EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
PAULO PEREIRA , SENIOR DIRECTOR , SYSTEMS
ENGINEERING , EMERGING MARKETS , NUTANIX
There is no doubt that HCI represents a major leap in the architecture of the data centre offering unmatched benefits . It is time to stop listening to the noise and start digging deeper into the benefits .
In order to optimise their data centre space and cost , CIOs should be looking at the use of hyper-convergence as the foundation of their data centres . For several years some big IT vendors have minimised the capabilities of hyperconverged infrastructure ( HCI ) and continued to do it until they were able to come up with their own HCI offering . There is no doubt that HCI represents a major leap in the architecture of the data centre offering unmatched benefits . It is time to stop listening to the noise and start digging deeper into the benefits , compare solutions , test them , and see first hands how much your organisation would benefit from this .
HCI converges the entire data centre stack , including compute , storage , storage networking and virtualisation . Complex and expensive legacy infrastructure is replaced by a distributed platform running on industry-standard commodity servers that enables enterprises to size their workloads precisely and to scale flexibly as needed . Each server , also known as a node , includes x86 processors with SSDs and HDDs . Software running on each node distributes all operating functions across the cluster for superior performance and resilience . simplifies the data centre to the maximum . All that you need to build a data centre is an ethernet switch and nodes . Setting up such a data centre is extremely fast and adding capacity is simply performed by adding more nodes , at any time , without the need to touch any other infrastructure .
Given that all of this is 100 % software-driven , it also provides unlimited flexibility to add capabilities in the future . With all of this in mind , without any doubt , HCI should be the foundation for new data centres .
Converged infrastructure ( CI ) on the other hand is just legacy infrastructure re-packaged by vendors to appear friendlier but given that it is built out of the same legacy architecture used in older data centres , it comes with all the same limitations : difficult to build , operate , upgrade and scale .
The solution to this problem has many angles , the most fundamental one being the use of virtualisation , however if we just limit the solution to apply virtualisation on top of a legacy architecture all the complexity will still remain . By using HCI , you first simplify the physical infrastructure to the maximum and enjoy the benefits of embedded virtualisation . Further to this and because not all HCI offerings in the market are the same , in the case of Nutanix , we offer our customers full flexibility in the choice of their hypervisor .
By converging the entire data centre stack into multiples of a single physical unit that is a server , it
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