There’s a lot of talk about networking and infrastructure, how they are the building blocks to network connectivity, communication and operations. Without it, there would be no pathway to other services or applications. At the end of the day it comes down to how much, or how little does a business need. There’s talk of scalability, and the goal of one company, Nutanix, is to do more with less.
That’s where “hyper-converged” systems came from. Nutanix’s idea is that infrastructure is sort of like building blocks; you start with a small block and, from there, can add more blocks, kind of like a Lego brick snapping into another to build a bigger structure.
In a video interview, Nutanix’s senior director of Canadian operations said its approach is ideal for medium-sized businesses and up. Its approach is similar to Google (News - Alert) in that it’s not selling more hardware, but less, and allowing the customers to do more with less and scaling up.
“This is the heart of the software-defined data center environment that everybody’s trying to build,” says Forrester Research (News - Alert) analyst Richard Fischera.“The notion of being able to flexibly provision storage and processing power together without having to buy a large array is very powerful to a lot of people because there are significant price-performance advantages.”
This concept goes beyond conventional tools in that enterprises can scale virtual clusters by plugging in a new node and the software automatically finds new hardware. It omits the headache associated with large VMware clusters.
VMware has made headlines in the hyper-converged space with its VSAN, a software option that pools capacity and compute from servers in a vSphere environment. With a build-your-own approach, you can select your desired server hardware manufacturer and your preferred drive configuration.
Hyper-converged systems can bring the advantages of easy designs, decreased administrative overhead, and simplified vendor management to highly virtualized environments.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson