Hello everyone,

In this post I'm going to explain what a hyperconverged infrastructure is and why the need for this type of infrastructure, which is so talked about today, has arisen.

Up to now we know Virtualization as shared storage, that is, one or more servers sharing a common storage as shown in the following diagram.

This type of infrastructure presents several drawbacks:

• It presents greater management complexity, requiring independent management of storage/hosts.
• Storage has a limited number of controllers, and as the number of hosts increases, we can encounter problems such as “bottleneck" when accessing our disks.
• Storage solutions were not initially designed to support virtual machines, which leads to problems monitoring VMs within LUNs. In other words, the storage system doesn't know what's on its disks; it only sees files.

Because of all these “issues“ In 2011, the first hyperconverged infrastructure was born, thanks to Nutanix, manufacturer that took the first step to offer “all in a box”.

What is this technology about and why are we talking about it in 2014?

To answer the question, it's simple. Hyperconvergence for the data center involves integrating compute and storage into a single device, specifically designed for virtual environments, which also allows us to have complete visibility of our environment. In a hyperconverged infrastructure, we don't treat storage and compute separately; everything is integrated, allowing us to manage the solution at the VM level for both provisioning and performance.

A hyperconverged system also allows for easy scale-out growth. Need more computing power? More storage? Simply add a new node, and it seamlessly integrates with your existing resources.

In this image we can clearly see the possibility of growth.

Now comes the reason why…

Until now, solutions like Nutanix were designed for corporate environments and not very suitable for the average Spanish company. This has been changing this year, and at the last VMworld held in Barcelona, ​​which we were able to attend along with our colleagues from Soltel Group, not only has Nutanix changed the philosophy, but VMware, the number one virtualization software manufacturer, has also presented its solution for converged infrastructures called EVO:RAIL. This solution is multi-vendor (let's not forget that VMware doesn't manufacture hardware) and will allow us to select a solution from several manufacturers tailored to our requirements.

The future…

We have no doubts from the Soltel Group We will increasingly hear about the adoption of these types of solutions, and from our position, we will be happy to help you on your path to hyperconvergence.

Greetings.