Why Hyper Converged Infrastructure from StarWind

HARMONIZATION INSTEAD OF SEPARATION

Why Hyper Converged Infrastructure?

Today, the complexity of data center IT environment is continuously growing as the amount of data increases and applications demand more compute power with more infrastructure components needed to support it.

At the same time, IT departments should always be able to provision resources instantly while maintaining flexibility and scalability of the infrastructure to handle unpredictable data growth.

Traditional data center infrastructure is comprised of separate compute, storage, and networking components requiring different administrative groups and systems for its management. The storage team, for example, handles the maintenance of the storage subsystem and the relationship with the storage hardware vendor. The same goes for the servers and the network teams.

Such infrastructures feature multiple management interfaces for separate components, higher maintenance costs, and are a real headache in terms of support since different components often come from different vendors.

All of this makes infrastructure management a highly time- and effort-consuming task forcing businesses to spend their time and money just on keeping the IT infrastructure working instead of focusing on innovations and services delivery.

HYPERCONVERGENCE IN A NUTSHELL

What Is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) combines compute, storage, and networking resources in a single “building block” and adopts Software-Defined Everything approach.

Software-Defined Storage (SDS) stack eliminates need for the proprietary storage hardware, significantly reducing costs since dedicated storage hardware is no longer needed.

The storage is controlled at the OS or Hypervisor layer with the help of virtual storage controllers. These virtual controllers run on every node within the cluster ensuring unified storage management, better resiliency, and failover capabilities.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) makes network management agile and flexible by providing a centralized interface allowing administrators to manage traffic and quickly distribute network resources where they are needed. Such integrated technologies dramatically improve IT infrastructure efficiency by automating provisioning and configuration of the entire networking stack.

MORE ABOUT HCI

More About HCI

There are various misconceptions about hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) from unfriendly scalability conditions and complex operability to unjustified costs and overkill requirements.

There is some truth to some of them. However, it depends on which HCI vendor you’re looking at, what your business really needs, and how best you should approach you mission-critical applications.

Peeking.

Under the Hood of StarWind All-Flash HyperConverged Appliance

Deploying.

StarWind VSAN for Hyper-V on VMware vSphere 6.5. ESXi Hosts

Configuring.

StarWind VSAN HCI for a 3-Node Windows Server 2016 Scenario

Testing Out.

How VMware vSAN Really Performs by Using the HCIBench Utility

Speculating On.

Where Microsoft Is Going with Its Innovations for Azure Stack HCI

CONVERGED VS HYPERCONVERGED

The main idea of converged infrastructure (CI) is to minimize compatibility issues between servers, storage systems, and network switching. To achieve this, a converged infrastructure delivers a set of separate compute, storage, and networking resources optimized and tested for better interoperability. While reducing the complexity of the data center IT infrastructure to a certain extent, a converged approach has significant drawbacks.

The components in a converged infrastructure are managed separately, requiring dedicated applications to manage various pieces of hardware, sometimes making administration a challenging task.

Furthermore, such infrastructures have a large hardware footprint – servers, data storage devices, and networking equipment occupy unnecessary space and convert into limited flexibility and scaling options. Additionally, due to a large amount of hardware utilized, CI implies significant deployment and operational expenses.

Rising Niche Player in
Gartner MQ for HCI 2020

StarWind has been included in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for HCI Software for three years consecutively, increasing its positioning. The report covers prospects for HCI growth market, trends and use cases, and what various HCI vendors bring to the table.

Download Report

StarWind VSAN Wins IT Central Station’s #1 Peer Award for SDS 2021

StarWind Virtual SAN was highest-rated software-defined storage (SDS) solution on the reputable peer-review platform IT Central Station. Users favor VSAN’s simplicity, rock-solid features, reasonable price, and friendly, responsive support.

Learn More

HYPERCONVERGENCE IS ALL ABOUT BENEFITS

Why Is Hyperconverged Infrastructure Important?

Hyperconverged infrastructure simplifies the work of system administrators by allowing them to manage and monitor the entire IT infrastructure from a “single pane of glass”.

The hardware footprint is significantly reduced since all components are tightly integrated and delivered in a single building block.

Such infrastructure provides higher flexibility, allowing not only to Scale Up by adding more drives, memory, or CPUs, but also to Scale Out by adding additional cluster nodes. Moreover. HCI deployment and operational costs become significantly lower with less hardware to purchase and maintain.

Hyperconverged architecture simplifies management by combining all nodes into a single resource pool. This allows managing aggregated resources across individual nodes from a single pane of glass instead of having a set of separate management interfaces for different components.

How to Reap Benefits from Deploying HCI Solutions

Hyperconverged
Infrastructure
Benefits

Unlike other vendors, we’re not saying that converged infrastructure is “legacy” and that hyperconvergence is the only way. Each scenario has its use cases and benefits. HCI brings significantly reduced hardware footprint, infrastructure and environment simplicity, reduced IT resources and IT management costs, as well as visibly increased ROI.

Unrivaled User Experience

StarWind HCI Appliance includes user-tailored configuration, free assisted migration, and dedicated ProActive Support engineers to “babysit” your HCI 24/7/365.

Invisible Hardware Footprint

StarWind HCI Appliance is the only offer on the market that brings all of modern hyperconvergence features and benefits in a tiny 2-node footprint.

Edge Infrastructure Inspired

HCI is inspired by and tailored perfectly for ROBO, Edge, and VDI scenarios with its deployment, operation, and maintenance simplicity with StarWind having your back round-the-clock remotely.

Unprecedented
Cost-Effectiveness

StarWind HCI is configured to your requirements, has zero hardware restrictions, and boasts a unique all-flash blend for best longevity, energy consumption, capacity, and performance.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Dummies

Hyperconverged storage is an element of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Storage is combined with compute and networking resources into a unified virtualized system. There is usually a software-defined storage (SDS) solution that pools all available underlying storage capacity into a resilient virtualized storage pool for further distribution and allocation.

Data processing is moving to the point of origin at a rapid speed. Workload and infrastructure investment are shifting from Enterprise to Edge by leaps and bounds. HCI makes sure all applications can store and process data at the point of inception in a cost-efficient manner. There’s also no need for dedicated IT staff at every ROBO or Edge location — everything is turnkey.

HCI brings lowered IT infrastructure cost, increased ROI, simplified IT environment operation, and IT infrastructure resiliency. All storage resources are unified into one fault-tolerant, Highly Available storage pool from which you can satisfy even the most demanding applications. HCI is an entire datacenter enclosed in a smaller footprint. It’s easy to master and manage, so there’s no need for an IT squad. StarWind takes it to the next level with its included ProActive Premium Support that makes sure everything is clockwork 24/7/365.

Unfortunately, this is the main issue with the HCI market: there is no mean price for HCI products. Vendors price HCI differently, frequently bumping up the price for more features. HCI cost depends also on your business needs and mission-critical applications. StarWind HCI, as proven by peer opinion, is the best price-quality HCI option for Enterprise ROBO, SMB & Edge on the market.

StarWind HCI is software- and hardware-agnostic. Our engineers will pre-configure, deploy, and help migrate workload to StarWind HCI absolutely free of cost. There are no hardware compatibility lists and StarWind is certified with all industry-standard hypervisor vendors, so you’ll enjoy unrestricted scalability and total smoothness of operation.

?WHERE TO GO NEXT

While you’re still thinking whether you need to go HCI, over 75% of workloads have already been virtualized! HCI is the next step in mission-critical IT infrastructure evolution. The market holds many offers, diversified in price, aim, feature, shape, size, etc.. In reality, it does indeed bring infrastructure cost optimization, flawless performance and resiliency.

Learn to hyper-converge the StarWind way —

GO!

Created to bring you fast time-to-solution and designed per Genetec and Milestone best practices, StarWind HCI Appliance for Video (Surveillance and Analytics) is a unique offer for MSPs and Integrators in the security space. We offer us to become your single point of technical reference and support. Bring your original VMS idea to us and we’ll bring it to life in your stead.

Building complex VMS has never been so easy —

GO!

Fill the gaps

Choose how you would like to start:

Send me a quote
Schedule a live demo

You agree that StarWind Software Inc. may use the above information to accommodate your requests, keep in touch with you, and offer a better customer experience.
You can withdraw your consent at any time by reaching us at dataprotection@starwind.com.
For more information on how we process your personal data, please read our Privacy Policy.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure Appliance
From Starwind

Why Hyper Converged Infrastructure?

What Is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?