Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Hyperconvergence is one of the coolest-sounding buzzwords of the modern cloud era. It means what it sounds like, but not really. Your first thought is all your disparate systems and functions will finally run together as one smooth unit: your desktop computers, your employees' mobile phones, the Apple iPads you have around, the Wi-Fi in your office, the servers on the rack or shelf running your custom CRM and billing software, the old noisy network switch and the shiny new one that takes five minutes to boot, your firewall with the security software subscription and VPN licenses, the phone system and voicemail, and A/V system in the conference room, the big printer/scanner with everyone's e-mail address in its address book, your Office 365 subscription and mail hosting, the Adobe software everyone had to create a login account to use, the Google Drive and Dropbox so many employees signed up for, and the endless software updates for everything.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do any of that. In reality, it's a term that applies only to the back office, where your servers run, or in a larger datacenter.

The full term is Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). HCI is deployed as a hardware appliance, something that looks like a server. But it is meant to be an entire IT system in a box. That is, it includes:

• Virtualized servers that can act as domain controllers, database servers, application servers, etc.;
• High-performance network storage you would normally see in a separate appliance;
• Virtual network that enables network segmentation and virtual firewalls for traffic management and access control, all through software alone running on the hypervisor.

The various components are what you see in a datacenter hosting a high performance software application. Data may be segmented into different tiers depending on access control or performance needs, with the data that must be served quickly on the more expensive SAN and attached via more expensive network equipment. Network segmentation and security is implemented to enable users to access the front end of the application and log in, but not to be able to connect to the storage appliances directly. Firewalls can monitor traffic and observe unusual behavior and send alerts to administrators or block access. Additional software runs at the hypervisor level, such as a management console and data protection (backup) applications.

It was weird to see these come out as the cloud era was burgeoning. See, the cloud is all about scalability and flexibility. An HCI appliance ties everything inside a box, and it's typically acquired as an all-in-one solution by a single vendor. The reason for this is it was first offered for relatively stable tasks in a datacenter, such as for a virtual desktop (VDI) host that is designated to run only so many virtual desktops for a given number of employees on a routine schedule. It was also marketed as an easy way to deploy an IT system in a remote branch location with a fixed number of users performing routine tasks and who need the performance of local servers as opposed to accessing the company's resources via long-distance links or the Internet only.

Since an HCI appliance is all virtualized, naturally it can be linked to cloud VMs. Thus we saw new HCI offerings running VMware with the idea that you can deploy tiered applications on premises and then enjoy the flexibility of linking with a hybrid cloud offerings and managing it all under the same vCenter domain. Wtih this approach, the HCI appliance can handle more flexible workloads, offloading to the cloud when its capacity is exceeded during times of high demand.

This doesn't seem to have caught on as would the fantasy-based description of hyperconvergence at the top of this article would! Certainly not for businesses with a single location and no VDI. But, as an IT manager, it's good to know that these offerings, whether one would be suitable or not for a given client, exist, and where they are positioned in the market.