Is IT a bird? Is IT a plane? No! IT is Super-Convergence!

Hyper-converged systems have already dealt a serious blow to the evil data centre silos. But as companies resort to more outsourced services, a new threat is emerging – cloud silos.

Hyper-convergence is the new data centre superhero. After a period of close observation, companies have thrown themselves body and soul into the battle against silos and complexity. As noted by CRN, based on IDC this technology is growing explosively in data centres.

"The hyper-converged market skyrocketed to nearly $1.5 billion in sales during the second quarter of 2018, up a whopping 78% year over year", writes journalist Mark Haranas, going on to emphasize the success of the technologies promoted by Dell EMC. "The leaders are clear, with Dell and Nutanix accounting for nearly half of the worldwide hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) revenue."

Out of the door of the data centre, in through the window of the cloud – “Up, up and away!”

Why such huge success? This new ally has managed to bring down a long-standing and fierce adversary of IT infrastructure: silos. While traditional architectures linking servers to storage arrays clearly remain suitable for many scenarios, hyper-convergence has offered a new option that is being adopted by IT departments for a growing number of workloads. Its superpower? Virtualization.

Thanks to virtualization, hyper-converged systems offer IT managers a simple solution for bringing together processing, storage and network resources in a single environment and managing them centrally rather than separately. This saves time for administrators, generates better quality of service for users and significant savings for businesses.

But today, a new threat is emerging for IT systems. "We assume that all businesses will need to adopt a certain amount of both public and private cloud computing and so be essentially hybrid," analyses Adrian Bridgewater in Forbes. "But we can also say that these customers will have now refined their use of cloud computing to get some of what they need from one public cloud provider and some of it from another - we call that shopping around deployment approach; multi-cloud."

Organisations are thus exploiting a wider and wider variety of cloud-hosted solutions and managing these multiple services individually can generate real complexity. Remind you of anything? Silos are back.

A new weapon: the meta-hypervisor – “This sounds like a job for Super-Convergence”

This is where hyper-convergence comes in, under its not-so-secret identity: VxRail. The only preconfigured and pretested VMware HCI appliance on the market, the VxRail solution is now in the front line of the response to the multi-cloud challenge. How? By offering native integration of VMware Cloud and VMware Cloud Assembly services.

In concrete terms, with a VxRail platform, a company starts by unifying the management of its internal infrastructure, setting up its own private cloud with self-service resources. The bridges built within the infrastructure then create a hybrid dimension, drawing resources from the public cloud for certain workloads and exploiting internal capacity for others.

As explained by TechTarget, "customers can manage clusters in their own data centres and clusters running in VMware Cloud on AWS from the same interface in vCenter."

The announcement of VMware Cloud Assembly at VMWorld closes the circle. With this new layer of orchestration, the company no longer thinks in terms of platforms but of needs. The IT manager defines a set of policies, each offering a different level of service.

When a new application needs to be deployed, it is just associated with a predefined policy. Cloud Assembly then takes care of allocating the right resources to the application, whether they are in an on-premises VMware environment or a public AWS or Azure cloud.

Cloud Assembly acts as a kind of meta-hypervisor that adds a further level of abstraction on top of multi-cloud. The administrator can access all the resources available via a single interface. Another line of defense against the evil silos!

“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap evil silos in a single bound …”

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