Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a combination of servers and storage into a distributed infrastructure platform with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure consisting of separate servers, storage networks, and storage arrays.Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a paradigm shift in data center technologies that aims to:
- Reduce infrastructure complexity
- Enhance scalability
- Enable a truly software-defined IT infrastructure environment
Organisations using on-premise infrastructure struggle to optimize data center capacity and performance, especially when traditional virtualization mechanisms lead to unmanageable, complex, and under-optimized resource islands.Complex and expensive legacy infrastructure is replaced by a distributed platform running on industry-standard commodity servers that enables enterprises to size their workloads precisely and to scale flexibly as needed.
Each server, also known as a node, includes x86 processors with SSDs and HDDs. Software running on each node distributes all operating functions across the cluster for superior performance and resilience.Hardware platform configurations are available to fit any workload by independently scaling the various resources (CPU, RAM, and storage) and can be provisioned with or without GPU for graphics acceleration. All nodes include flash to optimize storage performance, and all-flash nodes are available to deliver maximum I/O throughput with minimum latency for all enterprise applications.
In addition to the distributed storage and compute platform, HCI solutions also include a management pane to enable you to easily administer HCI resources from a single interface. This eliminates the need for separate management solutions for servers, storage, storage networks, and virtualization.
In the past, HCI started with use cases like VDI and ROBO (remote or branch office). That dynamic has rapidly changed as more and more users of HCI solutions have made their systems available with more and more production and datacenter workloads, even as they prepare their resources for the future.
Some prime examples of what apps run on HCI:
Databases: Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, and many others
Business critical applications: Virtualized server applications like Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP Business Suite, Microsoft Dynamics, Epic, JD Edwards etc Big data: Splunk, MongoDB, Elastic, Hadoop etc
Cloud native: Build and deploy cloud native applications with Kubernetes, Docker, Puppet, Chef etc
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI): Citrix, VMware Horizon etc
Remote office and branch office (ROBO): Print and file servers, office services, custom applications etc