Webscale converged infrastructure is an approach to designing and managing a datacentre infrastructure which is easy to deploy and manage. It gives the user the option to start small and scale up on demand. Able to run on a wide variety of application workloads, managed by a simple consumer grade management interface.
Webscale includes designing, deploying and the management of infrastructure, irrespective of size and can be packaged specifically to fit requirements for businesses or enterprises. It is a host of performance grade capabilities found in a complete IT infrastructure.
When Gartner first introduced the term Web-scale IT in 2013, they predicted that up to 50% of enterprises globally would be using that approach by 2017, where many will be adopting the processes and practices of the big cloud providers such as Google and Facebook.
A webscale datacentre drives efficiency by being able to grow predictably to thousands of servers and zetabytes of data that runs continuously without disruption even when expansion is taking place. Web-scale also enables flexible and varied support of new applications and services that need to be implemented quickly to support the speed of new product development and launch that businesses need to meet.
Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions have proven to be a key building block on which webscale computing is delivered.
Webscale is not possible unless the entire supporting stack is software defined, enabling ease of upgrade and refinement. If IT resource requirement unexpectedly grow by huge multiples such as 100x webscale infrastructure should be able to scale without disruption, no re-architecting and simply adding more resource into the existing setup. In the case of hyper-converged, that would simply mean adding more nodes into the cluster.
Webscale management system interface needs to be consumer grade despite the complexity of what is being managed underneath. In essence, the complexity is removed freeing the time and ability of smaller IT teams to manager much enormous datacentres.
Nutanix are an example of a company who have been using their technology to allow companies to operate web-scale computing platforms. Their hyperconverged technology ticks the boxes to deliver webscale computing platforms. Compute, Network and Storage all managed in software using a highly intuitive single interface. Built on a clustered architecture where non-disruptive massive expansion can be achieved by adding nodes. For fast growth, digital start-ups, webscale is the architecture that makes hyper business growth possible. Companies like Nutanix are becoming increasingly relevant in this area as they enable your infrastructure can start small, but if your business explodes, the infrastructure will never lose pace and never hold the business back.
