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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Article | October 10, 2023

Discover the list of best hyperconverged infrastructure books and gain knowledge on the latest advancements in HCI and process design & explore areas for HCI improvements in the infrastructure domain. This comprehensive guide presents a curated selection of top books to consider for adopting Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) in IT infrastructure. Organizations increasingly recognize HCI as a transformative solution that streamlines data center management, enhances scalability, and optimizes resource utilization. To navigate this technology effectively, businesses must equip themselves with the proper knowledge and insights from authoritative sources. The carefully compiled list of books featured here offers valuable information, providing IT professionals and decision-makers with a solid foundation to make informed choices and successfully implement HCI within their IT infrastructure. 1. Hyperconverged Infrastructure Data Centers: Demystifying HCI Author: Sam Halabi Hyperconverged Infrastructure Data Centers: Demystifying HCI is a highly informative and authoritative guide that provides a clear understanding of Hyperconverged Infrastructure technology. Written for technical professionals and IT managers, the book offers a vendor-neutral perspective on HCI, covering its use cases and comparing leading hyperconvergence solutions in the market. Halabi effectively explains HCI's benefits, combining storage, computing, and networking into a single system, offering simplicity, scalability, and flexibility without sacrificing control. The book explores computing, virtualization, and software-defined storage advancements, highlighting the improvements they bring to data center designs. The author guides readers through the HCI lifecycle, including evaluation, planning, implementation, and management. The book also delves into HCI applications such as DevOps, virtual desktops, and disaster recovery, presenting a new application deployment and management model. 2. Hyperconverged Infrastructure: A Complete Guide Author: The Art of Service - Hyperconverged Infrastructure Publishing This book is a valuable resource for individuals and organizations seeking to understand and leverage the potential of hyperconverged infrastructure. This guide takes a question-based approach, empowering readers to uncover challenges and develop effective solutions. The guide provides a comprehensive self-assessment tool covering seven core HCI maturity levels. With updated case-based questions, readers can diagnose their HCI projects, initiatives, organizations, and processes based on accepted diagnostic standards and practices. It helps readers identify areas where HCI improvements can be made and provides a clear picture of the attention those areas require, enabling them to lead their organizations effectively and address what truly matters. It empowers readers to make their HCI investments work better by guiding them through asking the right questions and seeking innovative perspectives. 3. Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Practical Tools for Self-Assessment Author: Gerardus Blokdyk The book is a valuable resource for individuals in diverse business roles seeking to optimize their Hyperconverged infrastructure investments. This comprehensive guide emphasizes the integration of HCI with other business initiatives and the monitoring of HCI activities' effectiveness. The guide emphasizes the use of HCI data and information to support organizational decision-making and foster innovation. One of the strengths of this guide lies in its focus on leveraging HCI data and information for organizational decision-making and innovation. The self-assessment tool helps identify areas for improvement, with case-based questions organized into seven core areas of process design. Nevertheless, this guide equips readers with the necessary tools and insights to maximize the value of HCI investments, align with business objectives, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. 4. Hyper-converged Infrastructure Standard Requirements Author: Gerardus Blokdyk This book offers individuals various business roles considering or exploring hyper-converged infrastructure implementation. This comprehensive guide emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions and understanding the challenges and hyperconvergence solutions related to HCI. It provides a set of organized case-based questions, enabling readers to diagnose their HCI projects and identify areas for improvement. The self-assessment tool helps organizations implement evidence-based best practices and integrate the latest advancements in HCI and process design. With the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Scorecard, readers can gain a clear understanding of the areas that require attention and prioritize their efforts accordingly. The digital components accompanying the book provide additional resources to support organizations in their HCI journey. 5. The Gorilla Guide to Hyperconverged Infrastructure Implementation Strategies Author: Scott D. Lowe The Gorilla Guide to Hyperconverged Infrastructure Implementation Strategies is a book designed for strategic planners seeking innovative segmentation methods. This book offers individuals various business roles exploring HCI implementation. It starts with the architecture of hyper-converged architecture, followed by Exploring the Intersection of Software-Defined Networking and HCI. It delved into addressing the pain points and storage performance in HCI, with relevant use cases for practical examples. It covers data-center consolidation, test and development environments, and HCI economics, for its impact on the IT budget. It helps organizations implement evidence-based best practices and integrate the latest advancements in HCI and process design. 6. The 2022 Report on Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: World Market Segmentation by City Author: Prof Philip M. Parker The '2022 Report on Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: World Market Segmentation by City' is a book designed for global strategic planners seeking innovative segmentation methods. This report covers over 2,000 cities across 200 countries, providing insights into the estimated market size (latent demand) of hyper-converged infrastructure in each significant city worldwide. The report ranks these cities based on their market size relative to their respective countries, geographic regions, and global market. The sales of hyper-converged infrastructure encompass a wide range of products, including hypervisors such as VMware, KVM, and Hyper-V, used for various purposes like virtual desktop infrastructure, server virtualization, data protection, and cloud solutions. Prominent companies in the industry, including VMware, Nutanix, Maxta, and others are covered in the report. The information presented is gathered from public sources, including news, press releases, and industry players, and is reported in U.S. dollars without adjusting for inflation. 7. The 2020-2025 World Outlook for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Author: Prof Philip M. Parker The World Outlook for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure study comprehensively analyzes the global market across more than 190 countries. It offers estimates of the latent demand, or potential industry earnings (P.I.E.), for each country, expressed in millions of U.S. dollars. The report also presents the country's share as a percentage of the region and the global market, enabling readers to assess its relative position. The study generates latent demand estimates using econometric models that project economic dynamics within and between countries. While it does not delve into specific market players or product details, it takes a strategic, long-term perspective, disregarding short-term cyclical fluctuations and focusing on aggregated trends. A multi-stage methodology, often taught in graduate business courses on international strategic planning, was employed to formulate these estimates. Wrap-up The adoption of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure represents a significant opportunity for businesses to revolutionize their IT infrastructure, improve operational efficiency, and unlock new levels of agility and scalability. The books recommended in this listicle serve as indispensable resources for IT professionals and decision-makers seeking to embark on an HCI journey. By investing in the knowledge imparted by these authoritative texts, you empower yourself and your organization to leverage the full potential of HCI and stay at the forefront of technological advancements. Remember, success in adopting HCI lies not only in the technology itself but also in the understanding and expertise gained through continuous learning and exploration.

Application Infrastructure, Application Storage

Article | July 19, 2023

Flexible data access, enhanced disaster recovery, and reduced infrastructure staff burden are some of the biggest reasons businesses migrate to innovative and reliable cloud technologies. Infrastructure-as-a-service or Iaas, is one such cloud computing model that has simplified the lives of enterprises and developers by reducing their infrastructure burden. Iaas gives you access to servers, networking, storage, and virtualization features. IaaS is fast becoming one of the biggest trends in cloud computing. According to Technavio's latest report, the IaaS market projects a growth of USD 141.77 billion, registering a CAGR of 28.2% from 2021 to 2026. “So many systems end up as a big dreaded ball of mud (which is totally preventable) when designing an enforceable architecture model.” Alexander von Zitzewitz, CEO, hello2morrow Inc. But, how can IaaS technology help you grow and advance your business? Here are some key advantages of switching to IaaS: Better Performance One of the more well-known benefits of IaaS is achieving a higher performance level from your infrastructure. Rather than worrying about the latest hardware for your infrastructure, with IaaS in place, your in-house IT team will be able to focus more on working on your business goals and objectives through technology. Because the SLA (Service Level Agreement) with your IaaS cloud service provider can ensure that you are getting the best performance from your cloud provider's infrastructure. An SLA will ensure that your cloud provider is accountable for continuous upgrades and the best possible service for your business. Decreased CapEx With IaaS technology, you can choose the IaaS cloud service provider of your choice. Typically, a cloud provider has a more reliable, robust, and redundant infrastructure setup than what would be feasible and financially realistic in an office environment. This means you can save on maintenance, purchase, and operating hardware-related business expenditures. Additionally, it also decreases your overall IT-related capital expenditure (CapEx). Increased Flexibility IaaS increases your scalability and flexibility exponentially. Your business can scale up and down as needed and on-demand. For example, say your business is hosting a short-term campaign to drive more traffic to your website. IaaS will automatically provision resources to ensure your business infrastructure is well equipped to handle the sudden incoming traffic boost. Scale- Up Your Business Additionally, IaaS gives your growing business the flexibility it needs from its IT infrastructure. For example, if you’re considering opening a new office in a different location, you don’t need to spend extra on new hardware; instead, you can directly connect to your infrastructure virtually. This means you don’t need to invest in additional infrastructure for business expansion continually. Managed-Task Virtualization As IaaS supports the virtualization of management tasks, your IT is free to concentrate on other, more thought-intensive work. This will not only drive more efficiency but also help boost ROI. Disaster Recovery During disasters like an earthquake or floods, IaaS ensures smooth business operations. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) stores and replicates data in multiple data centers in different geographical locations. So even if a disaster or mishap causes significant damage to the data center, your IaaS providers can quickly restore the data from another data center. Conclusion IaaS allows your businesses to utilize the cloud to achieve your IT goals. It is flexible, scalable, reliable, cost-effective and provides seamless access to maximize business continuity. Therefore, you should choose a reliable IaaS cloud provider who can deliver a variety of cloud infrastructure solutions.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Windows Systems and Network

Article | July 11, 2023

The rollout of 5G networks coupled with edge compute introduces new security concerns for both the network and the enterprise. Security at the edge presents a unique set of security challenges that differ from those faced by traditional data centers. Today new concerns emerge from the combination of distributed architectures and a disaggregated network, creating new challenges for service providers. Many mission critical applications enabled by 5G connectivity, such as smart factories, are better off hosted at the edge because it's more economical and delivers better Quality of Service (QoS). However, applications must also be secured; communication service providers need to ensure that applications operate in an environment that is both safe and provides isolation. This means that secure designs and protocols are in place to pre-empt threats, avoid incidents and minimize response time when incidents do occur. As enterprises adopt private 5G networks to drive their Industry 4.0 strategies, these new enterprise 5G trends demand a new approach to security. Companies must find ways to reduce their exposure to cyberattacks that could potentially disrupt mission critical services, compromise industrial assets and threaten the safety of their workforce. Cybersecurity readiness is essential to ensure private network investments are not devalued. The 5G network architecture, particularly at the edge, introduces new levels of service decomposition now evolving beyond the virtual machine and into the space of orchestrated containers. Such disaggregation requires the operation of a layered technology stack, from the physical infrastructure to resource abstraction, container enablement and orchestration, all of which present attack surfaces which require addressing from a security perspective. So how can CSPs protect their network and services from complex and rapidly growing threats? Addressing vulnerability points of the network layer by layer As networks grow and the number of connected nodes at the edge multiply, so do the vulnerability points. The distributed nature of the 5G edge increases vulnerability threats, just by having network infrastructure scattered across tens of thousands of sites. The arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) further complicates the picture: with a greater number of connected and mobile devices, potentially creating new network bridging connection points, questions around network security have become more relevant. As the integrity of the physical site cannot be guaranteed in the same way as a supervised data center, additional security measures need to be taken to protect the infrastructure. Transport and application control layers also need to be secured, to enable forms of "isolation" preventing a breach from propagating to other layers and components. Each layer requires specific security measures to ensure overall network security: use of Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) chipsets on motherboards, UEFI Secure OS boot process, secure connections in the control plane and more. These measures all contribute to and are integral part of an end-to-end network security design and strategy. Open RAN for a more secure solution The latest developments in open RAN and the collaborative standards-setting process related to open interfaces and supply chain diversification are enhancing the security of 5G networks. This is happening for two reasons. First, traditional networks are built using vendor proprietary technology – a limited number of vendors dominate the telco equipment market and create vendor lock-in for service providers that forces them to also rely on vendors' proprietary security solutions. This in turn prevents the adoption of "best-of-breed" solutions and slows innovation and speed of response, potentially amplifying the impact of a security breach. Second, open RAN standardization initiatives employ a set of open-source standards-based components. This has a positive effect on security as the design embedded in components is openly visible and understood; vendors can then contribute to such open-source projects where tighter security requirements need to be addressed. Aside from the inherent security of the open-source components, open RAN defines a number of open interfaces which can be individually assessed in their security aspects. The openness intrinsically present in open RAN means that service components can be seamlessly upgraded or swapped to facilitate the introduction of more stringent security characteristics, or they can simultaneously swiftly address identified vulnerabilities. Securing network components with AI Monitoring the status of myriad network components, particularly spotting a security attack taking place among a multitude of cooperating application functions, requires resources that transcend the capabilities of a finite team of human operators. This is where advances in AI technology can help to augment the abilities of operations teams. AI massively scales the ability to monitor any number of KPIs, learn their characteristic behavior and identify anomalies – this makes it the ideal companion in the secure operation of the 5G edge. The self-learning aspect of AI supports not just the identification of known incident patterns but also the ability to learn about new, unknown and unanticipated threats. Security by design Security needs to be integral to the design of the network architecture and its services. The adoption of open standards caters to the definition of security best practices in both the design and operation of the new 5G network edge. The analytics capabilities embedded in edge hyperconverged infrastructure components provide the platform on which to build an effective monitoring and troubleshooting toolkit, ensuring the secure operation of the intelligent edge.

Article | May 4, 2020

Enterprises running hypervisors on hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) systems typically have backup options available to them that are not available to those running on generic hardware. Such customers may also have additional backup challenges depending on the HCI vendor and hypervisor they have chosen. Let’s take a look.