What Does It Mean for Data Center Management?
What is hyperconvergence? To understand what hyperconvergence is, it helps to understand where we’ve come from in the data center space.
The data center – or “server closet”, depending on the size of your business – used to be a room that kept the servers that ran your business.
- Departmental servers (Sales, Marketing, Dev),
- Database servers,
- Application servers,
- Development servers.
This type of configuration was very limiting, with each of these servers operating as a self-contained entity:
- Each had its own fixed data storage,
- Each had its own fixed number of processors,
- Each had its own vendor-specific management console.
With the introduction of virtualization and “hot swap” technologies some of the scalability, downtime, and failover issues were addressed, but the silos still remained. Also remaining were the issues of using multiple tools to manage computing, data-storage, and network resources.
With the addition of the virtualization hypervisor, the potential for new latency/packet loss issues was introduced, requiring troubleshooting on yet another console.
Hyperconvergence and the Data Center
The hyperconvergence architecture was created to address the common data center and network issues of scalability and resource management complexity,
At a basic level, the hyperconvergence architecture brings computing, data storage, and network under a single, unified management system, including integration with the hypervisor.
The hyperconvergence architecture addresses multiple data center and network issues:
- Initial system deployment time;
- Scalability/expandability;
- Manageability.
Initial System Deployment Time
As mentioned before, the hyperconvergence architecture brings computing, storage, and network together under a single management system. At implementation time, the hyperconvergence system manager identifies all of the nodes in the cluster and configures them for the network.
The system manager also identifies all the processors in the cluster and makes them available for use by the hypervisor for distributed and virtual computing.
The memory and storage are also identified and made available as a single store for to the hypervisor for storage.
Finally, the management system integrates with the hypervisor, enabling it to compute, storage, and network.
Scalability
Because the hyperconvergence architecture puts a virtualization layer between the applications and the hardware they use, resources can be added as needed and reallocated to other systems as needed.
Unlike the classic server architecture, with its limited and siloed resources, the hyperconvergence architecture enables dynamic allocation of any resources available, as well as the addition of new processing and/or storage resources into the pool.
Manageability
The single dashboard simplifies the network management and troubleshooting process. Do you really want to spend more time wondering whether there is a latency issue caused by high processor usage, high I/O, or packet collisions?
Hyperconvergence — it’s better for your network and for you.
Learn more about how a hyperconverged architecture can simplify data center management for your business, contact us today to talk with one of our data center experts.
Thanks.
– Chris