Hyper-converged infrastructure is part of the modernisation movement in today’s data centres. According to leaders in infrastructure for the software-defined data centre, SimpliVity, whose products are distributed in southern Africa by Networks Unlimited, “Business demands and IT challenges are forcing CXOs to take a longer look at investments that will fuel growth, innovation, agility and competitive advantage.”

Hyper-converged infrastructure addresses the performance, capacity, mobility, and management issues prevalent in previous waves of converged infrastructures.

“To truly simplify IT in post virtualisation data centres, the data problem must be addressed without driving up CAPEX and OPEX. As such, business leaders need to start demanding that their IT functions efficiently support their business requirements, in order to serve today’s higher demanding customers within a fast paced and changing economic landscape,” says Anton Jacobsz, managing director at Networks Unlimited.

Christo Briedenhann, regional manager for southern Africa at SimpliVity explains that infrastructure convergence has been evolving over the last few years:  “We’ve seen several waves of solutions up until now. Converged infrastructure only attempts to address the acquisition and delivery issues brought on by virtualisation and cloud adoption. Converged infrastructure doesn’t focus on the problems that customers are trying to solve, such as the data efficiency, data protection, performance, and global management issues for workloads running in the post-virtualisation data centre.”

He highlights that data centres throughout southern Africa are currently marked by a proliferation of appliances and “point solutions”, whereby each only addresses a singular problem.

“That is, each product is supplied by a different vendor, has a different management screen, a different training curriculum, and physically takes up a lot of space in the data centre. Combined, we refer to these products as the legacy infrastructure stack. This stack has become a major hurdle for many organisations to overcome. However, the innovation of true hyperconvergence has the ability to quickly assist organisations in transforming this IT complexity into turnkey simplicity, ” he says.

Already placed in the Visionaries quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems after only entering the IT market in 2013, SimpliVity delivers a true hyper-converged infrastructure solution.

“We believe that our solution stands apart from others in the southern African market, which is why we distinguished our offering with the ‘hyper’ prefix, meaning ‘over, above, in excess’. Simply converging server compute, storage, and storage networking is not over and above. Over and above would be to also collapse deduplication, WAN optimisation, and data protection into the solution—to converge more components of the IT stack into a single scalable system from a single vendor. Over and above would also take customer pain points into consideration, and also address the ability to manage aggregated resources across nodes as a single federated system from a single interface,” says Briedenhann.

He points out that “true hyper-convergence” is IT infrastructure that is designed, delivered and supported by a single vendor, and that can address all data centre workloads. It has a software-centric design and provides a single pool of shared x86 resources that scales by adding additional building block units.

“Through a single management interface, organisations in southern Africa can easily manage aggregate resources and virtual machines within and across data centres – both locally and globally. You can also provide protection to valuable company data within a single node, across nodes within a data centre – all without leaving the single management interface,” continues Briedenhann. “Hyper-efficiency characterises true hyper-convergence: resources are used without waste and without introducing contention. That means that data management tasks are not duplicated and heavy processing is offloaded from x86 processors so that your applications aren’t starved for resources.”

He further states that true hyper-convergence comprises efficiency that extends to the data, with all data being deduplicated, compressed and optimised once, before it’s written to disk, and remaining in that state throughout its lifecycle.

Cited as the next generation, or “third wave” of converged infrastructure, hyper-convergence delivers the most value, maintains Briedenhann. True hyper-convergence simplifies deployment of infrastructure and virtual workloads, and simplifies management when compared with legacy IT stacks. It is characterised by:

• A single vendor design, delivery and support: It streamlines the acquisition, deployment, management and support of the solution. It also reduces complexity, interoperability issues and operational expenses. “SimpliVity architected its hyper-converged infrastructure from the ground up with these efficiencies in mind,” adds Briedenhann.
• A single shared resource pool of x86 resources: Combining all IT infrastructure and services below the hypervisor into a single shared pool of x86 resources eliminates the need for discrete IT components. It creates an environment that’s optimised for virtualised applications. And, it creates an environment that reduces costs to enable cloud-level economics.
• Ease of scale: A scalable “building block” approach that expands by adding additional units to meet business demands.
• Centralised management: The ability to centrally manage virtual environments globally through a single interface is key to improving operational efficiency and reducing operational expenses.
• Hyper-efficient use of resources: Efficient use of resources is accomplished in three ways: firstly, eliminate duplicate devices and services, making more efficient use of resources and reducing capital costs; secondly, saving IOPS and lowering capacity requirements by deduplicating, compressing and optimising data inline in real-time; and lastly, offloading intensive processing from x86 processors to ensures that maximum CPU resources are available for application requirements.
• VM-centricity: Management shifts to the application or virtual machine, which enables greater mobility, and offers VM-centric policies and management.
• Native data protection: VM-level backup and replication of backup data between sites eliminate the need for third-party backup and replication software and hardware, and backup specialists.
• Software-centric design: Hyperconvergence meets software-defined data centre requirements, enabling automation to improve operational efficiency.

“When it comes to IT infrastructure in southern Africa, there’s no such thing as just ‘good enough’. At SimpliVity, we’re defying the conventional by assimilating all infrastructure and data services ‘below the hypervisor’. We deliver a data centre building block based on a data architecture that addresses the performance, capacity, mobility, management, data protection and efficiency required in today’s modern data centre. With all of these enterprise functionalities designed into the product from the ground up, we can eliminate islands of data storage and management, and deliver these services throughout the region like no one else,” concludes Briedenhann.