Converged infrastructure promises to do away with many challenges of traditional datacenter architecture as it offers scalable integrated solutions

Converged infrastructure promises ease of deployment, central management, and optimization as it brings together storage, servers, networking, and management together. Leading vendors have been rolling out new converged infrastructure systems. Their objective is to offer a new way of integrated IT that radically redefines the way IT infrastructure is built and maintained and is geared to support cloud ready environments.

The value-propositions are quite appealing for both SMB and enterprise customers. It helps meet Technology expectations such as eliminate silos, simplify systems management, adopt efficiencies and effectiveness through virtualization, improve TCO alongside reduced footprints, improve automation as well as make the infrastructure far more agile.

Shams Hasan, Enterprise Product Manager, Middle East at Dell says, “Converged infrastructure is one of the fastest-growing segments of the IT industry.  Integrated infrastructure delivers ease of deployment, reduces capital equipment expenses, facilitates scalability and reduces management complexity.  Converged solutions are being widely adopted by large enterprises where infrastructure sprawl has chewed up budgets and made scalability a challenge, and as a method to speed delivery of IT services. They are also proving to be beneficial to IT-strapped small and mid-sized organizations, which often lack the skills and resources to keep up with increased business demands for IT services.”

According to Kartik Shankar, Senior Sales Manager, StorIT Distribution, as data centres and storage solutions continue to evolve, converged infrastructure is also taking the centre stage in modernization. Organizations that have invested in software-defined technologies for their data centre transformation are seeing value in converged infrastructure solutions.

He adds, “The trend towards converged infrastructure is primarily driven by TCO and performance objectives demands of emerging technology solutions. Sizing key components of the IT system infrastructure gets highly complex and challenging to meet the objective through the traditional way. Currently converged infrastructure is the most matured approach to address these challenges and backbone/infrastructure backbone of web 3.0.”

The traditional datacenters have seen the sprawl of technology silos of storage, networking, compute as separate racks. This is addressed through taking the convergence route to IT deployment.

Suda Srinivasan, Director for Product Marketing at Nutanix says, “Enterprise datacenters have become incredibly complex over the years. Every aspect of the legacy infrastructure lifecycle is a challenge, from buying and deploying to managing, scaling and support. At the heart of the problem is the traditional three-tier infrastructure model, with servers connected over a network to a shared scale-up storage solution. Converged infrastructure, or more specifically hyperconverged infrastructure, addresses this problem of complexity.”

There are two approaches to achieving the integrated systems infrastructure deployment. VCE, part of the EMC Federation champions the hardware-focused, building-block approach which is categorised as converged infrastructure whereas Nutanix, SimpliVity and recently VMware etc offer hyper-converged infrastructure, taking the software defined route. While converged systems are in general separate components that are designed to work well together, hyper-converged systems are modular. Hyperconverged solutions integrate compute and storage resources in a single x86-based server deployed in scale-out clusters.

Hyperconvergence in the ascent

Virtualization has pretty much become a standard for enterprise infrastructure except for a few legacy business critical applications. Converged or hyper-converged infrastructure can help realize greater benefits of virtualization.

Karthik says, “We can find enterprise setups managing both virtual and physical environment in many cases. This is majorly due to the limitations in the traditional infrastructure approach and support/compatibility challenges from the application vendor, etc. This is where converged infrastructure plays a major game changing role by providing custom engineered system components fine-tuned to run even legacy applications. This approach helps to balance and align the right system components to meet the business requirement, with improved performance and ease of infrastructure management.”

Hyperconverged infrastructure uses the webscale approach that is modular and scales up as required. This is well aligned with the needs of virtualization and cloud based infrastructure.

Shams says, “Once deployed, with web scale, the converged compute and local storage platform with distributed software technology can create extremely dynamic data centers that can easily be scaled.  This strategy and capability is crucial for the modern data center.”

According to Jan Ursi, Senior Director, Channel Sales & Marketing for EMEA and India at Nutanix, the traditional datacenter architecture with multiple components that need to be glued together manually is not built for virtualization or cloud. It is too complex, too rigid, scales in too large increments and slows down provisioning of new applications

He adds, “Virtualization is the default vehicle to Cloud, but the underlying IT infrastructure needs to change, learning from the most successful web companies like Google, Amazon, Azure, Facebook, etc. Simplifying the datacenter by virtualizing without a SAN, using a converged webscale virtual computing platform is critical for Virtualization and Cloud projects to live up to their promise.”

Nutanix, the leader in the hyperconverged space deploys more hyperconverged infrastructure than all other players in this space together with a 52% market share, according to IDC. The EMEA region represents around 25% of the global Nutanix footprint.

“Hundreds of datacenters rely on Nutanix to run their critical applications already for many years. The Nutanix projects are a mix of size and verticals, serving SMB enterprises like ADD in Belgium to large organizations like Orange Business Services. The uses vary from running critical tier-1 server workloads like Microsoft SQL, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft Exchange to others like VDI, Big Data, Branch Office and Disaster Recovery projects,” says Jan Ursi, Sr. Director, Channel Sales & Marketing for EMEA and India at Nutanix.

Nutanix offers a software-defined solution that does not rely on any purpose built hardware. The Nutanix solution runs on a commodity server architecture on top of any industry standard hypervisor (VMware, Microsoft hyper-v or KVM).

However, customers can also choose between a wide portfolio of Nutanix nodes with a different mix of compute and storage resources on board. Next to the native Nutanix NX series appliances, customers can also opt to source the Dell XC series converged webscale appliances powered by the Nutanix software.

Some divergence with the convergence

There are two approaches for converged infrastructure. One where a single vendor owns all the technology, bundles it, tests it and then sells it as a single bundled solution to the customer. The second approach is when different vendors collaborate to bring the latest and best solutions based around a validated reference architecture that describe configurations of server/storage/networking products, which is integrated into one unified solution that is assembled, integrated and tested before selling it to the customer.

The converged infrastructure space is populated by many of the large sized vendors including some new start-ups. The vendors in the fray include EMC, NetApp, Cisco IBM, Hitachi, HP, Dell, Oracle etc. Reference architecture offerings include NetApp’s Flexpod and EMC’s VSPEX. Hitachi offers both pre-fabricated solutions and reference architectures under its Unified Compute Platform (UCP).

The flexpods

Flexpod is a reference architecture that uses technology from NetApp and Cisco Systems. The FlexPod solution portfolio combines NetApp storage systems, Cisco Unified Computing System servers, and Cisco Nexus fabric into a single, flexible architecture.

“The FlexPod, is a combination of networking servers from Cisco, NetApp storage with software from VMware for virtualization. The result is an integrated stack which solves the problems companies had in the past of buying and building their solutions and trying to make them work. The FlexPod is configured to work from the get go and is typically used by customers wishing to build a private cloud and then start to move towards a hybrid public,” says Graham Porter MENA Channel Manager.

The Flexpod converged portfolio has three offerings. Flexpod Datacentre is designed for large environments. FlexPod Express is targeted at small and medium-sized businesses. Finally, there is FlexPod Select, which is targeted at high performance workloads, including Hadoop big data analytics. According to NetApp, FlexPod has seen a sharp uptake in deployments and is an area of growth for the company moving forward.

Fadi Kanafani Regional Director, MENA and Pakistan at NetAPP says, “We have 50 validated designs between us and Cisco for this integrated stack which makes it the number one converged cloud-based solution in the market now, a market that now exceeds 3B dollars globally. We have in excess of 4000 customers on the FlexPod which is showing over 80% growth from 2013 to 2014. ”

The VCE way

VCE, one of the key players in converged infrastructure, is a company founded by EMC, VMware and Cisco and now owned largely by EMC. The company has an appliance based approach and offers Vblocks that are prefabricated in their factories according to customer requirements.

Tom O’Reilly, CTO – Middle East & Africa at VCE says, “Vblock is a highly engineered single product. We have determined the best possible way to configure networking, storage, software, compute and virtualization altogether into one product. We manufacture our Vblocks in the factory, where we build not only the physical box, wherein we rack, stack, power and cable everything but we also logically configure the entire v-block for a customer’s datacenter. We also do logical configuration survey (LCS) at the customer site before that to understand the environment as to how they want use the Vblock. So when our v-blocks arrive at the site, they are ready to powered on, connected to the switches, to the networking and all ready to deploy mission critical applications.”

The company provides customers support through the full lifecycle. It provides a one window support for different elements of the vblock.

He adds further, “Each v-block is a single product to us and since we built it, we are best placed to provide the support. We do the support for the entire stack that includes networking, storage, compute, networking, virtualization etc.”

VCE also have a proprietary software called pro vision intelligent operations (Vision IO). This helps customers to manage the Vblocks as a single set of resources rather than have a tool to manage software, storage, networking etc separately. It gives them a view of the entire datacenter. In addition, VCE also has the Release Configuration Matrix (RCM) – essentially a firmware level for the v-block.

Tom says, “When we ship the vblocks from our factory, they are in a known good state; we know that they have been configured correctly and everything has been tested and validated. When a release is come from EMC, Cisco or VMware, customers may want to do updates for security or performance reasons whatever, we on a regular basis release a RCM – so that customer can have an entire firmware level update for the v-block instead of customers teasing and doing each update on their own. We do the testing and validation in our labs before we release the RCM so that spares the customer the hassle. This is true convergence as we approach it.”

The EMC Federation appears poised to take advantage of the growing demand for converged systems, especially in data centres. So the companies that are part of the Federation operate as separate entities while they have integrated product development.

Tom adds, “When we became part of EMC, anything that was part of converging technologies was put under the VCE umbrella. Today there is EMC VSPEX- which is reference architecture, EMC VSPEX blue- which is their hyper converged solution that they just announced and is built upon VMware’s EVO:RAIL,  and then there is the VCE Vblock. These solutions all provide some rapid ways of achieving some standard goals from customers and wrap the customer expectations around the solutions. The go to market strategy remain the same- VSPEX and VSPEX blue remain EMC products – it is just that their Marketing and Engineering will be under the VCE umbrella and report to the VCE Management. They go through the EMC channel. Our go to market stays the same with the VCE channel.”

VCE is now expanding its lineup of integrated infrastructure solutions with the VCE Foundation for Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. This integrates VMware’s NSX network virtualization technology and vRealize management and orchestration software. In addition, the solution includes EMC’s ViPR software-defined storage (SDS) product.

Tom adds, “We are going to offer VCE foundation for enterprise hybrid cloud. Software defined storage, software defined networking and management orchestration tools will be pre-fabricated in a v-block from our factory. That will speed up the customer’s path to deploying enterprise hybrid cloud. That will be offered to the channel.”

The outlook

Adopting either of the key approaches, through convergence or hyperconvergence, the end goals are better alignment of the IT infrastructure in line with need to rapidly provision computing resources but only as required, to reduce footprint and eliminate sprawl, achieve pooling of resources in a seamless way and have the ability to scale. Vendors are betting on significant growth in terms of demand for such integrated systems.

MarketsandMarkets forecasts the converged infrastructure market to grow from $11.53 billion in 2014 to $ 33.89 billion in 2019 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 24.1%. MEA is also expected to experience significant growth during the forecast period. For the channel, those who have a strategic client base and have a great understanding of their client’s organization and their business needs, will hold the interest of value add distributor and vendors looking to take these solutions to market.