What Is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) virtualizes and integrates compute, storage, and networking into a single unified system with centralized management. This consolidation and modernization of IT infrastructure enables businesses to manage a growing volume of data and range of workloads with agility at a lower cost.

This is opposed to a traditional, three-tier data center infrastructure, where servers, storage (SAN/NAS), and networking are siloed and separately managed.

How Does Hyperconverged Infrastructure Work?

HCI combines all aspects of the data center—compute, storage, networking, and virtualization—into a single software-defined platform made up of multiple nodes. All data center functions are virtualized and merged onto commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) server hardware connected over standard Ethernet. Server nodes are collected into clusters, which are pools of compute and storage resources, similar to cloud infrastructure. Data and software are then distributed across the cluster, which enhances availability, durability, and resilience.

Benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Enterprises and businesses of all types need scalable, flexible compute infrastructure to support increasing and changing workload demands. HCI transforms data centers from complex environments with isolated components into streamlined, virtualized services that can be automatically provisioned. This enhances scalability and agility, helps manage costs, and provides new levels of IT control and productivity.

Benefits of HCI include:

• Reduced data center footprint: HCI allows businesses to reduce data center infrastructure to scalable, virtualized building blocks with automated workload optimization and management. This reduces data center footprint, power consumption, maintenance costs, and total cost of ownership (TCO). It also enables increased efficiencies by running the same infrastructure at the edge.
• Simplified management: Hyperconvergence centralizes and streamlines data center management, giving IT more control. By virtualizing all data center resources and functions, IT can see and manage all aspects of the HCI system from a unified view. This helps alleviate IT’s operational burden, making it easier to move data, add resources, and fix problems.
• Lower costs: Hyperconverged infrastructure allows businesses to replace expensive legacy infrastructure with off-the-shelf hardware that’s more cost efficient and built for virtualization. This controls capital expenditure (CapEx) while easier management, higher resource utilization, and controls that help prevent overprovisioning bring down operating expenditures (OpEx). HCI also reduces the need for specialized skill sets to manage unique data center hardware.
• Fast, agile scalability: With HCI, organizations can start with the resources they need and scale performance and capacity with relative ease. HCI nodes deploy more quickly and with greater simplicity than three-tier data centers. Additional resources can be integrated quickly by connecting a new node—running on commodity hardware—to the cluster.
• Improved data durability and data center resilience: With hyperconverged infrastructure, data is distributed across the cluster, ensuring no single point of failure. Multiple nodes on a single data fabric and management plane facilitate cloning, backups, snapshots, and recovery if an outage occurs. Deploying multiple clusters enhances durability and improves business continuity. If data in one location is inaccessible, it can be recovered from the other cluster.
• Strengthened data security and privacy: A hyperconverged system makes it easier to secure and isolate IT resources on-premises. HCI avoids the privacy concerns of sharing cloud resources with unknown users and allows businesses to leverage hardware-level security and encryption to close attack vectors.

Challenges of HCI

Hyperconvergence brings with it many opportunities and a few challenges that must be considered:
 

• Costs: HCI can present higher initial costs as new hardware is acquired, and costs can vary by vendor and features chosen. Ongoing costs, including licensing and maintenance, should also be considered.
• Scalability limitations: As resources are integrated into the same node, HCI requires scaling compute and storage together. Adding resources may require additional nodes or inefficiencies if additional resources of only one type are needed.
• Maintenance and integration: Unlike cloud services, HCI infrastructure is owned and maintained by the organization, as is the responsibility for integrating HCI systems with legacy infrastructure. Setting up server nodes and virtualization does require a specialized skill set.
• Security considerations: HCI can also present security risks if not properly managed, requiring IT teams to undertake internal security hardening. Misconfiguration or lack of familiarity with HCI security can introduce vulnerabilities.

HCI vs. Cloud

Cloud computing helps businesses manage costs and accelerate development with access to on-demand, scalable resources for short-term use or highly variable workloads. However, it can also present security and privacy risks due to shared resources and can be more expensive over time than owned infrastructure if costs and performance are not monitored.

HCI offers better results when low latency, strict regulations, or remote locations are required. It can also reduce expenses over the long term by allowing organizations to scale on commodity hardware.

While HCI and cloud are distinct offerings, both offer businesses agility and scalability benefits. Ideally, businesses can think of HCI as a link between on-premises and the cloud. The virtualized nature of HCI also modernizes IT infrastructure, allowing data and applications to move between the data center and cloud without rearchitecting to best meet business objectives.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure Use Cases

More businesses are shifting to hyperconverged infrastructure to stay competitive in a rapidly changing global environment. HCI allows organizations to efficiently store and analyze data from all parts of their enterprise, and virtualization makes it easier to deploy software and resources where they’re needed most.

Test Environment for DevOps

HCI enables DevOps to quickly provision virtual machines (VMs) to develop, test, and QA new applications in isolated environments that won’t affect other systems. HCI also offers native integration for containers.

Big Data Analytics

For e-commerce platforms handling high-transaction databases or financial firms running risk analysis models, HCI offers high performance and low latency to handle large in-memory datasets. Moreover, traditional SAN storage is harder to scale for databases than HCI.

Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR)

Traditional backup and recovery solutions can be slow, complex, and expensive. HCI helps simplify backup and recovery with built-in data redundancy, replication to another cluster or the cloud, and centralized management. This helps ensure that data is protected in the event of a failure, allowing business operations to continue with minimal disruption. For example, hospitals rely on backups to ensure regulatory compliance, and manufacturers rely on replication as they move factory data to other sites.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

For VDI use cases, like hospitals deploying clinical workstations or schools employing cloud-hosted desktops for students, hyperconverged infrastructure offers a better user experience and application performance. It enables cost-efficient scaling, simple management, and greater control.

Edge Servers

Edge environments, from restaurant POS systems to real-time sensors on oil rigs, benefit from HCI because of the space efficiency and power savings the streamlined architecture offers. HCI edge deployments bring artificial intelligence and analytics to the point of data ingestion, reducing latency and taking on the huge datasets created by edge and IoT applications. And because HCI is centrally and remotely managed, deploying at the edge doesn’t require specialized skill sets at remote locations.

The Future of Hyperconverged Infrastructure

HCI will continue to drive innovation as businesses convert their traditional data centers to software-defined infrastructure and hybrid or multicloud models. The key to getting the most from HCI is choosing the right partners so solutions are aligned with business needs, existing IT environment, and future growth plans. As workload demand increases and diversifies, HCI will need to be capable of supporting different types of software and deployment models. Platforms that support generational performance increases will also enable the cost-effective scaling of data center capabilities.