Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | October 3, 2023
In my last blog in this series, we looked at the present state of 5G. Although it’s still early and it’s impossible to fully comprehend the potential impact of 5G use cases that haven’t been built yet, opportunities to monetize 5G with little additional investment are out there for network service providers (NSPs) who know where to look.
Now, it’s time to look toward the future. Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that 5G technology will be revolutionary across many industry use cases, but I’m not sure everyone understands just how revolutionary, and how quickly it will go down. According to Gartner®, “While 10% of CSPs in 2020 provided commercializable 5G services, which could achieve multiregional availability, this number will increase to 60% by 2024”.[i]
With so many recognizing the value of 5G and acting to capitalize on it, NSPs that fail to prepare for future 5G opportunities today are doing themselves and their enterprise customers a serious disservice. Preparing for a 5G future may seem daunting but working with a trusted interconnection partner like Equinix can help make it easier.
5G is so challenging for NSPs and their customers because it is so revolutionary. Mobile radio networks were built with consumer use cases in mind, which means the traffic from those networks is generally dumped straight to the internet. 5G is the first generation of wireless technology capable of supporting enterprise-class business applications, which means it’s also forcing many NSPs to consider alternatives to the public internet to support those applications.
User plane function breakout helps put traffic near the app
In my last article, I mentioned that one of the key steps mobile network operators (MNOs) could take to enable 5G monetization in the short term would be to bypass the public internet by enabling user traffic functions in the data center. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but to prepare themselves for future 5G and multicloud opportunities, they must go further by enabling user plane function (UPF) breakout.
The 5G opportunities of tomorrow will rely on wireless traffic residing as close as possible to business applications, to reduce the distance data must travel and keep latency as low as possible. This is a similar challenge to the one NSPs faced in the past with their wireline networks. To address that challenge, they typically deployed virtual network functions (VNFs) on their own equipment. This helped them get the network capabilities they needed, when and where they needed them, but it also required them to buy colocation capacity and figure out how to interconnect their VNFs with the rest of their digital infrastructure.
Instead, Equinix customers have the option to do UPF breakout with Equinix Metal®, our automated bare-metal-as-a-service offering, or Network Edge virtual network services on Platform Equinix®. Both options provide a simple, cost-effective way to get the edge infrastructure needed to support 5G business applications. Since both offerings are integrated with Equinix Fabric™, they allow NSPs to create secure software-defined interconnection with a rich ecosystem of partners. This streamlines the process of setting up hybrid deployments.
Working with Equinix can help make UPF breakout less daunting. Instead of investing massive amounts of money to create 5G-ready infrastructure everywhere they need it, they can take advantage of more than 235 Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers spread across 65 metros in 27 countries on five continents. This allows them to shift from a potentially debilitating up-front CAPEX investment to an OPEX investment spread over time, making the economics around 5G infrastructure much more manageable.
Support MEC with a wide array of partners
Multiaccess edge compute (MEC) will play a key role in enabling advanced 5G use cases, but first enterprises need a digital infrastructure capable of supporting it. This gets more complicated when they need to modernize their infrastructure while maintaining existing application-level partnerships. To put it simply, NSPs and their enterprise customers need an infrastructure provider that can not only partner with them, but also partner with their partners.
With Equinix Metal, organizations can deploy the physical infrastructure they need to support MEC at software speed, while also supporting capabilities from a diverse array of partners. For instance, Equinix Metal provides support for Google Anthos, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere. These are just a few examples of how Equinix interconnection offerings make it easier to collaborate with leading cloud providers to deploy MEC-driven applications.
Provision reliable network slicing in a matter of minutes
Network slicing is another important 5G capability that can help NSPs differentiate their offerings and unlock new business opportunities. On the surface, it sounds simple: slicing up network traffic into different classes of service, so that the most important traffic is optimized for factors such as high throughput, low latency and security. However, NSPs won’t always know exactly what slices their customers will want to send or where they’ll want to send them, making network slice mapping a serious challenge.
Preparing for a 5G future may seem daunting but working with a trusted interconnection partner like Equinix can help make it easier.”
Equinix Fabric offers a quicker, more cost-effective way to map network slices, with no need for cross connects to be set on the fly. With software-defined interconnection, the counterparty that receives the network slice essentially becomes an automated function that NSPs can easily control. This means NSPs can provision network slicing in a matter of minutes, not days, even when they don’t know who the counterparty is going to be. Service automation enabled by Equinix Fabric can be a critical element of an NSP’s multidomain orchestration architecture.
5G use case: Reimagining the live event experience
As part of the MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept showcase, Equinix partnered with Spectrum Enterprise, Adva, and Juniper Networks to create a proof of concept (PoC) for a differentiated live event experience. The PoC showed how event promoters such as minor league sports teams could ingest multiple video feeds into an AI/ML-driven GPU farm that lives in an Equinix facility, and then process those feeds to present fans with custom content on demand.
With the help of network slicing and high-performance MEC, fans can build their own unique experience of the event, looking at different camera angles or following a particular player throughout the game. Event promoters can offer this personalized experience even without access to the on-site data centers that are more common in major league sports venues.
DISH taps Equinix for digital infrastructure services in support of 5G rollout
As DISH looks to build out the first nationwide 5G network in the U.S., they will partner with Equinix to gain access to critical digital infrastructure services in our IBX data centers. This is a great example of how Equinix is equipped to help its NSP partners access the modern digital infrastructure needed to capitalize on 5G—today and into the future.
DISH is taking the lead in delivering on the promise of 5G in the U.S., and our partnership with Equinix will enable us to secure critical interconnections for a nationwide 5G network. With proximity to large population centers, as well as network and cloud density, Equinix is the right partner to connect our cloud-native 5G network.”
- Jeff McSchooler, DISH executive vice president of wireless network operations
Read More
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | July 13, 2023
We’re all hoping that 2022 will finally end the unprecedented challenges brought by the global pandemic and things will return to a new normalcy. For IT infrastructure and operations organizations, the rising trends that we are seeing today will likely continue, but there are still a few areas that will need special attention from IT leaders over the next 12 to 18 months.
In no particular order, they include:
The New Edge
Edge computing is now at the forefront. Two primary factors that make it business-critical are the increased prevalence of remote and hybrid workplace models where employees will continue working remotely, either from home or a branch office, resulting in an increased adoption of cloud-based businesses and communications services.
With the rising focus on remote and hybrid workplace cultures, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet have continued to expand their solutions and add new features. As people start moving back to office, they are likely to want the same experience they had from home. In a typical enterprise setup, branch office traffic is usually backhauled all the way to the data center. This architecture severely impacts the user experience, so enterprises will have to review their network architectures and come up with a roadmap to accommodate local egress between branch offices and headquarters. That’s where the edge can help, bringing it closer to the workforce.
This also brings an opportunity to optimize costs by migrating from some of the expensive multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) or private circuits to relatively low-cost direct internet circuits, which is being addressed by the new secure access service edge (SASE) architecture that is being offered by many established vendors.
I anticipate some components of SASE, specifically those related to software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), local egress, and virtual private network (VPN), will drive a lot of conversation this year.
Holistic Cloud Strategy
Cloud adoption will continue to grow, and along with software as a service (SaaS), there will be renewed interest in infrastructure as a service (IaaS), albeit for specific workloads. For a medium-to-large-sized enterprise with a substantial development environment, it will still be cost-prohibitive to move everything to the cloud, so any cloud strategy would need to be holistic and forward-looking to maximize its business value.
Another pandemic-induced shift is from using virtual machines (VMs) as a consumption unit of compute to containers as a consumption unit of software. For on-premises or private cloud deployment architectures that require sustainable management, organizations will have to orchestrate containers and deploy efficient container security and management tools.
Automation
Now that cloud adoption, migration, and edge computing architectures are becoming more prevalent, the legacy methods of infrastructure provisioning and management will not be scalable.
By increasing infrastructure automation, enterprises can optimize costs and be more flexible and efficient—but only if they are successful at developing new skills. To achieve the goal of “infrastructure as a code” will require a shift in the perspective on infrastructure automation to one that focuses on developing and sustaining skills and roles that improve efficiency and agility across on-premises, cloud, and edge infrastructures. Defining the roles of designers and architects to support automation is essential to ensure that automation works as expected, avoids significant errors, and complements other technologies.
AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations)
Alongside complementing automation trends, the implementation of AIOps to effectively automate IT operations processes such as event correlation, anomaly detection, and causality determination will also be important. AIOps will eliminate the data silos in IT by bringing all types of data under one roof so it can be used to execute machine learning (ML)-based methods to develop insights for responsive enhancements and corrections.
AIOps can also help with probable cause analytics by focusing on the most likely source of a problem. The concept of site reliability engineering (SRE) is being increasingly adopted by SaaS providers and will gain importance in enterprise IT environments due to the trends listed above. AIOps is a key component that will enable site reliability engineers (SREs) to respond more quickly—and even proactively—by resolving issues without manual intervention.
These focus areas are by no means an exhaustive list. There are a variety of trends that will be more prevalent in specific industry areas, but a common theme in the post-pandemic era is going to be superior delivery of IT services. That’s also at the heart of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, a forward-focused business framework designed to help companies make technology investments for the future.
Read More
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | October 10, 2023
IT infrastructure scaling is when the size and power of an IT system are scaled to accommodate changes in storage and workflow demands. Infrastructure scaling can be horizontal or vertical. Vertical scaling, or scaling up, adds more processing power and memory to a system, giving it an immediate boost. Horizontal scaling, or scaling out, adds more servers to the cloud, easing the bottleneck in the long run, but also adding more complexity to the system.
Read More
Application Storage, Data Storage
Article | July 12, 2023
The expertise of leading HCI firms shape the future of IT operations. This Hyperconverged Infrastructure companies list, will provide Hyperconverged solutions for growth and better services.
In IT infrastructure, organizations constantly seek ways to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and enhance user experience. HCI is a game-changing solution combining storage, computing, and networking into a single, integrated system. To leverage the full potential of HCI and ensure enhanced user experience, leading HCI system integrators and consultants have become invaluable partners for businesses across various sectors. In this listicle, delve into the role of leading HCI system integrators and consultants in enhancing user experience, the key contributions, and the significance of the services of the top hyperconverged infrastructure companies.
1. Precision Computer Services
Precision Computer Services (PCS) is a trusted provider of practical and proven technology solutions for businesses. With over 30 years of experience, PCS helps clients overcome complex IT challenges and achieve their strategic goals. It offers expertise in data center upgrades when businesses struggle to manage workloads, need automation and orchestration for virtual infrastructure, aims to reduce physical data center footprint or require guidance on RPO and RTO strategies. PCS differentiates itself by automating processes, ensuring information accessibility and security, specializing in hybrid cloud models, and allowing client teams to focus on business growth while PCS handles complex IT work. It offers converged and hyperconverged infrastructure, reliable servers, data storage and protection, public and private cloud services, data classification, and backup and disaster recovery solutions.
2. IPDS
IPDS empowers businesses to modernize their IT infrastructure, facilitate efficient cloud operations, and capitalize on the capabilities of the modern workforce, by combining cutting-edge technologies with highly skilled engineering talent. The company's website serves to showcase its expertise and offerings. It specializes in Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and Converged Infrastructure solutions. These innovative technologies have become the standard in the IT landscape, enabling organizations to benefit from the advancements in the software-defined data center realm. With seamless connectivity to cloud providers, HCI allows businesses to establish hybrid cloud environments. By leveraging industry-leading technologies and harnessing the potential of a modern workforce, IPDS enables clients to stay at the forefront of innovation and achieve their strategic objectives.
3. Climb Channel Solutions
Climb Channel Solutions, a subsidiary of Climb Global Solutions, Inc, is a leading global specialty technology distributor specializing in emerging and business-critical technologies. One of the critical solutions offered by Climb is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, which combines computing resources, storage, and networking to minimize compatibility issues and reduce the total cost of ownership for businesses. Its HCI solution vendors provide software-defined storage, networking, virtualization, and disaster recovery solutions, enabling organizations to optimize their infrastructure and achieve high availability. With a global presence and a customer base that spans thousands of partners worldwide, Climb Channel Solutions has established itself as a trusted distribution partner.
4. Nexenta by DDN
DDN provides optimized high-performance computing (HPC) storage solutions for research and innovation. By offering scalable and efficient HPC storage solutions, DDN empowers businesses to streamline their data pipelines and achieve enhanced performance at scale. DDN's extensive experience in supporting advanced computing environments enables them to accelerate application performance, reduce operational costs, accommodate data growth, and deliver services through centralized data management. Their solutions, such as EXAScaler, provide efficient building blocks that match storage performance and scalability requirements while reducing administration overhead and complexity. With features like data placement optimization, encryption, and secure multi-tenancy, DDN ensures rock-solid security and efficient storage management. With real-time partnership and Lustre open-source support, DDN enables organizations to access subject matter expertise and effectively manage their entire HPC data lifecycle.
5. StorMagic
SvSAN is a highly efficient and cost-effective hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution designed specifically for manufacturing. To ensure maximum uptime and eliminate single points of failure, SvSAN enables manufacturers of all sizes to run applications smoothly and maintain productivity. By deploying just two x86 servers at each location, manufacturers can leverage SvSAN's virtual SAN capabilities to minimize planned and unplanned downtime. This solution provides 100% uptime, making it an ideal choice for factories and offices where operational continuity is critical. Converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint eliminates physical SANs, resulting in significant cost savings. StorMagic, as a company, is committed to solving edge data challenges. Their storage and HCI security products, including SvSAN and SvKMS (encryption key manager), cater to organizations with diverse site requirements.
6. Fabulix
Fabulix, a Hyperconverged Infrastructure Platform, offers a comprehensive solution for autonomous infrastructure, empowering organizations to break free from the complexities of legacy IT and monolithic data centers. It is an easily deployable and infinitely scalable hyperconverged infrastructure platform that combines compute, storage, network, and virtualization resources into a single, streamlined system. By integrating software and hardware, Fabulix creates or extends private cloud and hybrid environments within local data centers, providing organizations with the benefits of autonomous infrastructure and facilitating the transition from legacy operations to cloud outcomes. Its networking capabilities automate workload deployments without requiring configuration changes on physical networks. Fabulix is designed to be an affordable alternative for infrastructure requirements. It provides integrated protection for data and applications through features like shielded VMs, network micro-segmentation, and native encryption.
7. VZURE Solutions
VZURE Solutions empowers organizations to efficiently integrate and manage their converged or hyperconverged infrastructures. By leveraging their services, businesses can experience a range of benefits, including lower operating costs by consolidating storage and network management infrastructure teams, reduced labor costs through automated data center management, increased utilization, streamlined cabling, and fewer network connections to drive costs down, and enhanced agility through virtualized storage networking and centralized management. As a Cisco Preferred Solution Partner, VZURE offers a comprehensive suite of consultation, training, and support services for various aspects of cloud computing, networking, storage, and more. They provide the necessary expertise and resources to help businesses build, support, and manage efficient converged or hyperconverged infrastructures.
Final thoughts
The significance of leading Hyperconverged Infrastructure system integrators and consultants in enhancing user experience cannot be overstated in today's technology-driven world. With their expertise in designing and implementing optimized HCI solutions, these companies enable businesses to leverage the power of integrated storage, computing, and networking, resulting in streamlined operations, improved performance, and enhanced user satisfaction.
Their deep understanding of HCI technologies and ability to align solutions with specific business requirements helps organizations achieve seamless and efficient IT infrastructure, ultimately leading to enhanced user experiences. As the demand for scalable and flexible infrastructure solutions continues to grow, the expertise of HCI platforms, leading HCI system integrators and consultants will play a crucial role in shaping the future of IT operations and ensuring that user experience remains at the forefront of technological advancements.
Read More