Paddon said: “If the underlying fabric is not part of the design consideration then the result of implementing a converged infrastructure system for one application at a time could be piecemeal implementation of multiple converged infrastructure systems, each of which is supporting only one workload. This defeats the whole objective of going down the converged infrastructure route.”
The Trilogy man also said that if converged infrastructure is the preferred strategy, a well-considered roadmap is vital to understand how the initial converged systems deployment will scale out to accept multiple services or workloads. It’s also required to ensure IT continuity and create a smooth migration process.
“An understanding of how this will actually be done in practice is just as important, if not more important, than which vendor’s converged infrastructure stack is best fit for you,” said Paddon. “This is one of the reasons that converged infrastructure is far easier and attractive for a green field than a company with lots of legacy system considerations.”
Hyper-converged
Elsewhere, O’Haire looked a step further on, saying that once the type of carefully planned agile converged systems described above is implemented, it will lead towards “hyper-converged solutions”. To ensure the promised agility when choosing a hyper-converged solution, he said, it is important to ensure the solution is “truly software-defined and runs on standard X86 hardware”.
“It must also be hypervisor agnostic, as you never know which combination of hypervisors you will want to run in the future,” he said. “Finally, as this is a new and disruptive area of technology, the chosen vendor should be a leader in the field with a clear roadmap, vision and future.” O’Haire mentioned Nutanix as an option in this regard.
Further expansion
As investment in the area grows and vendors develop solutions at a faster rate, how else will they develop over the rest of 2015 and beyond? For Dell, Townsend said she expects “further expansion of our software defined solutions, which already includes Nutanix, Nexanta, Microsoft Storage Spaces, Ceph, and VMWare EvoRail. One of the developments in this area,” she added, “will be EvoRack, which builds on the EvoRail story and will support workloads such as expansive VDI solutions.”
Looking ahead, Paddon said one consideration is how current converged infrastructure platforms are likely to adapt to software defined infrastructure. In principle, he said, the idea behind software-defined systems is to abstract the environment completely off the hardware so cheap commodity components will be all that is needed. “If you are looking at this as an approach then you need to think about how this correlates with the major vendor’s converged infrastructure platforms, which by design are intended to promote their own hardware,” he said.
Echoing O’Haire, Hogan said he expects to see accelerating growth in ‘hyper convergence’. Hyper-converged systems integrate server, storage, networking and management in a small footprint, with simplified installation and administration. “These systems are based on the Open Software-Defined Data Centre (SDCC) framework developed by HP in conjunction with VMware and other partners.”
Hogan added that he expected to see “a continued increase in activity in the SAP HANA and Microsoft Analytics Platform (MAP) areas as these platforms gain wider acceptance.”
Ltd
