Top 10 Things You Need to
Consider When Buying
a Hyper-converged
Infrastructure
By Scott D. Lowe, vExpert
Partner and Co-Founder, ActualTech Media
June, 2015
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ... 2
Introduction ... 3
If It Doesn’t Support Mixed Architectures, You’re Wasting Your Time ... 4
Make Sure You Can Scale, Not Just Grow ... 5
Scaling Can Be Easy, If You Know What to Look For ...6
How You Move Data Matters ... 7
Multiple Hypervisor Support: You Don’t Want To Be Without It ... 8
Not Having Data Protection Won’t Work In Today’s World ...9
Replication Enables Simplified Disaster Recovery ... 10
Your SLA’s Need Business Continuity To Thrive ... 11
Serious Applications Require Serious Data Center Performance ... 12
Downtime Is Not An Option ... 13
Summary: The Upside Of Hyper-converged Infrastructure ... 14
About ActualTech Media ... 15
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise ... 15
ActualTech Media © 2015. All rights reserved.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 2Introduction
yper-converged infrastructure is a technology that is gaining growing
interest as organizations of all sizes and across all market verticals
seek ways to simplify increasingly complex data center environments.
Over the years, these environments have continued to grow unchecked in
complexity while IT departments react to new demands from the business.
The result of this unchecked growth, however, is the least flexible, most
expensive data center environments businesses have ever experienced.
This paper describes the how and why businesses place their hopes in hyper-converged infrastructure as a way to rein in complexity and provide IT with coveted flexibility and agility, all while reducing overall technology-related costs. But there are some important questions businesses may not all be asking yet. This paper will explain why these questions are important and how you can truly get the most out of a hyper-converged infrastructure.
When deployed correctly, and with the right solution, hyper-converged infrastructure is a powerful architectural choice that can transform the way that IT does business. In order to achieve the best possible outcomes from your investment in this technology, ask the tough questions of your vendor to make sure that they can meet your needs in a way that helps you better support your business.
As hyper-convergence is a relative newcomer to the data center arms race, there are critical questions that you must ask before you make a final decision as to what direction to move in evaluating this technology. The following sections provide these questions and explains why each one is so important.
About The Author
Scott Lowe is a partner in and co-founder of ActualTech Media. Scott has been in the IT field for close to twenty years and spent ten of those years in filling the CIO role for various
organizations. Scott has written thousands of articles and blog postings and regularly contributes to such sites as TechRepublic, Wikibon, and virtualizationadmin.com.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 3If It Doesn’t Support Mixed
Architectures, You’re Wasting Your Time
bviously, most companies considering hyper-converged
infrastructure already have some kind of data center equipment in
place. Most organizations will neither be interested in ripping and
replacing their entire data center infrastructure, nor will they want to be
forced to run their data center as two separate and discrete silos of
infrastructure.
When organizations choose the right hyper-convergence partner and deploy the solution correctly, there doesn’t need to be a choice. There are hyper-converged infrastructure solutions on the market today that enable you and your company to fully integrate the new solution with the legacy environment. Existing server and storage assets can coexist with the new environment. Such integration allows organizations to phase in the hyper-converged infrastructure solution during existing replacement cycles. Moreover, as the company continues to extend the hyper-converged infrastructure investment, it enhances the overall benefits that come from this powerful architectural option, which include:
• Consolidation of separate data center functions into single appliances.
• Eventual collapsing of multiple administrative interfaces into fewer, simpler tools.
• Modular, linear scaling opportunities, which simplify expansion and enable more granular growth.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 4Make Sure You Can Scale, Not Just
Grow
ata center solutions can scale. Exceptional data center systems can
scale easily. Often, scaling legacy data center environments involves
downtime, complex planning, and expensive consulting resources. Legacy
data center systems are not designed with scalability as a ground-up
feature, and instead rely on complex mechanisms to meet scaling needs.
Easy scalability is one of the hallmarks of hyper-converged infrastructure systems. These systems are built with scale as a feature, enabling unprecedented growth opportunities that can be accomplished with relative ease. As such, these systems are eminently flexible and help you achieve these two important goals:
• “Just-in-time” data center growth. Manufacturers long ago adopted just-in-time manufacturing processes to avoid the need to hold expensive inventory for which there was no immediate return on investment. By using the same methodology for building the data center, IT departments can help their organizations maximize return on investment in the data center.
• Flexible growth. Not all growth will be equal, but this doesn’t negate the need for simple scalability. Hyper-converged infrastructure solutions enable organizations to grow at their own pace and in increments that make sense for individual businesses, leaving users better off in the long-term as it pertains to scale. Such solutions are inherently future proof.
Scaling capabilities should have the ability to work just like initial hyper-converged cluster deployments. The more intelligent systems are equipped with start-up wizards that provide auto-discovery capabilities for new resources and simply add the new resources to existing resource pools.
Arguably, the best outcomes from scaling hyper-converged infrastructure solutions revolve around the lack of impact that scaling operations have on the environment. Even after adding new nodes to a cluster, everything is still managed with the same consoles as before. No new management interfaces are incorporated. As systems are added, they simply expand existing resource pools—more storage is added; more CPU is added; more RAM is added; more network connections are added. The end result is a boost in overall performance and capacity that doesn’t alter the management paradigm.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 5Scaling Can Be Easy, If You Know What
to Look For
any hyper-converged infrastructure solutions on the market provide
guidance as to how many virtual machines (VMs) their solutions can
support. For example, a solution may be sold as “supporting up to 100
virtual machines.” Disclosing this information helps potential buyers get a
sense for how well the intended solution will meet their needs. Ease of
scaling is one of the primary motivators when buying hyper-converged
infrastructure products. Rather than having to individually size and test
separate components, organizations simply add more nodes to the
existing environment.
At first, this may not seem substantial, but stepping back, it’s actually quite important as IT organizations struggle to remake themselves into nimbler and agile versions of their former selves. Simplicity in all things is a key underlying tenet of this process. For years, IT organizations have deployed what amounts to incredibly complex systems. At some point—if it hasn’t happened already—the sheer complexity in legacy IT systems will begin to work against the business by making it far more difficult to adapt as new business-needs require IT systems to do so.
Too many data centers force IT administrators to view scaling as an event that needs to be managed. Change orders must be processed; downtime must be scheduled; IT staff must be made available at off hours to execute the scaling event. Hyper-converged infrastructure solutions help IT administrators turn scale into a feature that is simply leveraged as business needs grow rather than requiring an increase in IT resources.
The ability to scale to the levels necessary to support both current and future needs of the business is important, but so is the ability to scale in increments. The step size to the next level of infrastructure will look vastly different depending on whether the organization is an SMB or an enterprise. Hyper-converged infrastructure solutions enable businesses to better “dial in” when it comes to resource growth that provides the best return on investment.
There are a number of additional points that should be considered when thinking about scale and how it plays into hyper-converged infrastructure, including:
• Size for the worst-case scenario. Even though most companies don’t want a lot of unused resources in the data center, it’s still important to size the infrastructure for peak expected capacity. After all, no one wants the business to come to a halt because the data center is undersized.
• Overhead can be good. The optimal business environment is “bomb proof” and can withstand the loss of a certain number of nodes in the cluster.
It’s also important to understand that some of the solutions in the hyper-converged space aren’t always about hyper-converged infrastructure at all. Some solutions from legacy storage vendors still take a very storage-centric approach to the data center problem and may focus scaling efforts on the storage resource at the expense of equally important compute, RAM, and networking resources.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 6How You Move Data Matters
he fact is that not every individual system in the data center can be
available 100% of the time. Availability targets of 99.999% are not
achieved by single devices, but are achieved in how the overall data center
architecture is constructed. Understanding that some systems will
necessarily be brought offline for various purposes, such as maintenance,
you must ensure that the hyper-converged infrastructure solution you’re
considering has the ability to move data around to accommodate
individual device outages.
Here are just a few features that a modern solution should provide:
• The ability to move data between the hyper-converged platform and other systems. This data movement should not be dependent on a specific form factor in order to enable the broadest possible technology adoption.
• Data movement options shouldn’t rely on consultants. Any solution should have the ability to support different hardware form factors and support data migration in a way accessible to the administrator and that doesn’t require custom consulting services from the vendor.
• “Many machines, one infrastructure” mentality. The goal of hyper-converged infrastructure is to simplify the data center by consolidating infrastructure into simpler constructs and collapsing management consoles. There still needs to be the ability to bring together disparate systems into a single management paradigm.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 7Multiple Hypervisor Support: You Don’t
Want To Be Without It
hen it comes to hypervisor support, the “right” answer depends on
the unique needs of the organization. Not all organizations need a
solution that supports multiple hypervisors, but if it does, it’s more likely
to support yours. For example, a company may run Hyper-V, and even
though there are numerous hyper-converged platforms that support just
VMware, none of them will be of use to the company needing Hyper-V
support.
With that said, even most hyper-convergence vendors that currently support only a single hypervisor have additional support for alternative hypervisors on their product roadmaps. As such, it’s important to continuously scan the market to determine whether hypervisor support has improved over time.
It’s also important to understand how different kinds of convergence technology bring hypervisor support to market. So-called hypervisor-converged solutions—those (such as certain VMware-specific systems) that integrate storage management right into the operating system kernel—are not likely to ever support alternative hypervisors. On the other hand, those that rely on a Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA)—a virtual machine that manages storage local to a specific node—are far more portable when it comes to extending support to additional hypervisors.
Many hyper-converged solutions are actually well-positioned for multiple hypervisor support, even ones that currently support only a single hypervisor. Many hyper-converged infrastructure vendors were forward-thinking when they built their first products. Rather than hard-code everything for a single hypervisor, such as VMware vSphere, they built abstraction layers into their technology that are relatively easily extended to support additional hypervisors as market needs evolve. Their initial focus may have been on just a single hypervisor, but their products are architected to enable broader support. Expect to see multi-hypervisor support to come to most of the hyper-converged infrastructure solutions on the market today.
The goal is to choose a system that can support organizational needs both today and tomorrow. This may mean that the solution needs to coexist with legacy investments either permanently or for the duration of a transition period. Bear in mind that almost every system on the market is created equal in this respect.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 8Not Having Data Protection Won’t Work
In Today’s World
ata protection is a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum are
in-server devices, such as RAID adapters, data mirrors, and other
local data protection methods that protect data on the server. At the other
end of the spectrum are complete disaster recovery systems. In the middle
are traditional data backup and recovery technologies.
Data protection services include protection against a host of situations, including:
• Hardware failure. Anything with moving parts will eventually fail. Even things without moving parts can fail. The point is that hardware will fail. For decades, IT pros have relied on devices such as RAID adapters to help protect against data loss in the event of a hardware failure.
• Human error. The leading cause of issues in any organization is human error and IT is no exception. One of the reasons that data protection services exist is to enable quick recovery in the event of an error, which can include deletion of a single file, deletion of a VM, or worse.
• Natural or manmade disasters. These can include hurricanes, tornados, riots, or just about any other cringe-worthy event that results in power outages or the partial or complete loss of the data center environment.
Hyper-converged infrastructure solutions vary dramatically in the level of support and capability that they offer for data protection. Most of the solutions on the market will, at a minimum, provide protection against hardware failure, but others can take data protection to whole new levels.
• RAID or mirroring. Enables local data protection to guard against local hardware failure and human error.
• Single-site replication. Provides further protection against hardware failures by making copies of data across multiple systems.
• Replication between sites. Helps organizations provide continuous business operations even when entire systems or data centers become unavailable.
• Full disaster recovery capabilities. Extends multi-site replication capabilities by automating the workflow necessary to recover mission-critical systems in a secondary site. Disaster recovery and business continuity systems are often considered as a step beyond data protection. Our last three considerations focus on these questions. All of this leads to additional questions around overall data protection and business continuity that must be asked when evaluating the use of hyper-converged infrastructure.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 9Replication Enables Simplified Disaster
Recovery
ll solutions provide support for local node hardware failure through
the use of some kind of protection mechanism, such as RAID or
mirroring. Replication enables customers to take data protection to the
next level by protecting against node faults and other hardware issues.
For legacy systems, this was the intent of RAID. RAID enabled companies to withstand the loss of a certain number of disks in a system, depending on the level selected. Replication in a hyper-converged infrastructure solution enables the loss of an entire node in the cluster. In these scenarios, copies of data are stored on more than one node, with the overall resiliency capability referred to as the replication factor. With two-way replication—which is akin to mirroring—one copy of data is made in addition to the original data. With three-way replication, two redundant copies of data are made in additional to the original. Under a three-way replication configuration, a cluster can withstand the loss of multiple nodes and remain operational without the loss of any data.
Two-way and three-way replication is generally referred to as synchronous replication because it takes place in real time. In fact, in hyper-converged infrastructure systems that use replicas to protect against node faults, data writes to the system are not usually acknowledged back to the application until all data copies have been written to various locations in the cluster.
Replication goes beyond just local clusters, though. It also forms the basis for larger-scale business continuity efforts. Services that can span sites over the wide area network, often referred to as asynchronous replication, don’t replicate in real-time, but do so on a best-effort basis to a remote site.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 10Your SLA’s Need Business Continuity
To Thrive
ore than ever, businesses are absolutely dependent on technology
resources remaining available even when some event disrupts
normal operations. Such events include natural disasters, manmade
mayhem, and simple operational errors.
There are a number of reasons that shared storage systems have become the core of the data center. In most cases, they “just work,” even if they don’t provide all of the features that the business needs. Storage systems have been designed with resiliency in mind and there are redundant hardware devices ensuring that the system as a whole remains available.
However, storage systems aren’t perfect, and a robust backup solution is an essential piece in making sure data remains available.
When reviewing hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, it’s critical that decision makers ensure that data protection is built into the system without the need for additional software layers. The goals here are to better manage costs and reduce complexity. Moreover, the data protection mechanisms included in the product should have the potential to enable complete business continuity as a part of its disaster recovery and data protection portfolio.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 11Serious Applications Require Serious
Data Center Performance
egardless of the other benefits that may come from the
implementation of a hyper-converged infrastructure solution, if that
solution is not able to provide the level of performance necessary to meet
the needs of business-critical workloads, it will not be suitable for the
data center environment. Performance, however, is not just about
processing speed. In recent years, storage performance challenges have
become some of the most pervasive issues facing data center
administrators.
Hyper-converged infrastructure solutions must provide performance opportunities that are considered enterprise-class. This means that the solution should support flash and, optionally, spinning disk. Ideally, both will be supported because they each have different strengths and weaknesses. When it makes sense, the solution should be able to automatically tier storage systems to enable faster data access or, at the very least, have an accelerated method for handling data retrieval. Not all solutions are created equal on this front.
Performance still matters! While hyper-converged infrastructure will make the data center easier to manage, simplification should not come at the expense of overall performance. The chosen solution should be provided by a vendor that has done full spectrum performance testing which includes overall throughput and IOPS testing, as well as determining how many virtual machines can operate per node in the environment.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 12Downtime Is Not An Option
ven small and medium businesses today demand “5 nines”
(99.999%) availability, which equates to just over 5 minutes of
downtime per year. However, many legacy data centers are built in ways
that make achieving this availability level very difficult, if not impossible.
Here are a few reasons why this is the case:
• Vendor interoperability issues. No one likes vendors pointing their fingers at one another when experiencing a data center outage or other issue. Moreover, it’s generally disliked when systems from different vendors can interoperate only under very carefully prescribed circumstances. The harder is it to get solutions to work, the more difficult it will be to keep them working.
• Lack of end-to-end availability mechanisms. The more discreet resources that exist in the data center, the more difficult it becomes to ensure high availability between all of the moving parts.
• Overall complexity. As previously discussed, complexity has become a serious issue in the data center and is one that can have a detrimental impact on application availability.
Enabling high levels of availability requires that vendors put a lot of thought into overall system design, including:
• Easy scale. If a system requires downtime to scale or is overly complex to be able to scale easily, downtime will almost be a given, thus impacting availability metrics.
• Simplified management. Complex management has the potential to increase human error when managing systems. Simple management replaces the opportunity for human error to factor into availability challenges.
• Scale-out storage. Storage remains one of the most challenging resources in the data center. Make sure to choose a solution that takes a scale-out approach to not only this resource but also to other resources in the data center. With a scale-out
architecture in place, hardware failures reduce the chances of widespread failures since there are far fewer shared elements in the data center.
Modern data centers must be built atop hardware and software solutions that help the business stay up and running. If you’re considering a hyper-converged infrastructure solution:
• Make sure that it can withstand the loss of a node. The scale-out methodology previously discussed is a key element in ensuring this outcome.
• Ensure cluster resiliency. Make sure that it can withstand the loss of other portions of the environment, including RAID arrays and individual drives.
• Enable automated failover mechanisms. For true high availability, configure automated failover mechanisms that transfer operational workloads from an environment experiencing outages to one that is able to ensure the consistent availability of those workloads.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 13Summary: The Upside Of
Hyper-converged Infrastructure
here are numerous reasons that organizations are considering
hyper-converged infrastructure for their data center environments.
However, the core hoped-for outcome across the board is
simplicity
, which
can come in many forms. There are also other benefits inherent in
hyper-converged infrastructure solutions that add to the architecture’s allure.
• Removing resource silos. Hyper-converged infrastructure allows IT organizations to break down the silos that have been built in the data center. Removing silos helps companies maximize their data center investments, reduce complexity, and promote growth and scale.
• Improved flexibility and agility. Hyper-converged infrastructure enables IT organizations to become more flexible and agile than is likely with legacy-based approaches to the data center.
• Open the environment. Hyper-converged infrastructure enables a more open approach to the data center environment and may allow easier deployment of emerging tools, such as OpenStack, and also allow use of container technologies that can help take virtualization to the next level.
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Top 10 Things You Need to Consider When Buying a Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Page 14About ActualTech Media
ActualTech Media delivers authoritative content services and assets
for top IT companies across the globe. Leading IT industry influencers
Scott D. Lowe, David M. Davis and partners develop trusted, 3rd-party
content designed to educate, convince and convert IT buyers.
ActualTech Media helps its clients reaching the right technical and
business audiences with content that resonates and leads to results.
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise creates new possibilities for technology
to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and
society. With a technology portfolio, spanning software, services, and
IT infrastructure, Hewlett Packard Enterprise delivers solutions for
customers’ most complex challenges in every region of the world.
For more information:
• Get the eBook on how Hyper-Convergence provides benefits of a virtualized
data center in a compact, cost-effective system that is easy to deploy, manage, and support.
• Read the eBook on how you can gain Hyper-Converged value from your existing
infrastructure, using software-defined storage
• Visit Hewlett Packard Enterprise at hpe.com/info/hc