Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

When making the decision on what is the best solution for your infrastructure, there are a few popular options available. Options include Converged, Hyperconverged, and Disaggregated Hyperconverged. Depending on the size and complexity of your environment, this will impact which infrastructure you may choose.

Choosing between the different available architectures means having a complex understanding of both the current deployments in your data center and the scaling factors impacting your organization specifically.

 

Converged Infrastructure

IT Sprawl is still a very real issue for data centers. It leads to increased costs, reduced efficiency, and less flexibility. A converged infrastructure (CI) helps with this by creating a virtualized resource hub. It increases overall efficiencies across the data center using a single integrated IT management system.

A converged infrastructure (CI) aims to optimize by grouping multiple components into a single system. Servers, networks, and storage are placed on a single rack. Replacing the old silos of hardware, convergence allows IT to become more efficient by sharing resources and simplifying system management. This efficiency helps keep costs down and systems running smoothly. On the flip side, it is expensive and not the most flexible in scaling.

While converged infrastructure is effective in small-scale environments, most mid-market and enterprise organizations are limited by this architecture. Its hardware is proprietary in nature and it ineffectively distributes resources at scale.

 

Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) was designed to fix the scalability issue, and it certainly improved things. Designed as a building-block approach, HCI allows IT departments to add in the nodes (i.e., servers, storage, or computing) as needed. It continues to simplify management by placing all controls under a single user interface.

Hyperconverged infrastructure, by leveraging commodity products across the board, significantly disrupted the financial dynamics. It was radically less expensive, at least initially than converged infrastructure while still providing most of the benefits.

Most organizations today use either a traditional CI or HCI Deployment. There are benefits and advantages to both.

While HCI has many benefits, there are some significant disadvantages.  For quickly growing businesses that need an easy-to-manage architecture that embeds as many elements of modern-day computing – like disaster recovery, security, and cloud, this may not be the best solution. Hyperconverged solutions have use cases where they do not fit. This has caused problems for customers who disrupted operations by not realizing the impact some workloads would have.

While more scalable than CI, HCI still requires the interdependent growth of storage and servers. That’s a challenge with the types of workloads companies use today.

It’s hard to argue with the manageability and scalability advantages of traditional HCI platforms. IDC predicts that the HCI market revenue will grow at a CAGR of 25.2% to crest $11.4 billion in 2022. As HCI has matured, enterprises have been looking to use it to host a broader set of workloads.

There are still workloads whose performance, availability, and/or capacity demands encourage the use of an architecture that allows IT managers to scale compute and storage resources independently. A storage solution that is better for workloads whose growth is very dynamic and unpredictable.

 

Disaggregated HyperConverged (dHCI)

Enter in the latest solution, Disaggregated Hyperconverged infrastructure. Disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure (dHCI) combines the simplicity of CI and the speed of HCI to create a more resilient, evolved data center architecture. There are numerous benefits to dHCI.  The biggest value proposition most attractive to users today is disaster recovery as a service or DRaaS.

While not every workflow can run on a hyperconverged infrastructure, they can on a dHCI. That’s part of what makes it appealing. It doesn’t come with the restrictions of its predecessors. Ultimately, disaggregated HCI leverages similar components to converged infrastructure but leverages modern infrastructure automation techniques to enable automated, wizard-based deployment and simple, unified management at similar costs to HCI.

With dHCI, IT teams are able to focus on support and service delivery while Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes care of infrastructure management. The rise in size and complexity of data centers means that such an intelligent solution will help firms get maximum Returns on Investment (RoI) in IT equipment.

dHCI is in demand for IT managers who want the simplicity of HCI and the flexibility of converged. dHCI is simple to deploy, manage, scale and support. It is software-defined so compute and storage are condensed and managed through vCenter with full-stack intelligence from storage to VMs and policy-based automation for virtual environments are integrated throughout.

 

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI pulls together the best elements of each type of infrastructure. Combining the simplicity of HCI management with the reliability, familiarity, and flexibility of scale of our beloved 3-tier architecture. It is essentially high-performance HPE Nimble Storage, FlexFabric SAN switches and Proliant servers converged together into a stack. Simple deployment, operation, and day-to-day management tasks have been hugely simplified with this solution.

 

 

The out-of-box experience requires very little technical experience to use and deploy the stack. Once up and running, day-to-day tasks, such as adding more hosts or provisioning more storage, are simple “one-click” processes that are simple and take up very little technician time. Storage, compute and networking can be scaled independently of each other. This further reduces the requirement for VMware/ Hyper-V licensing at scale. It reduces the costs as there isn’t a need to scale out all the components when you simply need more storage or compute.

The whole stack plugs directly into the HPE Infosight portal and support model. It automates simple support tasks so that 1st and 2nd line support are no longer needed to triage issues. dHCI plugs into this to bring this first-class support and analytics to VMware, Proliant, and FlexFabric as well as the Nimble Storage platform. With dHCI, it’s now possible to deploy an entire virtualization stack and have it monitored and supported 24/7/365 by skilled HPE engineers.

Want to learn more about these infrastructure solutions and discover which one is a good fit for your organization, request a consultation today with Zunesis.

 

 

 

 

 

If I start this blog with the words “back-up,” I’ve already lost you. Talking BC/DR to customers puts them to sleep faster than a box of red wine and a turkey dinner.
But, if I talk about availability, risk management, compliance, and ensuring that your CEO’s fat-fingered deletes are reversible, well, that gets attention.
One of my favorite products on the market is Zerto. Zerto provides enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) solutions for virtualized infrastructure and cloud. They won Best of Show at VMworld 2011, as well as 2011, 2012, and 2013 Product of the Year Gold Awards. It’s the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications.
With Zerto you can sequentially and automatically fail over and back the VMs that comprise your critical applications.
With RPOs of seconds and RTOs consistently less than five minutes, you don’t have to worry about any downtime.
They are hypervisor and hardware agnostic. Vsphere 5.0 to Vshpere 6.0 and back to Hyper-V. 3Par to Zadara to Nimble, etc.
With non-disruptive testing, you can fail over and back on a live environment with no  impact to production. Best of all, Zerto can run the DR test automatically, generate a report of the execution, and deliver it directly to risk management.
That last point gets lost. Let me repeat it. DR testing is non-disruptive.
There’s nothing else like it. Do yourself a favor and check out unbiased reviews at Spiceworks. 5 stars out of 7 reviews. To quote one of them, “Zerto is….dare I say, life changing.”
At Zunesis we also use Zerto for data center migrations. Zerto even lets you try the product for free. It’s an awesome piece of software, and I really encourage you to take a look.

Insight Remote Support: Reducing Risk and Downtime

As a solution provider, a common refrain from clients and prospects is that, “a server is a server.” They simply don’t see the rationale in paying more for a brand-name server, such as an HP ProLiant, vs. a “white-box” server. Through learning about what IT professionals are looking for and what their challenges are, we find that the following are core concerns:

• Keep the systems up and running
• Maintain infrastructure while controlling costs
• Increase staff productivity
• Prevent system downtime
• Better control of assets

While “white-box” and similar low-cost/low-value server manufactures can provide a quick fix to providing clients with needed CPU and memory horsepower, often times there is little additional value provided by these low-value solutions to support the above concerns.
I want to share with you just one of many HP ProLiant server innovations that is provided with all server orders at no additional cost: HP Insight Remote Support. HP Insight Remote Support is provided with any HP ProLiant Server (along with HP Storage and Networking products) that is either under at least the base warranty period or is part of a Care Pack or HP support contract. Insight Remote Support includes:

• Remote monitoring 24×7 and anytime/anywhere support access via HP Insight Online – gaining you better control
• Automatic notification with proactive advisories on potential hardware problems before they occur – allowing you to do more with less
• Fast and accurate problem resolution with HP Phone Home support; problem resolution for serious issues can initiate without customer intervention – you stay up and running

HP research has shown that utilizing this NO COST feature included with every HP ProLiant server sold results in up to 66% faster problem resolution and an up to 95% “first time fix” rate, enabling you to focus on your business needs and spend less time on support calls or escorting repair technicians back and forth to your data center time and again.
Additionally, you might ask, how does an HP Solution Provider such as Zunesis potentially add even more value to this feature set? HP has provided the OPTION for a customer to provide customer-determined information to their partner, such as:

• Opt to send Zunesis your configuration reports, which gives you the opportunity to have Zunesis identify configuration issues, performance bottlenecks, and for us to have a greater understanding of your server configurations.
• Choose to allow Zunesis to view your HP infrastructure from anywhere, anytime, with HP Insight Online, again to partner with your solution provider to help proactively plan and grow your environment together.

Note: Insight Remote Support does not require use of HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) in most environments. We do recommend considering Zunesis Professional Services to assist with deployment of HP SIM if that level of granularity is desired, but the Insight Remote Support product stands alone and is an input into the SIM/OneView environment if you have already made the time investment to deploy those tools.
Ready to learn more?

– Contact your Zunesis Account Manager and/or Solution Engineer!