Hyperconverged Infrastructure:
The Future of Enterprise Data Centers

What is Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) represents a revolutionary technical architecture that seamlessly integrates computing, storage, and networking resources. Its core objective is to consolidate the hardware and software resources within the data center, offering a highly integrated, scalable, and easily manageable solution. By converging computing, storage, and network functions into a unified hardware platform and software framework, HCI enables integrated management and automated operation and maintenance of the entire data center. This not only reduces the interdependencies between various devices but also achieves efficient integrated management. Moreover, HCI's high degree of integration, scalability, and ease of management make it the preferred solution for modern enterprise data center architectures.

Defining Hyperconvergence

While there are some variations in the definition of hyper-converged architecture among different vendors, the article "The Fundamentals of Hyper-converged Infrastructure" published by ActualTech Media provides a widely accepted definition:

• Hardware: Hyper-converged architecture consolidates independent computing, storage, and network hardware in large enterprise IT systems, integrating them into individual server nodes and combining multiple hardware devices.

• Software: All system resources in the hyper-converged architecture are managed through a unified shared software management interface and are shared with upper-level applications.

Beyond this definition, the general public's understanding of hyper-convergence architecture is that it provides a unified management platform that transforms DAS (Direct Attached Storage) into a resource pool, eliminating the need for storage arrays. However, it's important to note that the primary goal of hyper-convergence architecture is to simplify data center management and eliminate the issue of discrete data center management. The elimination of storage arrays is just one of the more evident features of hyper-convergence architecture.

In simple terms, hyper-converged infrastructure involves running server virtualization software and storage virtualization software on business nodes. It aggregates all computing nodes into a unified virtual computing and virtual storage resource pool through the network, providing the IT infrastructure required by the data center in the form of a resource pool.

In addition to computing and storage virtualization, hyper-converged infrastructure can also integrate network virtualization, security virtualization, and upper-layer business application services. The industry now generally agrees that software-defined virtualized computing and distributed storage are the minimum set of components for hyper-converged infrastructure.

On each hyper-converged node, virtualization software and distributed storage software are deployed. The local disks on the nodes are aggregated into a unified distributed storage resource pool through the storage network, providing storage infrastructure services to the upper-level virtual machines in the form of a virtual abstraction layer. The unified management platform of the hyper-converged infrastructure offers centralized configuration and monitoring management services for both physical and virtual resources, enabling rapid deployment and streamlined operation and maintenance of IT infrastructure.

The Need for Hyperconvergence

The emergence of hyper-converged architecture is aimed at addressing some of the challenges and limitations in traditional data center architecture. The differences in hardware between hyper-converged architecture and traditional enterprise private cloud architecture are illustrated in Figure 2. The main advantages of hyperconverged architecture are as follows:

• Simplified Management: HCI reduces dependencies between distributed devices by integrating management and automating operations, significantly simplifying the management workload of IT infrastructure.
• Improved Efficiency: The integrated nature of HCI allows for more efficient management and allocation of resources, enhancing the overall operating efficiency of the IT system.
• Enhanced Scalability: HCI's modular design enables system resources to be easily expanded by simply adding more nodes to increase computing power and storage capacity.
• Easy Deployment and Maintenance: Compared with traditional discrete architecture, HCI's integrated design reduces the complexity of deployment and maintenance, accelerating the launch of IT projects.
• Reduced Costs: By consolidating hardware and software resources, HCI helps reduce an enterprise's total cost of ownership (TCO).

As digital transformation continues to deepen, it is foreseeable that hyper-converged architecture will become the core architecture of future enterprise data centers. The introduction of hyper-converged architecture not only improves the work efficiency of enterprise IT departments but also provides guarantees for enterprise innovation and development, as well as technical support for enterprises to gain a competitive edge.