Hyperconverged Infrastructure of HCI refers to a software defined approach to managing the three major components of a Datacentre.
Compute, Network and Storage are tightly integrated together and delivered in a single appliance which is managed by software.
By building the integration tightly and enabling the entire stack to be software defined a few major benefits are gained over and above the traditional approach to isolated servers, storage and networking.
HCI users can expect to see significant improvements in operational efficiency with less people able to effectively manage much larger environments.
Excellent application performance can be achieved using standard commodity server hardware.
Scale and expandability can be achieved with ease and almost no planning or downtime. This “elastic” scalability makes HCI perfect for dealing with the unexpected demands of Digital business.
First generation HCI appliances have been built with standard uniform amounts of compute and storage in every node. This has led to what has been termed as the “HCI Tax”.
If an application is compute hungry but does not need more storage, adding a new node will mean increasing storage capacity that will not be needed. Likewise, if a data intensive application requires HCI expansion, the new node will include unneeded compute capacity.
This is the HCI Tax, with estimations that in some instances companies have as much as 30% of unused HCI resource.
Some companies like NetApp are developing next generation HCI capability with the express intent of eliminating this tax.
