Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Current IT infrastructure weighs data centers down with sluggish arrays of hard-to-manage components, preventing them from keeping up with the quick-turnaround demands of business and the cloud. Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) comes to the rescue here. HCI combines compute, virtualization, storage, and networking in a single cluster. Starting with as few as three nodes, users can easily scale out to match computing and storage resource needs. Hyperconvergence brings cloudlike simplicity on-premises and within a single, easily managed platform.

Before we discuss HCI in detail, let’s first see what the difference is between Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructures. Converged and hyperconverged systems both aim to simplify data center management. Converged Infrastructure has the same components, but they’re discrete, separable, and cumbersome to manage compared with HCI. Hyperconverged Infrastructure fully integrates all components and is software-defined. In essence, HCI is designed to work as one system with software-managed storage, as opposed to converged solutions and their separate components. HCI delivers deeper abstraction and higher automation and scalability than Converged Infrastructure. HCI simplifies administration by providing a single point of management. HCI fully integrates with the entire data center, eliminating the need for separate servers and network storage and delivering on-demand infrastructure for data-centric workloads.

Cisco HyperFlex engineered on the Cisco UCS is an HCI solution. Cisco HyperFlex systems with Intel Xeon Scalable Processors deliver hyperconvergence with power and simplicity for any application, on any cloud, anywhere. Cisco HyperFlex includes hybrid, all-flash, all-NVMe, and edge configurations, an integrated network fabric, and powerful data optimization features that bring the full potential of hyperconvergence to a wide range of workloads and use cases. Cisco UCS fabric interconnects provide a single point of connectivity integrating Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series all-flash, all-NVMe, or hybrid nodes and other Cisco UCS servers into a single unified cluster. More on Cisco HyperFlex can be found in Chapter 16.

Figure 1-12 shows a typical Cisco HyperFlex system with virtualized and containerized applications support.

  

Figure 1-12 Cisco HyperFlex Systems

The following list provides some of the many benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure:

• Lower cost: Integrating components into one platform reduces storage footprint, power use, maintenance costs, and total cost of ownership (TCO). Hyperconverged systems eliminate the need to overprovision to accommodate growth and help enable data centers to scale in small, easily managed steps.
• Simplicity and agility: Hyperconverged systems can deploy in a fraction of the time of traditional IT infrastructure. And there is no need for IT specialists for each resource area. Plus, automation makes management simple, giving staff and administrators more time to focus on strategic initiatives.
• Performance: Hyperconvergence helps organizations deploy any workload and enjoy high levels of performance. Many organizations use hyperconverged solutions for the most intensive workloads, including enterprise apps and SQL Server.
• Flexible scaling: Hyperconverged infrastructure scales easily. Additional resources can be added by simply connecting a new node to the cluster. Plus, with some hyperconverged systems, you can scale compute and storage separately. New resources are automatically identified and integrated into the cluster.
• Multicloud support: Hyperconvergence dramatically simplifies hybrid cloud environments and reduces the time and cost of transitioning to a hybrid cloud. It also makes it easy to move data and applications back and forth between on-premises servers and the public cloud.
• Security and data protection: On-premises IT infrastructure is more secure than other options. Security is baked into hyperconverged systems, with features including self-encrypting drives and tools that provide high levels of visibility. Backup and disaster recovery are also built in.

Different products corresponding to the Unified Management pillar of the Cisco Unified Data Center platform, such as Cisco UCS Manager, Cisco UCS Central, and so on, will be discussed in detail in Chapter 17, “Describing Cisco UCS Abstraction.” Cisco Intersight will be discussed in Chapter 21, “Cloud Computing,” and Cisco Nexus Dashboard in Chapter 9, “Operating ACI.”