Source of the news: http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/market-reportsresearch/12-hyperconverged-infrastructure-providers-that-matter/
Forrester conducted product evaluations in May 2016 and interviewed 12 hyperconverged systems vendors and their references: Atlantis Computing, Cisco, EMC, Gridstore, HPE, Huawei, Nutanix, pivot3, Scale Computing, SimpliVity, Stratoscale, and VMware.
Hyperconvergence Is a Concept Whose Time Has Come
A flexible cloud computing model has proven central to nimble adaptation for quickly changing customer expectations. As I&O pros around the globe increasingly virtualize their infrastructure, operating ever-larger cloud-like infrastructures has gained a higher pro le. More virtualization has resulted in more complexity at a time when complexity is already excessive. In response to this growing problem, the first hyperconverged system emerged in 2011.(1) Hyperconverged platforms disrupt the traditional hardware infrastructure vendor landscape because they let customers build scalable virtualized infrastructure without requiring silo-focused expertise in areas such as storage and SAN management.
Forrester defines hyperconvergence as:
An approach to technology infrastructure that packages server, storage, and network functions into a modular unit and adds a software layer to discover, pool, and reconfigure assets across multiple units quickly and easily without the need for deep technology skills. These systems can be implemented either as software plus modular physical units or as a software overlay on top of existing infrastructure.
Legacy Hypervisor-Based Infrastructure Did Little to Hide Complexity
Legacy hypervisor-based infrastructure exposed too many underlying system details, unnecessarily adding to operational complexity. The routine task of adding capacity – particularly storage and compute capacity – became increasingly onerous, distracting I&O professionals from tasks that deliver more value to their companies’ BT agendas. Tech management professionals are demanding tighter management integration across virtualization and storage silos to boost the efficiency of their infrastructures to match customer demands.
Technology Must Obscure Complexity
to Help Protect People from Themselves
Complexity is inevitable, but it’s usually a self-inflicted issue. Infrastructure is typically designed with the best tools and design methodologies available at the time but often with unclear or missing information about future requirements. As these environments scale and change, the limitations of the underlying technology become more and more apparent, manifesting themselves as increasing complexity and instability. Complexity and instability have a tendency to become nonlinear as the number of non-isolated potential interactions between components increases. At the same time, a small minority of people who have profound technology expertise rooted in the current environment and are resistant to change sometimes complicate these legitimate aspects of complexity. The result is like a Frankenstein’s monster that turns on its creators. Even those with the deepest technical expertise will find themselves crushed under the weight of its complexity, and the business will suffer commensurately. Technology must protect us from ourselves.
Hyperconvergence Delivers on The Promise of Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS)
The next wave of integrated systems, beyond the base level of converged hardware integration, is hyperconvergence, which installs a software-defined storage layer optimized for VM-aware operation on top of an integrated hardware and system software stack.(2) The earlier generation of converged infrastructure (CI) combined resources into single physical units, which was a great first step to truly unifying infrastructure. Hyperconvergence adds more flexibility by treating the entire pool of physical units as a unified virtual entity. With minimal administrative burden, you can morph this pool into more-flexible configurations and treat the storage as native objects in the virtualization abstraction layer. A fluid resource pool is central to the whole notion of cloud computing. If you wish to develop cloud-like services atop your infrastructure, hyperconverged systems represent a very promising platform. When you’re forced to manipulate individual components, the process is complex and fragile, even when cloud software automates it. Let the infrastructure itself produce the needed capabilities.
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