What is Hyper Converged Infrastructure?
Hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) is a convergence of compute and storage infrastructure that is easy to deploy and manage with a single UI.
HCI removes complex manual steps in deployment and is designed for simplicity. Because it is designed to be administered by virtualization or cloud administrators, HCI eliminates the need for team members with specialized hardware skills in storage, compute, or networking. It scales incrementally and is designed for a pay-as-you-go cost model.
Benefits of HCI
As IT teams look to move to DevOps, support new Internet of Things (IoT) and edge use cases, and leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to optimize virtually every aspect of business operations, hyper converged infrastructure simplifies delivery of services on-premises.
The benefits of HCI as an on-premises solution to meet the demands of today’s workloads are:
- Predictability. One of the biggest challenges in any data center is delivering predictable results, especially in the face of proliferating applications and workloads. Any time you have multiple applications sharing the same infrastructure, it's possible for one application to interfere with the performance of another.
- Flexibility. The relentless pace of business change means you need maximum flexibility to adapt to any workload while using existing investments.
- Simplicity. A common goal of IT organizations is to automate all routine tasks, eliminating the risk of user errors associated with manual operations.
NetApp HCI Versus Other Hyper Converged Systems
All hyper converged solutions must be easy to buy, be simple to control, and have consolidated management. All HCI must also make private cloud easy, provide a single vendor for support, provide pay-as-you-go expansion and economics, be easy to plan and scale, and respond rapidly to business demands. Different HCI vendors approach these business objectives differently.
NetApp HCI took an enterprise approach to the current HCI market by separating compute and storage in our architectures. This new architecture is what IDC calls disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure (dHCI). No data center or application requires compute and storage at the same rate or ratio. NetApp HCI provides flexibility to scale your infrastructure according to what your data center and applications require. This predictable performance is based on an HCI industry first: quality of service (QoS) that guarantees minimum performance by application. NetApp HCI integrates with hybrid cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and our proprietary Data Fabric.
Traditional HCI vendors chose to deliver a shared core architecture that virtualized the storage operating system or integrated it into the hypervisor. Running this architecture can consume up to 30% of infrastructure costs, and this approach leads to unpredictable performance at utilization rates of 70% or above. Software licenses are charged when applications only need more capacity. Traditional HCI also requires dedicated hardware and awareness of the location of customer data to ensure an optimal experience. It is simple enough for single application, remote office deployments but quickly escalates into complexity in multiapplication scenarios.
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Get ready for hybrid cloud infrastructure Take the first steps toward implementing NetApp HCI. Is your current infrastructure prepared to handle the demands of a hybrid cloud world at enterprise scale? If you have NetApp® HCI, it is. NetApp HCI helps your business move faster, consolidate more, and scale independently with consistent management between public and private clouds, while reducing costs. |
NetApp HCI allows you to: |
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Download our checklist to evaluate whether your organization is ready for NetApp HCI. Then, review the steps you can take to get a free TCO report, explore the hardware, and more. |
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