. That is part of the reason why any conversation about the latest business IT solutions can often devolve into a near-meaningless string of industry buzzwords. For businesses, that makes figuring out which IT trends to lean into challenging at best and futile at worst.
However, now and then, an IT trend comes along that lives up to the hype. An excellent example of that is hyperconvergence. It is more than just the latest cloud service buzzword. Hyperconvergence is at the center of a profound transformation in the operational mechanisms of the data centers used by cloud providers. Therefore, it is highly advisable for business decision-makers to learn more about it. To help with that, this article does a deep dive into hyperconvergence. We’ll discuss its benefits, why it is the future of data centers, and how it will help drive business innovation in the years to come.
What Is Hyperconvergence?
Back in the early 1990s, the modern data center came into existence when businesses began replacing room-sized legacy mainframes with rack-mounted, microprocessor-based servers. Not long after that, stand-alone data center operators began offering businesses the opportunity to rent space for their servers or to rent servers operated by the data center owner themselves. It was a shift that enabled the internet as we know it today.
Before long, data center operators began using virtualization technology as a means of maximizing the utility of commodity servers. That allowed them to sell the resources of each physical server in their racks to multiple customers, slicing them up into multi-tenant hosting arrangements. More recently, however, data centers are moving away from the one-server-to-one customer or one-server-to-many approach in favor of a new paradigm: hyperconvergence.
Hyperconvergence is an extension of the same kind of virtualization technology that made the last data center epoch possible. The difference is that now virtualization runs throughout every piece of hardware in the data center, turning each component into a single node in a larger computing environment. It creates the ultimate in workload flexibility for the data center operator, allowing them to scale tenant workloads up and down as needed.
For businesses, this means having access to computing power ranging from micro-scale testing server instances up to enterprise-scale server deployments supporting thousands of users at once, all at the touch of a button. In effect, hyperconvergence means that businesses never again have to worry about things like computational power constraints, storage constraints, or server deployments with risky single points of potential failure.
The Benefits of Hyperconvergence
As a concept, hyperconvergence has quite a bit going for it. For data center owners, be they individual enterprises or commercial operators, it makes operations substantially simpler. That is because it turns the data center into a single, software-defined computing system. Within it, all networking, computing, and storage hardware becomes both interchangeable and available to every tenant.
For businesses, this means a near-infinite ability to expand and contract operations on demand. It also means far less chance of any bottom-line damaging downtime. That is because hyperconvergence also allows data center operators to commission and decommission individual nodes as needed on the fly. With the right configuration approach, a data center can address a hardware failure without users experiencing much more than a performance blip if they notice anything at all.
Hyperconvergence also helps to minimize latency and performance issues. It accomplishes that by leveraging local storage inside each computing node rather than a SAN-based storage infrastructure. This makes it possible to optimize data storage to keep critical data closest to the computing hardware that needs it, all but eliminating network storage bandwidth constraints.
Perhaps best of all, hyperconvergence eliminates hardware vendor lock-in. As long as the hardware matches the architecture of the existing nodes, it will work. That is a massive advantage for both businesses operating their own data centers as well as commercial operators. Plus, in the long run, it should continue to drive hardware costs down, saving businesses a small fortune on their server needs.
Hyperconvergence in Action
The benefits detailed above are not hypothetical. Since hyperconvergence is not a new idea—it is an evolution of preexisting data center infrastructure concepts—there are already businesses reaping its rewards in the real world. Consider Italy’s Carron Group.
According to this case study, they were looking for a solution to upgrade their existing three-tier virtualized infrastructure to support a new ERP system. Their existing infrastructure was reaching end of life, and had started to run into significant performance and reliability issues. Worse still, its frequent failures would often lead to days of downtime while IT staff recovered lost data.
The solution: a new hyperconverged infrastructure, and the results were as immediate as they were transformative. Immediately, IT administration time fell by 50%. The time required to generate the company’s end-of-month financial reports dropped from weeks to a blazing-fast two days.
As for the cost, hyperconvergence cut a massive 20% off of Carron’s total cost of ownership for its infrastructure. In other words, hyperconvergence did the job faster, easier, and cheaper than any other infrastructure type could. Additionally, since the advantages translate to any type of computing workload and are not dependent on the vendor (which in the case was Dell), Carron could have benefitted just as much if they used any other hyperconvergence-oriented product line. Businesses can transition to hyperconvergence by partnering with any vendor they wish.
Why Hyperconvergence Is a Game-changer
The most important aspect of hyperconvergence, is its potential as an innovation enabler. The reasons for that are manifold. First and foremost, hyperconvergence offers true modularization of infrastructure for businesses. It means that even the smallest company can build its own bespoke infrastructure and scale it as they grow. Or, they can partner with a cloud provider that leverages hyperconvergence in its data centers and achieve the same ends. Either approach provides the computational room to grow and innovate without the need for massive upfront financial commitments.
It is also worth noting that hyperconvergence offers a ready path to the cloud for businesses with existing on-premises infrastructure. By upgrading local hardware to a hyperconverged standard, businesses can create the basis for a hybrid cloud deployment, with local resources fitting in natively with cloud-based resources. At a minimum, an on-site transition to a hyperconverged infrastructure also prepares local workloads for the cloud by default, enabling a complete migration to the cloud at a later date.
Most of all, hyperconvergence works as an innovation enabler because it knits together every type of data center computing technology into a single fabric. This means a development environment with no limits. Software businesses, for example, can use it as the ultimate technological safety net. As developmental needs change, they can simply add or remove resources as needed. That allows developers to prioritize product functionality over all else, without worrying about outgrowing infrastructure capabilities.
Other types of businesses can benefit from that trait, as well. For example, an accounting firm could upgrade its infrastructure to accommodate a surge in client demand by adding new nodes during tax season. For businesses, hyperconvergence means the ultimate in technological agility, allowing them to pivot, evolve, and grow as conditions demand—without fear of their technology falling behind their changing needs.
The Future of Data Centers
Although it may sound like hyperbole to call hyperconvergence the future of the data center, it may well be an understatement. The fact is most of the world’s largest and best-known data centers and cloud providers already rely on hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver their services. Also, more businesses are upgrading their on-site infrastructure to leverage hyperconverged hardware every year. If anything, it may be more precise to say that hyperconvergence is the future of computing infrastructure, period. It is a rare example of an IT buzzword that not only lives up to its hype but also delivers value for businesses that may not even know they are depending on it.
Making the most out of the trend of hyperconvergence means having far more in-depth knowledge than this article could ever provide. That is where the experts here at Outsource IT come in. We offer IT procurement services to help businesses to source and purchase the right hyperconverged hardware for their needs. Plus, we offer private cloud colocation for businesses looking to build an offsite hyperconverged cloud to power them into the future. Contact one of our knowledgeable account managers and ask how we can help make hyperconvergence the bedrock foundation of your business’s future success.
