Article Moving to a Hyperconverged Infrastructure?
By Insight Editor / 27 Apr 2018 / Topics: Modern infrastructure Data center Storage
Evaluating your ROI or truly understanding your cost of ownership of hardware in your data centers has always been difficult. Even though the convergence of technologies reduces the need for siloed IT teams, it is still laden with inefficiencies around buying infrastructure, gaining approvals and predicting business needs. This weakens the hyperconvergence adoption for the future as businesses are expecting IT to be more agile and have capacity on demand. A good solution to this, is you have to have a hybrid approach where cloud is accessible to ensure business demands are being met.
Sizing your hyperconverged environment is all about knowing your organization's needs for storage. Which is another very hard thing to predict in today’s world. Because hyperconvergence is so easy to set up, it may lead you to deploy it in scenarios where it may not fit. For example, because compute and storage resources are sharing the same appliance, it can limit storage capacity. If you don’t understand the storage requirements of your applications, performance can suffer.
Below are the top 3 mistakes we see when setting up a hyperconverged infrastructure:
- The customer didn’t invest the time to research all aspects of the solution. Due diligence is required to know how to manage hyperconverged after the initial install. How is storage capacity calculated and how can you increase it if needed? How does high availability work in relationship to the number of nodes in the cluster, did you buy enough nodes, and what are the guidelines for adding nodes? What do you need to do to backup the nodes, and are there backup options that may be included?
- The customer’s environment wasn’t ready for a hyperconverged solution. Primarily, make sure the network is solid and is ready to handle your hyperconverged requirements. For some customers, this may be their first virtual storage cluster so there can be somethings to consider.
- The customer doesn’t understand the hyperconverged support process. Don’t wait for a crisis to discover that your support may not meet your requirements. You need to understand who handles what and make sure the response time aligns with your service level agreements for the corresponding applications.
In conclusion, invest time to understand how to best manage a hyperconverged environment before investing.
