Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Windows Systems and Network
Article | July 11, 2023
Rapid IT infrastructure scaling is always challenging. In March 2020, the coronavirus caused a surge in remote workers as organizations switched overwhelmingly to work-from-home policies. Scaling IT infrastructure to support this sudden shift proved to be a struggle for IT teams, resulting in a migration to cloud-based applications and solutions, a rush on hardware that can support a remote environment, and challenges scaling VPNs to support remote worker security. Here are some of the insights and lessons learned from IT professionals.
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | October 3, 2023
Building trust through HCI by unveiling strategies to ensure the long-term reliability of technology partnerships, cementing lasting collaborations in a dynamic business landscape through vendor stability.
Contents
1. Introduction
2. How HCI Overcomes Infrastructural Challenges
3. Evaluation Criteria for Enterprise HCI
3.1. Distributed Storage Layer
3.2. Data Security
3.3. Data Reduction
4. Assessing Vendor Stability: Ensuring Long-Term Reliability of Partners
4.1. Vendor Track Record
4.2. Financial Stability
4.3. Customer Base and References
4.4. Product Roadmap and Innovation
4.5. Support and Maintenance
4.6. Partnerships and Ecosystem
4.7. Industry Recognition and Analyst Reports
4.8. Contracts and SLAs
5. Final Takeaway
1. Introduction
When collaborating with a vendor, it is essential to evaluate their financial stability. This ensures that they are able to fulfil their obligations and deliver the promised services or goods. Prior to making contractual commitments, it is necessary to conduct due diligence to determine a vendor's financial health. This article examines when a vendor's financial viability must be evaluated, why to do so, and how vendor and contract management software can assist businesses.
IT organizations of all sizes face numerous infrastructure difficulties. On one hand, they frequently receive urgent demands from the business to keep their organization agile and proactive while implementing new digital transformation initiatives. They also struggle to keep their budget under control, provide new resources swiftly, and manage the increasing complexity while maintaining a reasonable level of efficiency. For many organizations, a cloud-only IT strategy is not a viable option; as a result, there is a growing interest in hybrid scenarios that offer the best of both realms. By combining cloud and traditional IT infrastructures, there is a real danger of creating silos, going in the incorrect direction, and further complicating the overall infrastructure, thereby introducing inefficiencies.
2. How HCI Overcomes Infrastructural Challenges
Hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI) surpass conventional infrastructures in terms of simplicity and adaptability. HCI enables organizations to conceal the complexity of their IT infrastructure while reaping the benefits of a cloud-like environment. HCI simplifies operations and facilitates the migration of on-premises data and applications to the cloud. HCI is a software-defined solution that abstracts and organizes CPU, memory, networking, and storage devices as resource pools, typically utilizing commodity x86-based hardware and virtualization software. It enables the administrator to rapidly combine and provision these resources as virtual machines and, more recently, as independent storage resources such as network-attached storage (NAS) filers and object stores. Management operations are also simplified, allowing for an increase in infrastructure productivity while reducing the number of operators and system administrators per virtual machine managed.
HCI market and itssolutions can be categorized into three groups:
Enterprise Solutions
They have an extensive feature set, high scalability, core-to-cloud integrations, and tools that extend beyond traditional virtualization platform management and up the application stack.
Small/Medium Enterprise Solutions
Comparable to the previous category, but simplified and more affordable. The emphasis remains on simplifying the IT infrastructure for virtualized environments, with limited core-to-cloud integrations and a limited ecosystem of solutions.
Vertical Solutions
Designed for particular use cases or vertical markets, they are highly competitive in edge-cloud or edge-core deployments, but typically have a limited ecosystem of solutions. These solutions incorporate open-source hypervisors, such as KVM, to provide end-to-end support at lower costs. They are typically not very scalable, but they are efficient from a resource consumption standpoint.
3. Evaluation Criteria for Enterprise HCI
3.1 Distributed Storage Layer
The distributed storage layer provides primary data storage service for virtual machines and is a crucial component of every HCI solution. Depending on the exposed protocol, they are typically presented as a virtual network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) and contain all of the data.
There are three distributed storage layer approaches for HCI:
Virtual storage appliance (VSA): A virtual machine administered by the same hypervisor as the other virtual machines in the node. A VSA is more flexible and can typically support multiple hypervisors, but this method may result in increased latency.
Integrated within the hypervisor or the Operating System (OS): The storage layer is an extension of the hypervisor and does not require the preceding approach's components (VM and guest OS). The tight integration boosts overall performance, enhances workload telemetry, and fully exploits hypervisor characteristics, but the storage layer is not portable.
Specialized storage nodes: The distributed storage layer is comprised of specialized nodes in order to achieve optimal performance consistency and scalability for both internal and external storage consumption. This strategy, which is typically more expensive than the alternatives for lesser configurations, is utilized.
3.2 Data Security
Currently, all vendors offer sophisticated data protection against multiple failures, such as full node, single, and multiple-component issues. Distributed erasure coding safeguards information by balancing performance and data footprint efficiency. This equilibrium is made possible by modern CPUs with sophisticated instruction sets, new hardware such as NVMe and storage-class memory (SCM) devices, and data path optimizations.
In addition, the evolution of storage technologies has played a pivotal role in enhancing data protection strategies. The introduction of high-capacity SSDs (Solid-State Drives) and advancements in storage virtualization have further strengthened the ability to withstand failures and ensure uninterrupted data availability. These technological innovations, combined with the relentless pursuit of redundancy and fault tolerance, have elevated the resilience of modern data storage systems.
Furthermore, for data protection and security, compliance with rules, regulations, and laws is paramount. Governments and regulatory bodies across the globe have established stringent frameworks to safeguard sensitive information and ensure privacy. Adherence to laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States, and various industry-specific regulations is non-negotiable. Organizations must fortify their data against technical vulnerabilities and align their practices with legal requirements to prevent costly fines, legal repercussions, and reputational damage.
3.3 Data Reduction
Optimization of the data footprint is a crucial aspect of hyper-converged infrastructures. Deduplication, compression, and other techniques, such as thin provisioning, can significantly improve capacity utilization in virtualized environments, particularly for Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) use cases. Moreover, in order to optimize rack space utilization and achieve server balance, the number of storage devices that can be deployed on a single HCI node is restricted.
4. Assessing Vendor Stability: Ensuring Long-Term Reliability of Partners
Here are some key factors that contribute to ensuring long-term reliability:
4.1 Vendor Track Record
Assessing the vendor's track record and reputation in the industry is crucial. Look for established vendors with a history of delivering reliable products and services. A vendor that has been operating in the market for a significant period of time and has a strong customer base indicates stability.
4.2 Financial Stability
Consider factors such as the vendor's profitability, revenue growth, and ability to invest in research and development. Financial stability ensures the vendor's ability to support their products and services over the long term.
4.3 Customer Base and References
Look at the size and diversity of the vendor's customer base. A large and satisfied customer base indicates that the vendor's solutions have been adopted successfully by organizations. Request references from existing customers to get insights into their experience with the vendor's stability and support.
4.4 Product Roadmap and Innovation
Assess the vendor's product roadmap and commitment to ongoing innovation. A vendor that actively invests in research and development, regularly updates their products, and introduces new features and enhancements demonstrates a long-term commitment to their solution's reliability and advancement.
4.5 Support and Maintenance
Evaluate the vendor's support and maintenance services. Look for comprehensive support offerings, including timely bug fixes, security patches, and firmware updates. Understand the vendor's service-level agreements (SLAs), response times, and availability of technical support to ensure they can address any issues that may arise.
4.6 Partnerships and Ecosystem
Consider the vendor's partnerships and ecosystem. A strong network of partners, including technology alliances and integrations with other industry-leading vendors, can contribute to long-term reliability. Partnerships demonstrate collaboration, interoperability, and a wider ecosystem that enhances the vendor's solution.
4.7 Industry Recognition and Analyst Reports
Assess the vendor's industry recognition and performance in analyst reports. Look for accolades, awards, and positive evaluations from reputable industry analysts. These assessments provide independent validation of the vendor's stability and the reliability of their HCI solution.
4.8 Contracts and SLAs
Review the vendor's contracts, service-level agreements, and warranties carefully. Ensure they provide appropriate guarantees for support, maintenance, and ongoing product updates throughout the expected lifecycle of the HCI solution.
5. Final Takeaway
Evaluating a vendor's financial stability is crucial before entering into contractual commitments to ensure their ability to fulfill obligations. Hyper-converged infrastructure overcomes infrastructural challenges by simplifying operations, enabling cloud-like environments, and facilitating data and application migration. The HCI market offers enterprise, small/medium enterprise, and vertical solutions, each catering to different needs and requirements.
Analysing enterprise HCI solutions requires careful consideration of various criteria. Each approach has its own advantages and considerations related to flexibility, performance, and cost.
The mentioned techniques can significantly reduce the data footprint, particularly in use cases like VDI, while maintaining performance and efficiency. Organizations take decisions that align with their specific storage, security, and efficiency requirements by considering the evaluation criteria for enterprise HCI solutions.
By considering these factors, organizations can make informed decisions and choose a vendor with a strong foundation of reliability, stability, and long-term commitment, ensuring the durability of their HCI infrastructure and minimizing risks associated with vendor instability.
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Application Infrastructure, Application Storage
Article | July 19, 2023
Unlocking the potential of hyper-converged infrastructure: Designing an advanced data center with scalability, efficiency, and performance for seamless HCI deployments through recent trends.
Contents
1. Introduction
2. Top Trends to consider in HCI
2.1. Public Cloud Services: An Option to On-premises Storage Infrastructure
2.2. Increasing Priority for Edge in Digital Businesses
2.3. Application Modernization
2.4. Hybrid and HCI: The Way to Future
2.5. HCI Automation Software in Pipeline
2.6. Backup and Disaster Recovery
2.7. Quadrupling of Micro Data and Edge Centers
3. Wrap Up
1. Introduction
In the era of hyper-converged infrastructure, designing an advanced data center is crucial to unlock the full potential of this transformative technology. With HCI combining compute, storage, and networking into a single platform, the data center must be carefully planned and optimized to ensure scalability, flexibility, and efficient operations. In this article, explore the key considerations and top hyper converged infrastructure trends for designing an advanced data center tailored for HCI, enabling organizations to harness the benefits of this innovative infrastructure.
2. Top Trends to consider in HCI
2.1 Public Cloud Services: An Option to On-premises Storage Infrastructure
HCI is experiencing the option of public cloud services as an alternative to on-premises storage infrastructure. By leveraging cloud services and native HCI platform file services, organizations can optimize workloads, leverage data storage services, eliminate silos, and create a unified and high-performance infrastructure. A 2019 ESG survey conducted among IT and data storage professionals found that public cloud storage infrastructure is increasingly favored over on-premises options. The survey revealed that IT professionals are twice as likely to consider public cloud storage infrastructure due to its benefits in cost efficiency, ease of procurement, automation capabilities, and simplified evaluation processes. Hyperconverged infrastructure facilitates on-premises and cloud-based deployments, enabling organizations to integrate and manage their IT infrastructure across both environments seamlessly. As organizations continue to explore hybrid IT strategies, HCI will play a critical role in providing a flexible and efficient infrastructure foundation.
2.2 Increasing Priority for Edge in Digital Businesses
Organizations are investing in IT to support this new business model of edge computing, and HCI plays a crucial role in enabling the deployment of edge resources. This trend also drives cloud adoption for such implementations, facilitating rapid responses to evolving business models and enabling dynamic scalability without impacting the core business. The rise of remote workforces has highlighted the importance of edge computing, where computing resources are brought closer to the point of data generation and consumption. This streamlined approach enables organizations to deploy and manage edge resources efficiently, ensuring reliable performance and data availability for remote employees. Furthermore, the adoption of IT infrastructure is complemented by the increasing use of cloud services. HCI serves as a bridge between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud, facilitating seamless integration and enabling organizations to leverage cloud capabilities for rapid scalability and flexibility.
2.3 Application modernization
One among Hyper-Converged Infrastructure trends, is application modernization is driving CIOs to seek opportunities for migrating to next-generation digital platforms that leverage HCI and cloud-native approaches. As part of this modernization approach, DevOps practices will need to incorporate containers and orchestration layers to provide the burst capabilities required to keep up with the escalating demands of digital experiences. The need for application modernization makes embracing advanced digital platforms that can efficiently modernize their existing applications compelling. This transformation allows for the rapid development of new products, services, and processes, enhancing customer experiences and increasing customer satisfaction. Containers provide a lightweight and scalable environment, allowing for consistent and reliable application deployment across various platforms. Orchestration tools streamline the management of containerized applications, enabling automated scaling, load balancing, and efficient resource allocation. By leveraging these containerization and orchestration layers, organizations can meet the growing demands of digital experiences, ensuring optimal performance and responsiveness.
2.4 Hybrid and HCI: The Way to Future
Traditional, cumbersome infrastructure is slowing down companies and impeding their ability to innovate faster than their more agile competitors. The future of IT infrastructure lies in hybrid environments, and HCI serves as a powerful facilitator for this transition. HCI allows businesses to seamlessly simplify their environments, optimize workload experiences, and improve scalability. According to research by 451 Research, 45% of respondents using HCI report that it facilitates resource scaling across their environments as circumstances and goals evolve. Additionally, an overwhelming 97% of HCI customers agree that HCI simplifies the deployment process for hybrid IT environments. This demonstrates the value and relevance of HCI in supporting the agility and flexibility demanded by the future of IT infrastructure. Fundamental innovations such as compute/storage disaggregation with HCI Mesh, native file services, and Kubernetes integration are broadening the range of applications for which HCI is well suited. With ongoing product innovations, such as compute/storage disaggregation, native file services, and Kubernetes integration, HCI continues to expand its range of applications, providing organizations with the performance, agility, and cost savings needed in modern IT infrastructure.
2.5 HCI Automation Software in Pipeline
The highly automated nature of HCI helps mitigate the risk of downtime by automating everyday life-cycle infrastructure management tasks, such as firmware upgrades and system refreshes. This automation reduces the need for complex, disruptive forklift upgrades traditionally prevalent in data centers. As a result, the data center becomes more intelligent and automated through the pervasive use of artificial intelligence and hyper-convergence, particularly in the monitoring and managing of assets and risks. Hyper converged infrastructure vendors are heavily investing in machine learning and automation to improve the underlying hardware and hyper-converged software for providing hyper converged solutions. The development of automation software, machine-learning-based AI for HCI reflects the industry's focus on enhancing HCI's efficiency, resilience, and manageability. Integrating artificial intelligence and automation technologies into HCI offerings paves the way for more intelligent and self-managing data centers. As the trend continues to evolve, organizations can expect greater automation capabilities and improved management of their decentralized and distributed systems through innovative HCI software solutions.
2.6 Backup and Disaster Recovery
Increasing concerns for faster data backup and security drive significant growth in the backup and disaster recovery application segment. Research firm MarketsAndMarkets reports that backup and disaster recovery are the fastest-growing applications within the hyper-converged market. One notable trend in the backup and disaster recovery space is the ability of hyper-convergence to reduce the total cost of ownership and operating expenses. Organizations can achieve cost savings and streamline their backup and disaster recovery processes by consolidating backup software, deduplication appliances, and storage arrays into a unified infrastructure. This integrated approach simplifies management, eliminates the need for separate components, and improves overall efficiency. According to MarketsAndMarkets, the global hyper-converged infrastructure market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 33 percent over the next four years, reaching a value of $17.1 billion by 2023. The demand for continuous application delivery and the increasing awareness among enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses are expected to drive this hyper converged market size expansion.
2.7 Quadrupling of Micro Data and Edge Centers
The evolution and adaptation of traditional enterprise data centers, driven by the rise of cloud computing, are paving the way for the expansion of micro or edge data centers. Gartner predicts that by 2025 these edge data centers will quadruple, fueled by innovations such as 5G and hyperconverged infrastructure. This shift presents an opportunity for hyper-converged offerings to consolidate servers, storage, networking, and software into a single, streamlined solution at the edge. While small remote office and edge deployments may require fewer storage and compute resources, they greatly benefit from centralized management and high-availability designs. HCI's ability to consolidate resources and its compact form factor make it an ideal solution for edge environments with limited physical space.
3. Wrap Up
Designing an advanced data center for hyper-converged infrastructure trends requires careful planning and consideration of key factors in HCI such as scalability, network architecture, storage requirements, and redundancy. By implementing approaches like modular design, modern digitalization, efficient cooling, proper power distribution, and robust security measures, organizations can create a data center that optimally supports HCI deployments. With an advanced data center, organizations can realize the full potential of HCI, achieving agility, scalability, and improved performance for their IT infrastructure.
An advanced data center tailored for hyper-converged infrastructure is essential to fully leverage HCI's benefits. By following the trends & techniques and considering critical factors in design, organizations can create a future-proof and efficient data center that enables seamless deployment and operation of HCI solutions, unlocking agility and scalability for their IT infrastructure.
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IT Systems Management
Article | July 6, 2022
IT and data center administrators are under pressure to foster quicker innovation. For workers and customers to have access to digital experiences, more devices must be deployed, and larger enterprise-to-edge networks must be managed. The security of distributed networks has suffered as a result of this rapid growth, though.
Some colocation providers can install custom locks for your cabinet if necessary due to the varying compliance standards and security needs for distinct applications. However, physical security measures are still of utmost importance because theft and social engineering can affect hardware as well as data.
Risk Companies Face
Remote IT work continue on the long run
Attacking users is the easiest way into networks
IT may be deploying devices with weak controls
When determining whether rack-level security is required, there are essentially two critical criteria to take into account. The first is the level of sensitivity of the data stored, and the second is the importance of the equipment in a particular rack to the facility's continuing functioning. Due to the nature of the data being handled and kept, some processes will always have a higher risk profile than others.
Conclusion
Data centers must rely on a physically secure perimeter that can be trusted. Clients, in particular, require unwavering assurance that security can be put in place to limit user access and guarantee that safety regulations are followed. Rack-level security locks that ensure physical access limitations are crucial to maintaining data center space security. Compared to their mechanical predecessors, electronic rack locks or "smart locks" offer a much more comprehensive range of feature-rich capabilities.
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