Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has been around for over a decade, simplifying data center operations and enabling them to scale faster and less expensively than older three-tier models. But HCI didn’t stop there.
A new generation of HCI has emerged as a foundation for running hybrid cloud IT operations that leverage on-premises private and public cloud technologies. Experts say this software-defined approach has evolved to meet many needs, including in-house application development and the ability to move data and apps between cloud environments, and centralized and edge data centers.
“The value proposition of converged infrastructure solutions has evolved to align with the needs of a hybrid cloud world," said Eric Sheppard, research vice president of infrastructure platforms and technologies at research firm IDC.
“Modern converged solutions are driving growth because they allow organizations to leverage standardized, software-defined, and highly automated data center infrastructure that is increasingly the on-premises backbone of a seamless multi-cloud world."
What is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?
Hyperconverged infrastructure is a unified structure combining all of the different components of a traditional data center using smart software. In doing so, HCI creates flexible servers and storage instead of the more disparate and rigid systems that legacy infrastructure often provides.
HCI creates software-defined IT infrastructure that is easier to manage and scale than traditional IT environments.
Bhattacharyya said IT departments use HCI to lower total cost of ownership (TCO), increase performance and scalability of IT services and improve overall productivity. Over time, the technology and the meaning of its acronym have evolved.
What are the Components of Hyperconverged Infrastructure?
Hyperconverged infrastructure virtualizes and integrates data center computing, storage, and networking into a powerful private cloud-like system. The software that powers HCI allows for more advanced management of the infrastructure, including automation, the pooling, separation and intelligent allocation of resources to various applications.
“HCI 2.0 is ‘Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure,” said Manosiz Bhattacharyya, Nutanix CTO.
He said the new generation of hyperconverged infrastructure has become the foundation for hybrid cloud infrastructure, which manages applications and their data uniformly across edge, core data centers, service providers and the public cloud.
How Hybrid Cloud and HCI Go Together
In recent years, hybrid cloud has become the preferred IT operating model for several years, as reported in the Enterprise Cloud Index. Hybrid cloud provides a wide selection of computing and storage options that are available across clouds both public and private.
“Part of it is having the ability for enterprise applications to run in a public cloud,” he said. “Easily managing and running cloud native applications on-premises is the other side.”
HCI forms a solid foundation for running powerful private clouds inside enterprise data centers.
But boundaries between on- and off-premise cloud computing environments are starting to disappear, forming a hybrid cloud that will ultimately have common management, security and application portability. For three years running, Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) research commissioned by Nutanix has shown that between 85% and 91% of global IT architects consider the hybrid cloud to be their ideal IT operating model.
What becomes of hyperconverged infrastucture in this emerging, integrated environment?
“HCI running enterprise applications on private infrastructure is HCI 1.0,” said Bhattacharyya. “HCI running enterprise and cloud-native applications in both private and public cloud becomes HCI 2.0.”
Research indicates that hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure do seem to go together. ECI data indicated that organizations that have embraced hybrid cloud are also far more likely to have also embraced HCI, compared to businesses running other IT operating models.
The flexibility of hybrid cloud pairs well with hyperconverged infrastructure, allowing IT teams to achieve additional benefits by combining these two trends together. Companies can choose the mix that best meets their needs and adjust as needed.
Private Cloud vs Public Cloud
Recent moves by the major public cloud providers to support bare-metal computing, which allows premises-based cloud software and workloads to run in their environments, have caused a landscape shift. Bhattacharyya sees this as a game-changer in HCI, which can now extend into the public cloud.
“Without control over the hardware, we couldn’t control [application] performance,” said Bhattacharyya. “Until recently, we were at the mercy of what the public cloud vendors provided.”
But that’s changing. An example is Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), which allows IT teams to extend their Nutanix HCI-powered private cloud to bare metal public cloud services such as AWS and Azure. After an enterprise creates their hybrid cloud infrastructure, they can port that environment across cloud locations without the need to rebuild applications.
Workload Strategies
Although public cloud is becoming the destination of choice for many applications, some workloads may never leave the data center because of security, regulatory and access speed concerns. For example, latency-sensitive transaction-processing applications may stay on local infrastructure for performance reasons, but organizations might want to ship data from those apps to the cloud for data warehousing and analytics.
“That means IT managers need a single view of all their infrastructure and the option to shift workloads quickly to wherever it makes sense to run them,” said Steve McDowell, chief analyst at NAND Research.
“The [traditional] cloud model doesn’t scale across on- and off-premises” this way, he said.
Using a single hyperconverged infrastructure platform in both environments enables that flexibility.
“You should be able to take an application built on any cloud and run it on any other with the same scale, automation, fault-tolerance and scale,” Bhattacharyya said.
HCI: the OS for Hybrid Cloud?
If customers can create a replica of their on-premises infrastructure in the cloud, they can then move workloads at the byte level to where they make sense, said Bhattacharyya.
“Your traditional transactional database could be on-premise while the analytic workload could be in the cloud,” he said.
“You can move transformed and anonymized transactional data to the cloud and do analytics there, using the entire Nutanix ecosystem or choosing the pieces that matter to you most. This may completely change the way you look at HCI.”
Cloud infrastructure that’s fully compatible with what’s on the raised floor has other built-in benefits. Among these are application data backup and recovery and consistent security, disaster recovery, capacity management and overall governance, said Lucas Mearian, an IDC research manager.
McDowell noted that the virtual machine hypervisor has become the operating system for the data center, but there is no corollary for the hybrid cloud. A single hyperconverged infrastructure that lives in both places “gets rid of the storage and network administration,” he said. “It becomes the next OS for your data center.”
Expanded HCI also changes the cost equation by making it easier for organizations to adopt a single, pay-as-you-go pricing mechanism, noted IDC’s Mearian. “It moves HCI from a capex-heavy model to an opex model,” he said, referring to capital and operating expenditures.
Private, Public Contenders
Players other than HCI vendors will vie for the privilege of unifying on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Initiatives like Amazon’s Outposts and Microsoft’s Azure Stack are attempts by public cloud infrastructure providers to extend into their customers’ data centers with all the attendant benefits of simple management and provisioning.
McDowell thinks hyperconverged infrastructure has an edge in that cloud vendors will resist making it easy for customers to move workloads to competitive infrastructure, but HCI vendors can deploy across multiple clouds to facilitate choice.
“The more likely model is to start on-premise and leverage the benefits of the cloud," McDowell said. “That’s where HCI helps bridge the gap. It’s a single pane of glass into a number of clouds in a box.”
Another evolutionary path for HCI 2.0 may lie at the far reaches – or edge – of the network. Driven by the arrival of high-speed 5G wireless services, edge computing puts processing closer to the point at which data is captured and is projected to grow nearly 37% annually through 2030, according to Grand View Research.
Edge computing will require the creation of potentially hundreds of thousands of small data centers in the field, many of them self-contained units attached to telephone poles or situated in adverse environmental conditions. Analysts say this situation practically begs for HCI efficiencies.
“Companies that need to deploy thousands of self-driving computers across a distributed network will want the configuration to be as simple as possible,” McDowell said.
“Hyperconverged infrastructure can give you a set of compute and storage [resources]…in a hut at the edge that looks a lot like a data center.”
Editor’s note: This is an updated version of the article originally published November 16, 2020 and revised in April 28, 2023.
Paul Gillin is a contributing writer and B2B content marketing strategist. He was founding editor-in-chief of B2B technology publisher TechTarget and editor-in-chief and executive editor of Computerworld, a tech newsweekly, for 12 years.
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