<div class="article-content "> <p>LAS VEGAS &#x2013; Hyperconverged infrastructure did not exist as a concept two or three years ago. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing methods for deploying IT in the data center, as IT departments look for ways to adjust to their <a href="http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/12/08/gartner-enterprise-it-should-forget-hardware-software-infrastructure/">new role in business and new demands that are placed on them</a>.</p> <p>Gartner expects it to go from zero in 2012 to a $5 billion market by 2019, becoming the category leader by revenue in pre-integrated full-stack infrastructure products. The category also includes reference architectures, integrated infrastructure, and integrated stacks.</p> <p>&#x201C;Hyperconvergence simply didn&#x2019;t exist two years ago,&#x201D; Gartner analyst Andrew Butler said. &#x201C;Near the end of this year, it&#x2019;s an industry in its own right.&#x201D; But, he added, the industry has a lot of maturation ahead of it, which means far from all vendors who are in the space today will still be in it a few years from now.</p> <p>In a session at this week&#x2019;s Gartner data center management summit here, Butler and his colleague George Weiss shared their view of what hyperconverged infrastructure is, why it&#x2019;s so hot, and what might it all mean for data center managers.</p> <p>They also addressed some of the most pervasive myths about hyperconvergence. Check those out in a <a href="http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/12/10/five-myths-hyperconverged-infrastructure/">separate post here</a>.</p> <h3>What is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?</h3> <p>Given that the concept is only about two years old, it&#x2019;s worth explaining what hyperconverged infrastructure is and how it&#x2019;s different from its cousin converged infrastructure.</p> <p>Hyperconvergence is the latest step in the now multiyear pursuit of infrastructure that is flexible and simpler to manage, or as Butler put it, a centralized approach to &#x201C;tidying up&#x201D; data center infrastructure. Earlier attempts include integrated systems and fabric infrastructure, and they usually involve SANs, blade servers, and a lot of money upfront.</p> <p>Converged infrastructure has similar aims but in most cases seeks to collapse compute, storage, and networking into a single SKU and provide a unified management layer.</p> <p>Hyperconverged infrastructure seeks to do the same, but adds more value by throwing in software-defined storage and doesn&#x2019;t place much emphasis on networking. The focus is on data control and management.</p> <p>Hyperconverged systems are also built using low-cost commodity x86 hardware. Some vendors, especially early comers, contract manufacturers like Supermicro, Quanta, or Dell for the hardware bit, adding value with software. More recently, we have seen the emergence of software-only hyperconverged plays, as well as hybrid plays, where a vendor may sell software by itself but will also provide hardware if necessary.</p> <p>Today hyperconverged infrastructure can come as an appliance, a reference architecture, or as software that&#x2019;s flexible in terms of the platform it runs on. The last bit is where it&#x2019;s sometimes hard to tell the difference between a hyperconverged solution or software-defined storage, Butler said.</p> <h3>Why is Hyperconvergence So Hot?</h3> <p>To understand why hyperconvergence has gotten so popular so quickly it&#x2019;s necessary to keep in mind other trends that are taking place.</p> <p>There&#x2019;s pressure on IT departments to be able to provision resources instantly; more and more applications are best-suited for scale-out systems built using commodity components; software-defined storage promises great efficiency gains; data volume growth is unpredictable; and so on.</p> <p>More and more enterprises look at creation of software products and services as a way to grow revenue and therefore want to adopt agile software development methodologies, which require a high degree of flexibility from IT. In other words, they want to create software and deploy it much more often than they used to, so IT has to be ready to get new applications up and running quickly.</p> <h3>How Companies Use it</h3> <p>But at this point, companies seldom use hyperconverged infrastructure for those purposes. Today, it&#x2019;s used primarily to deploy general-purpose workloads, virtual desktop infrastructure, analytics (Hadoop clusters for example), and for remote or branch office workloads.</p> <p>In fewer cases, companies use it to run mission critical applications, server virtualization, or high-performance storage. In yet fewer instances, hyperconverged infrastructure underlies private or hybrid cloud or those agile environments that support rapid software-release cycles.</p> <p>Gartner expects this to change, as the market evolves and users become more familiar with the architecture.</p> <h3>It Will Not Solve World Hunger</h3> <p>It&#x2019;s important to keep in mind that hyperconvergence is just one of the approaches to infrastructure and not the ultimate answer to the IT department&#x2019;s problems. Vendors still have to prove themselves out and show that their solutions have staying power, and that they can beat competition from SAN and blade solutions, which are very much alive and kicking.</p> <p>Hyperconverged infrastructure&#x2019;s promise is simplicity and flexibility, but those two words mean different things to different people. When thinking about hyperconvergence, Gartner&#x2019;s advice is to figure out what those words mean to you and then see which vendor&#x2019;s message resonates the most with that.</p> <p>&#x201C;It&#x2019;s not going to solve world hunger,&#x201D; Butler said. &#x201C;It is an interesting solution [when used] in the right place.&#x201D;</p> </div>

<div><div id="drr-container" class="cat "> <p>Hyperconvergence is an IT framework that combines storage, computing and networking into a single system in an effort to reduce data center complexity and increase scalability. Hyperconverged platforms include a hypervisor for virtualized computing, software-defined storage, and virtualized networking, and they typically run on standard, off-the-shelf servers. Multiple nodes can be clustered together to create pools of shared compute and storage resources, designed for convenient consumption. The use of commodity hardware, supported by a single vendor, yields an infrastructure that&apos;s designed to be more flexible and simpler to manage than traditional enterprise storage infrastructure. For IT leaders who are embarking on data center modernization projects, hyperconvergence can provide&#xA0;the agility of public cloud infrastructure without relinquishing control of hardware on their own premises.</p><h2>How does hyperconvergence differ from converged infrastructure?</h2><p>Hyperconvergence adds deeper levels of abstraction and greater levels of automation.</p><p>Converged infrastructure involves a preconfigured package of software and hardware in a single system for simplified management. But with a converged infrastructure, the compute, storage, and networking components are discrete and can be separated. In a hyperconverged environment, the components can&#x2019;t be separated; the software-defined elements are implemented virtually, with seamless integration into the hypervisor environment. This allows organizations to easily expand capacity by deploying additional modules.</p><h2>What are the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure solutions?</h2><p>Hyperconverged infrastructure promises to deliver simplicity and flexibility when compared with legacy solutions. The integrated storage systems, servers and networking switches are designed to be managed as a single system, across all instances of a hyperconverged infrastructure. The inherent management capabilities enable ease of use, and software-defined storage is expected to yield greater scalability and resource efficiency. Companies can start small and grow resources as needed. HCI vendors also tout potential cost savings in areas including data center power and space; IT labor; and avoidance of licensed software such as backup or disaster recovery tools.</p><aside class="nativo-promo nativo-promo-1 smartphone" id=""> </aside><h2>Which workloads are strong candidates for hyperconvergence?</h2><p>HCI systems were initially targeted at virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and other general-purpose workloads with fairly predictable resource requirements. Over time they&#x2019;ve grown from being specialty solutions for VDI into generally scalable platforms for enterprise applications, database, and private cloud, according to research firm Forrester.</p><p>In a survey of infrastructure pros whose firms are planning, implementing or expanding their use of hyperconverged systems, Forrester found the most common workloads being run on hyperconverged systems are: database, such as Oracle or SQL server (cited by 50%); file and print services (40%); collaboration, such as Exchange or SharePoint (38%); virtual desktop (34%); commercial packaged software such as SAP, Oracle (33%); analytics (25%); and Web-facing workloads such as LAMP stack or web servers (17%).</p><h2>How is it sold?</h2><p>Hyperconverged infrastructure is available as an appliance, a reference architecture, or as a software-only model. Bundled capabilities such as data deduplication, compression, data protection, snapshots, WAN optimization, and backup/disaster recovery differentiate vendors&#x2019; offerings.</p><p>Specialist vendors in the HCI space include Nutanix, SimpliVity and Pivot3. Big systems vendors that have entered the market include Cisco, Dell-EMC and HPE. Gartner predicts the market for hyperconverged integrated systems (HCIS) will reach nearly $5 billion &#x2013; or 24% of the overall market for integrated systems &#x2013; by 2019, as the technology moves toward more mainstream use.</p><aside class="nativo-promo nativo-promo-1 tablet desktop" id=""> </aside> <div class="end-note"> <div id="" class="blx blxParticleendnote blxM2005 blox4_html blxC23909">Join the Network World communities on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/NetworkWorld/">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/network-world">LinkedIn</a> to comment on topics that are top of mind.</div> </div> </div></div>

<div class="article-content "> <p>At first glance, the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for hyper-converged infrastructure seems to show bad news for some of the featured vendors. But, as Gartner research director Jon MacArthur explained to Data Center Knowledge, this report uses such a different definition of &#x201C;hyper-converged&#x201D; and has so much narrower a focus, that you can&#x2019;t compare vendor positions to previous years. In particular, software-only, &#x201C;bring-your-own-hardware&#x201D; hyper-converged systems have become significant enough to earn a place in the report, because they&#x2019;re increasingly competing with hyper-converged hardware appliances.</p> <p>&#x201C;Most of the core technology is starting to shift to software. If you buy a vSAN ReadyNode from Lenovo or Cisco, or HPE, or your pick of server platform, they&apos;re all pretty much the same,&#x201D; MacArthur said. &#x201C;Customers are evaluating vSAN and ReadyNode, not so much the hardware. Dell EMC VxRAIL is a popular deployment model for vSAN, but so is putting VMware on your own choice of hyper-converged hardware.</p> <p>Whether a buyer goes an appliance or does the integration work on their own depends on their level of sophistication, he explained. Also, special needs like rugged hardware, for example, can lead retail or military clients to do hardware assembly on their own, putting the computing equipment in purpose-built boxes.</p> <p>That means Microsoft and VMware&#x2019;s hyper-converged software has matured enough to now appear in the Magic Quadrant. &#x201C;With Microsoft and Storage Spaces Direct, they significantly improved their capability and started to get to a level of maturity such that they&apos;ve now got thousands of customers using that as their hyper-converged stack.&#x201D;</p> <p>That gets more attractive with improved data deduplication and mirror-accelerated parity volumes in Windows Server 2018, alongside Linux container support. If Microsoft can convert even a small portion of the Windows Server installed base to hyper-converged, those clients would represent a large portion of the hyper-converged market.</p> <p>A significant part of the appeal is the ability to manage that hyper-converged infrastructure with the familiar System Center. Being able to rely on existing skills offers the benefits of going hyper-converged without as much disruption and retraining, which is especially valuable, because hyper-converged infrastructure is often introduced as part of a stratification of the data center.</p> <p><div class="inline-image-parent"><div class="inline-image-container"><span class="inline-image-credit">Gartner</span><img src="http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sites/datacenterknowledge.com/files/gartner%20magic%20quadrant%20hyperconverged%202018.jpg" alt="" class="old-inline-image"><p class="inline-image-caption">Gartner Magic Quadrant for hyper-converged infrastructure, February 2018</p></div></div></p> <p><strong>[Top company in the Niche Players quadrant is Scale Computing. We&apos;ll be&#xA0;<a href="http://global.datacenterworld.com/dcwg18/Public/SessionDetails.aspx?FromPage=Sessions.aspx&amp;SessionID=1020219&amp;SessionDateID=1001178">interviewing Scale&apos;s founder, Jason Collier, on the Data Center Knowledge stage</a> at the&#xA0;<a href="http://global.datacenterworld.com/dcwg18/Public/Enter.aspx">Data Center World Global</a> conference in San Antonio, Texas, in March. <a href="http://global.datacenterworld.com/dcwg18/Public/Content.aspx?ID=1067568&amp;sortMenu=126000">Click here to register for the event</a>.]</strong></p> <h2>Converging Toward Hybrid Cloud</h2> <p>Increasingly, enterprises are starting to create three pools of capabilities in their data centers. &#x201C;One is integrated systems or older-school three-tier architecture for their absolute mission critical &#x2018;can&apos;t go down&#x2019; applications,&#x201D; MacArthur said. He emphasized that hyper-converged infrastructure isn&#x2019;t displacing these systems but sitting alongside them. Gartner predicts that only 20 percent of business-critical applications currently deployed on three-tier IT infrastructure will have moved onto hyper-converged infrastructure by 2020.</p> <p>&#x201C;If you&apos;re running high-end mission critical Oracle or SAP apps, you might run that on hyper-converged infrastructure, depending on the scale, but today you&#x2019;d probably run that on an integrated system or classic three-tier architecture. Then, they&apos;re moving their general-purpose workloads to hyper-converged, and they&apos;re starting to experiment more with the cloud.&#x201D;</p> <p>The disadvantage of this is complexity. &#x201C;They do end up having multiple infrastructures they have to manage. You do end up, at least for the near term, with more silos. One of the things you&apos;ll start to see is more and more vendors making noise about their ability to manage across all thee deployment models: cloud, hyper-converged, and integrated systems.&#x201D;</p> <p>In some cases, enterprises see hyper-converged infrastructure as part of their journey to cloud, making dedicated hardware appliances less attractive. This is especially true for those using Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack. They go with a full-stack Microsoft offering, thinking two or three years later they can run on hybrid cloud or fully in the cloud.</p> <p>The same is true with VMware and Nutanix. (The latter has an appliance but also sells software on multiple OEMs&#x2019; hardware.)</p> <p>&#x201C;Then you&#x2019;ve got SimpliVity with their hardware acceleration, which provides tremendous value for the environment they&#x2019;re going into,&#x201D; MacArthur added. &#x201C;Their dedupe compression card delivers a service level to a lot of companies to start to replace backup solutions with native deploys of SimpliVity.&#x201D; Since early last year, <a href="http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/01/18/hpe-acquires-hyperconverged-infrastructure-startup-simplivity-650m">SimpliVity has been part of HPE</a>.</p> <p>Whether you choose a preconfigured system or a software stack with your choice of appliance or BYO hardware, many hyper-converged systems combine elements from multiple vendors, which has support implications, MacArthur notes. &#x201C;Does the vendor have the ability to take level-one and level-two support calls for the full stack or just a portion of that? Some customers may be fine managing complex support requirements, but if you&#x2019;re focused on hardware appliances, you only want to make one call. Those customers don&#x2019;t care what&apos;s inside, only who&apos;s going to support it.&#x201D;</p> <h2>Still Changing</h2> <p>Hyper-converged infrastructure continues to evolve significantly. Even without the focus on software, in this new report the market looks very different from just a year ago. &#x201C;Roll back 12 months, and HPE had just acquired SimpliVity, Cisco had not yet acquired Springpath, Nutanix was an appliance builder with a couple of OEM partners and had not really launched the cloud software focus they have today, and Dell had just completed the acquisition of EMC. There are a lot of moving pieces here, and I would expect a lot of movement in the coming 12 months too.&#x201D;</p> <p>As always, it&#x2019;s a mistake to focus only on the vendors in the top right corner of the Magic Quadrant. MacArthur encouraged enterprises to consider both regional and emerging vendors. Huawei is in the Challenger quadrant despite having almost no traction in North America. &#x201C;If you&#x2019;re in Asia Pacific, they should absolutely be shortlisted, and maybe if you&#x2019;re in EMEA too.&#x201D;</p> <p>Pivot3 has a relatively small number of customers, but he called out both their reputation for customer support and the new Acuity platform that moves beyond its previous video surveillance and VDI focus. &#x201C;You can begin to think about Pivot3 more for enterprise workloads,&#x201D; he noted.</p> <p>Similarly, the new focus for the Magic Quadrant means Cisco isn&#x2019;t in the Leader quadrant, but that shouldn&#x2019;t stop enterprises considering HyperFlex, even though it&#x2019;s not as well-known as Nutanix or Dell EMC&#x2019;s VxRail. &#x201C;Cisco is a significant player in the integrated systems market with a huge customer base; although they&apos;re in the challenger quadrant, Cisco should absolutely be on the consideration list for companies, as they&apos;re looking at hyper-converged offerings. If they only look at the top two or three vendors, they&apos;re missing out on some opportunities.&#x201D;</p> </div>