Faced with massive data growth, increase in business applications, as well as the demands of the Internet of things, hyper-converged and converged architectures solve most computing challenges besetting organisations today.
So says Paul Ruinaard, regional sales manager for sub-Saharan Africa at Nutanix, who notes today, many business applications run on traditional storage and virtualisation products that are time-consuming to deploy, expensive to manage, difficult to scale and challenging to migrate from.
Enterprises need infrastructure that delivers cloud-like scalability, resiliency, agility and flexibility - but with lower costs, better application service levels, and trusted security, he urges.
Quick deployment
Hyper-converged and converged architectures are next-generation solutions that address lack of skills by simplifying and reducing complexity in the data centre, Ruinaard says.
"There are many countries where converged solutions have been sold over traditional complex three tier architectures, as they are much quicker to deploy and run, and have much higher uptime and availability."
According to Ruinaard, the premise of hyper-converged is the ability to leverage the type of architectures that were used to build Web giants like Google, Amazon and many other large Web properties that are used daily and are required to be always on.
"As you could imagine, it would be a nightmare to run and manage these without doing something different, as it is known that hardware fails. So there has to be a way to build out a self-healing fault-tolerant architecture that can tolerate hardware failure and just carry on running."
This is what is today called Web scale architecture and is the key to hyper-convergence, Ruinaard points out.
"So, typically, the design principles and benefits of hyper-convergence is that you can leverage unbranded hardware solutions; you don't have to rely on special purpose appliances; all of your system's intelligence and services reside in the software; you can leverage extensive automation and rich analytics; and, critically, you can leverage an environment that takes advantage of the concept of 'distributed everything'."
He adds some business benefits of hyper-converged and converged architectures to the technical teams are that these systems are linear, and boast predictable scale-out; are always-on; encourage and facilitate fast innovation in software; provide operational simplicity; and importantly provide lower TCO.
Invisible infrastructure
Ruinaard believes by using a hyper-converged architecture rather than a legacy three-tier architecture, a lot of the challenges organisations face in regards to storage go away. Storage on its own has bottlenecks and single points of failure, so storage itself needs to be provisioned according to the applications they are running, he notes.
"Storage has many tools that are used to provision it and it becomes a complex and costly exercise which involves tonnes of processes and is generally a bottleneck in any virtualisation environment. By removing this complexity and abstracting and automating it, the storage becomes invisible. It is left to software and automation that makes it very easy to do all this as a background process."
Nutanix has unveiled its Xtreme Computing Platform (XCP) which it says delivers "invisible infrastructure", enabling IT teams to focus on what matters to them - the applications and services that power their business.
Comprising two product families - Nutanix Acropolis and Nutanix Prism - XCP extends the hyper-converged solution to enable application independence from infrastructure with an app mobility feature, native virtualisation and search capability. The company says the solution simplifies the data centre, reduces costs and enhances IT service delivery.
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