Hyper-converged infrastructure

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Written By

ERIC RYDZKOWSKI

DEMYSTIFYINGHYPER-CONVERGED

INFRASTRUCTURE

INVESTIGATING THE PROS AND CONS OF HCI FOR CANADIAN SMBS

VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become the standard. As awareness around its benefi ts has grown, visualization has become a go-to for organizations seeking reduced power consumption, high-availability, more streamlined IT deployment and support for rapid change.

Still, even in virtualized environments, IT infrastructures

exist in fi gurative silos, with different infrastructure

elements of network, storage, compute, software operating

on different systems (often with different experts). But

for many organizations that division is disappearing.

Large cloud providers, such as Amazon or Google, have

developed an infrastructure model to extend the benefi ts

of virtualization to meet their exponentially expanding

IT infrastructure needs, dubbed hyper-converged

infrastructure (HCI).

A great deal of confusion still exists around converged

infrastructures, their benefi ts and challenges, and what

businesses and environments for which they are well

suited. This whitepaper looks at HCI and what small and

mid-sized businesses must consider in evaluating such

solutions.

PERSONALIZED IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS

VIRTUALIZED VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTSVIRTUALIZED VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become VIRTUALIZED have increasingly become VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTSVIRTUALIZED VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS

ENVIRONMENTSVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS

ENVIRONMENTSVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become

ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS

ENVIRONMENTSVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTSthe standard. As awareness around its benefi ts has grown, visualization has ENVIRONMENTSthe standard. As awareness around its benefi ts has grown, visualization has become a go-to for organizations seeking reduced power consumption, ENVIRONMENTSbecome a go-to for organizations seeking reduced power consumption, high-availability, more streamlined IT deployment and support for rapid change.ENVIRONMENTShigh-availability, more streamlined IT deployment and support for rapid change.

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LEGACYINFRASTRUCTURE

Many current or “legacy infrastructures” have computers

as a distinct group of servers that connect to an external

set of Ethernet switches for network connectivity and

also connect to fi bre channel switches for access to

SAN storage. This is a proven design, but in some cases

this architecture does not scale well for a dynamic

organization requiring rapid growth.

Legacy Infrastructures are very open in nature as it is

quite common to have servers from one manufacturer,

fi ber channel switches from another manufacturer and

a SAN from yet another manufacturer. This “best of

breed” model has served us well for many years as open

compute, storage and network standards allow all the

discrete components to work together quite seamlessly.

If you don’t like your SAN vendor, it is quite easy to

purchase and migrate over to a different SAN product

with little or no disruption to the business.


Ethernet

Servers

Fibre Channel

Storage

LEGACYLEGACYLEGACYLEGACY

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CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

A converged infrastructure is well suited to cloud

environments since they pool resources, automate

provisioning and allow for rapid and dynamic scaling.

The market for converged infrastructure is growing as

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service

(PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud-based

models become more popularly embraced.

Forecasts estimate the converged infrastructure market

will see a compound annual growth of 24.1 percent in

the next several years, growing from $11.53 billion in

2014 to $33.89 in 2019.

Virtually all major infrastructure companies are

looking at and developing solutions for the converged

infrastructure space. Open source analyst fi rm Wikibon

has estimated that by 2017 nearly two-thirds of all

infrastructures that supports enterprise applications will

be packaged as converged solutions.


Embedded Ethernet Server Blades

Embedded Fibre Channel

Embedded Network

Storage

A converged infrastructure is one in which the multiple IT

infrastructure components—server, storage and networking—

are combined into a single unifi ed computing package. These

are often called blade centres or unifi ed computing. This

approach is still hardware-based and each function of the server

can, if required, be used for its particular purpose. That is, a

particular server can be separated and used to run a particular

discrete function or isolated application.

CONVERGEDCONVERGED CONVERGEDCONVERGED

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HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

Hyper-converged infrastructure takes the decoupling

of function and hardware even further by delivering

the function using software. In this software-defi ned

approach all infrastructure components run across a

mesh or fabric of low-cost hardware components

turning them into a single pool from which resources

can be drawn.

For example, in solutions from HCI vendor Nutanix, the

storage logic controller normally found in SAN hardware

is treated as a service found on every virtual machine

(VM) and software-defi ned storage takes all the local

clusters and confi gures them into a single pool. For

performance, data is dynamically moved to the local

node on which it is being used, and replicated on other

nodes in the cluster for resilience.


Servers

Single Solid State Drive for performance of local VM’s

Remaining Magnetic Drives are part of a large drive pool shared among all servers.

Standard low cost server

1Converged Infrastructure Market by Components (Server, Networking, Storage, Infrastructure Software, Support Infrastructure), Services ( Installation & Integration, Consulting & Professional, Maintenance & Support), Architecture Type, and End Users (Enterprises, Cloud Service Providers, Collocation Service Providers) - Worldwide Forecasts & Analysis (2014 - 2019), marketsandmarkets.com, August 2014.

HYPER-CONVERGEDHYPER-CONVERGED CONVERGEDHYPER-CONVERGED

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In short: hyper-converged is exciting, up-and-coming technology with some exciting potential.

However, we have found through experience with medium-sized business customers that hyper-converged systems are likely to create some significant challenges for SMBs.

Typically, each node is configured with a single Solid

State Drive (SSD) so that frequently accessed data

is served-up lightning fast for VM’s on that physical

host. If you take a host offline (or it fails), the VM’s

will auto-migrate to other hosts in the farm but the

process of moving the data local and caching on

local SSD will start over so performance will suffer

until things stabilize.

Also increasing in popularity, the HCI market is

currently growing at 116 percent, and is expected to

reach $800 million by the end of 2015 and to pass

$1.5 billion worldwide in 2016, according to IDC.

At their simplest, converged infrastructure is based

on blocks of hardware and hyper-converged is

software-defined. But this distinction creates

significant concerns that SMBs must consider.


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ALL FOR ONE: THE BENEFITSOF HCI

BENEFITSBENEFITSALL FOR ONE: BENEFITSALL FOR ONE:

For the right business, with specifi c needs, HCI provides

some exceptional benefi ts, in particular:

• Simplicity in management: One hardware system

can result in simplifi ed management, at least from a

hardware perspective. Hyper-converged infrastructure

centralizes management and offers a single console

to manage compute, storage and network. This may

not, however, ultimately result in an easier-to-manage

infrastructure as we will look at later.

• Economics: Because infrastructure elements are

distributed across a mesh of lower-cost servers,

HCI provides a granular and linear, pay-as-you-grow

economic model for IT investment. Need to scale up,

simply add a node to the HCI fabric where it is joined

into the “collective.”

• Distributed architecture: The mesh-like approach

taken by an HCI solution is fault-tolerant. Since

functions aren’t tied to one particular server, multiple

failures can occur simultaneously and the system

“heals itself” by simply using the nodes remaining.

• Storage consumption: Load balancing between nodes

and capacity savings mechanisms in HCI systems reduce

storage consumption. In addition, with systems like

Maxta’s VM-centric HCI solutions, storage administration

demands are reduced, since VMs are being managed

rather than storage.

• Replication & disaster recovery: In addition to

the benefi ts of the distributed architecture already

managed, many HCI solutions have integrated

replication and disaster recovery technologies built in to

the underlying software.

• Smooth and non-disruptive upgrades: In a traditional

IT infrastructure a mismatch can occur between

various systems as they age and, say, compute or

storage functions become individually upgraded. This

can be a particularly prominent problem in SMBs with

high capital costs. With HCI the entire stack becomes

upgraded by adding new nodes and removing old low-

performance nodes in a non-disruptive and (again)

granular way.


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HCI CHALLENGES FOR SMBS

CHALLENGESCHALLENGESHCI CHALLENGES CHALLENGESHCI CHALLENGES

Hyper-converged infrastructure operates a little like the

Borg on TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, assimilating

all functions under one great big infrastructure mesh. While

that may seem like a great idea, SMBs should consider the

effect such a collective would have on security, staffi ng

and scalability in their specifi c environments.

These are no small issues that you would need to

contend with in an HCI environment. These are further

complicated by changes between what national markets

consider “small and mid-sized.” For example, while

certain aspects of HCI might be ideal for a U.S. “small

business,” it is often referring to a much larger company

than found in the Canadian market.

• Security and compliance: Security is always only as

strong as its weakest link, but consider the effect of

all data, storage, compute, system and networking

functions existing on the same hardware and

distributed across nodes of a hardware fabric. What

happens when one of those functions is compromised,

or one of those nodes?

• In addition, regulatory compliance often requires

a fi rewall or direct separation between particularly

sensitive information—for example, payment card

information in PCI—and other data. How is such a barrier

put in place across such a distributed infrastructure?

While not impossible, it is certainly more diffi cult to

achieve.

• Staffi ng challenges: Staffi ng is almost always a

challenge for Canadian SMBs, but it is one that is only

becoming more diffi cult in the years to come. A recent

report from the Information and Communications

Technology Council (ICTC) suggests the expected

growth of smart and hyper-connected marketplace

mean that cumulative hiring requirements in Canada

for ICT Talent are expected to be over 182,000 by

2019. According to the report, 31 percent of surveyed


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employers in Canada already have difficulty or delays

in filling ICT positions due to a lack of suitable talent.

• In traditional infrastructures different experts often

handle different functions, with network administrators

handling the network, or storage experts dealing

with storage solutions. An HCI environment requires

managers with some degree of expertise of all

elements, exacerbating the challenge of finding the

talent needed.

• Scalability: While HCI provides benefits around

scalability, allowing it to be granular and more

dynamic, it also creates challenges around scaling

any one infrastructure component independently.

HCI scales in a linear way, making it ideal for large

scale organizations with huge growth needs across

the board, but inefficient for a smaller organization

that perhaps need to ramp up a great deal of storage

without adding compute performance.

• Although some HCI vendors offer, for example, storage-

only nodes so scaling can occur independent, they are

limited in number making it still more of a challenge to

scale storage independent of compute than a traditional

environment.

• Since control planes and data are converged, mixed

together as VMs and VM data storage, scaling one

means automatically scaling the other. For most SMBs

if performance degrades you upgrade only the node on

which the control plane is running, for example; this is

impossible in an HCI environment.

• Lock-in: Vendor lock-in must also be considered.

To control costs and maintain flexibility, you may

want to be able to select server and storage vendors

independently. Not possible, of course, in a HCI

environment. You become locked into one manufacturer

for your entire infrastructure, limiting flexibility, and you

become married to their support and SLAs.


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A hyper-converged infrastructure certainly makes a great

deal of sense for a number of verticals and businesses,

especially those with extreme needs to grow and scale on a

dime. That’s why companies like Google and Amazon have

developed and used such technologies for years, so they can

scale their infrastructure quickly with inexpensive hardware.

For companies with a linear growth pattern, where each

technology consumer would have a reasonably similar

growth across the organization (or its customers in the case

of a cloud provider) HCI is a perfect solution. For others,

traditional compute and storage infrastructures absolutely

will still have their place when aggressive and massive (and,

again, linear) scaling is not a requirement.

Those outside of the sweet spot of service providers or up-

and-coming industries experiencing explosive, extensive and

rapid IT resource growth will want to consider the impact of

HCI on their environment very closely and may want to wait

until solutions to the challenges discussed have been better

developed.


MAKING SMART DECISIONSIDEAL FOR SOME, BUT…

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ABOUT LANWORKSFor over 25 years, Lanworks has been committed to delivering

the best IT solutions to businesses, by investing in partnerships

with clients, building relationships with vendors and distributors,

expertise in its service portfolio—Life Cycle Management,

Security, IP Communications, Advanced Infrastructure and

Collaboration—Lanworks is positioned to assist its clients

through the entire cycle, from early stages of evaluating IT

solutions to post-implementation support.

REFERENCES

1 Technavio, “Global Disaster Recovery Services Market 2015-2019”, December 24, 2014.

2 MarketsandMarkets, “DR as a Service Market [RaaS; Cloud DR; Disaster Recovery

as a Service; Business Continuity as a Service] - Worldwide Forecasts and Analysis

(2013 - 2018)”, March 2013.

3 Aspect Software and The Center for Generational Kinetics, “The Aspect Consumer

Experience Index: Millennial Research on Customer Service Expectations”, April 2015.

4 Bret Longlois, Catalyst Canada, “With Growth Comes Changes:

The Evolving Canadian Mobile Landscape”, March 2015

5 Leon Spencer, “16 million mobile devices hit by malware in 2014:

Alcatel-Lucent”, ZDNet, February 13, 2015.

6 Panda Security, “PandaLabs Quarterly Report, Q2 2014”

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T. 905.212.1555F. 905.212.1560

5155 SPECTRUM WAY . UNIT #11MISSISSAUGA . ON . L4W 5A1 . CANADA

ABOUT LANWORKSFor over 25 years, Lanworks has been committed to delivering

the best IT solutions to businesses, by investing in partnerships

with clients, building relationships with vendors and distributors,

and truly valuing our employees. Through the fi ve pillars of

expertise in its service portfolio—Life Cycle Management,

Security, IP Communications, Advanced Infrastructure and

Collaboration—Lanworks is positioned to assist its clients

through the entire cycle, from early stages of evaluating IT

solutions to post-implementation support.

Hyper-converged infrastructure

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