-> Planning for a refresh of your hardware landscape and you have a large number of VMs (in 100s) on your aged hardware and you also need to refresh your storage (SAN).
-> Planning on a new project deployment in a remote location with the minimum rack space that will require optimization of space and effort.
- High Availability of Application and Data with Zero Downtime ensuring Business Continuity.
- Followed by Consolidation and removing the clutter to manage and get the flexibility to scale and serve the business with the growing demand of Storage and Servers.
Infrastructure Integration Analyst at a government with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Feb 24, 2022
We have decided to deploy Cisco Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for a few business justifications and technical justifications.
Business justifications:
- Continuous improvements: performance, reliability, and scalability from business applications' requirements of the performance.
- Migrate from disaster avoidance strategy from EMC storage to Cisco Stretch storage cluster.
- Continue to improve on disaster avoidance and redundancy.
Technical justifications:
- Software-Defined network, storage, and computing with UCS Cisco Hyper-Converged Infrastructure has been proven in our test environment with highly reliable performance, manageability, scalability, and ease of use.
The key reason is when you want zero downtime and consolidation. It helps you reduce the cost of space, power and cooling.
Secondly, If your existing hardware is going to the end of life, it helps you to remove the clutter and complexity while you get redundant and make it easy to manage your infrastructure.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) can be a considerable CAPEX and companies must decide whether it's worth the spend based on their ability to utilize the value gained and the importance of the IT Systems to their operations.
HCI overs the following major benefits over traditional SAN and Server or cluster environments:
- Enterprise scaling with zero loss of performance based on resources.
- True onsite HA with N+1 redundancy for virtual machines (a copy of each VM is always kept available for instant restoration.
- Ability to pool resources into a single logical unit and carve out these resources to best suit business needs.
- Enterprise-grade reliability for critical applications with higher rates of system performance and availability.
-Ease of management of infrastructure since the system appears and is managed as a single unit.
- improved fault tolerance across the physical hardware pool.
If these benefits are critical to your organization, and your company has the need for an enterprise-grade system, then it may be a good time to consider moving to HCI rather than investing in traditional SAN and Server.
I think that the major argument of vendors for HCI, the management simplicity, is a big lie.
Typically, companies don´t have dedicated teams to every infrastructure component - unless you are a giant enterprise or a tech. company.
The great number of things that must be integrated to make HCI work fine cause a lot of administrative effort to maintain.
Data security and availability is another question to think about: yes, you can build RAID, replication and so on. But the hardware that your data resides in will frequently fail, so, be prepared to RAID rebuild´s and the constant correlated risk´s.
The best on HCI is the cost. I think that it can be the right choice for non-critical ( like VDI) or high parallelized environments, where workload are running in a distributed way.
If you have the legacy and resource-hungry applications you go best with traditional infra.
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) integrates compute, storage, and networking into a single unified system, simplifying data center operations and management. It enhances agility, scalability, and lowers costs by using a software-centric architecture.HCI solutions offer a dynamic approach to IT infrastructure by combining essential components into a simplified platform. This approach reduces complexity, enhances system efficiency, and supports seamless scalability. Organizations can spend...
The key aspects for choosing HCI over traditional infrastructure are:
- Highly virtualized environments: more than 50 or 100 VMs
- Management simplicity: Software-defined storage and networking simplifies management.
- Easily implemented data protection strategies.
- Ease of horizontal and vertical growth.
- Operational flexibility, creation and administration of VM very easy.
- Ease of viewing and consolidation of VM
- Optimization of resources, computing capacities and memory are not wasted.
I would consider the following points:
-> Planning for a refresh of your hardware landscape and you have a large number of VMs (in 100s) on your aged hardware and you also need to refresh your storage (SAN).
-> Planning on a new project deployment in a remote location with the minimum rack space that will require optimization of space and effort.
The key reasons for HCI are:
- High Availability of Application and Data with Zero Downtime ensuring Business Continuity.
- Followed by Consolidation and removing the clutter to manage and get the flexibility to scale and serve the business with the growing demand of Storage and Servers.
- Lastly, reducing TCO.
@SANJAY HASIJA thanks for your in-detail answer!
We have decided to deploy Cisco Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for a few business justifications and technical justifications.
Business justifications:
- Continuous improvements: performance, reliability, and scalability from business applications' requirements of the performance.
- Migrate from disaster avoidance strategy from EMC storage to Cisco Stretch storage cluster.
- Continue to improve on disaster avoidance and redundancy.
Technical justifications:
- Software-Defined network, storage, and computing with UCS Cisco Hyper-Converged Infrastructure has been proven in our test environment with highly reliable performance, manageability, scalability, and ease of use.
- Monitoring
- Centralization
- Ease of maintenance
The key reason is when you want zero downtime and consolidation. It helps you reduce the cost of space, power and cooling.
Secondly, If your existing hardware is going to the end of life, it helps you to remove the clutter and complexity while you get redundant and make it easy to manage your infrastructure.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) can be a considerable CAPEX and companies must decide whether it's worth the spend based on their ability to utilize the value gained and the importance of the IT Systems to their operations.
HCI overs the following major benefits over traditional SAN and Server or cluster environments:
- Enterprise scaling with zero loss of performance based on resources.
- True onsite HA with N+1 redundancy for virtual machines (a copy of each VM is always kept available for instant restoration.
- Ability to pool resources into a single logical unit and carve out these resources to best suit business needs.
- Enterprise-grade reliability for critical applications with higher rates of system performance and availability.
-Ease of management of infrastructure since the system appears and is managed as a single unit.
- improved fault tolerance across the physical hardware pool.
If these benefits are critical to your organization, and your company has the need for an enterprise-grade system, then it may be a good time to consider moving to HCI rather than investing in traditional SAN and Server.
I think that the major argument of vendors for HCI, the management simplicity, is a big lie.
Typically, companies don´t have dedicated teams to every infrastructure component - unless you are a giant enterprise or a tech. company.
The great number of things that must be integrated to make HCI work fine cause a lot of administrative effort to maintain.
Data security and availability is another question to think about: yes, you can build RAID, replication and so on. But the hardware that your data resides in will frequently fail, so, be prepared to RAID rebuild´s and the constant correlated risk´s.
The best on HCI is the cost. I think that it can be the right choice for non-critical ( like VDI) or high parallelized environments, where workload are running in a distributed way.
If you have the legacy and resource-hungry applications you go best with traditional infra.