Hyperconverged infrastructure can be defined as:

“A way to enable cloud-like economics and scale without compromising the performance, reliability, and availability you expect in your own data centre.”

This is according to the SimpliVity Special Edition of Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Dummies. But how did hyperconverged infrastructure come about? And what are some of its key benefits?

What is the story behind hyperconverged infrastructure?

Before delving into hyperconvergence, it is important to understand the thinking behind convergence. Essentially, it is concerned with bringing together individual storage, compute, and network switching products into a single pre-tested, pre-validated solution.

However, this is only concerned with the purchase and upgrade cycle, failing to take into account ongoing operational challenges associated with virtualisation. For example, the creation of LUNs, the acquisition of WAN optimisers, and the maintenance of third-party backup products.

This is where hyperconvergence enters the fray. Designed from the ground-up as an all-encompassing solution, hyperconverged infrastructure concentrates on the virtual machine or workload, with all elements supporting the virtual machine as the basic construct of the data centre.

What are the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure?

There are no doubts as to why hyperconvergence has become the hottest infrastructure trend in recent years, as it can afford a number of advantages, such as:

  • Data efficiency – With hyperconverged infrastructure, you can reduce storage, bandwidth, and IOPS requirements
  • Cost efficiency – This step-by-step model eliminates waste and is much more sustainable that other IT options
  • Elasticity – Regardless of your business demands, it’s easy to scale out/in resources with hyperconverged infrastructure
  • VM-centricity – The cornerstone of enterprise IT is a focus on the virtual machine or workload, with all supporting constructs revolving around individual VMs.
  • Data protection – Another key IT requirement is that data can be recovered after loss or corruption. Thankfully, hyperconverged infrastructure makes this much easier.
  • VM mobility – Enjoy greater application/workload mobility with hyperconverged infrastructure
  • High availability – As opposed to legacy systems, hyperconvergence allows for much higher levels of availability
  • Technical implementation – There is no need to maintain separate islands of resource engineers to manage each aspect of the data centre

Hyperconverged infrastructure is the culmination of a number of trends, which has resulted in an extremely valuable solution to the modern enterprise.