So you finally on the journey to implementing a Hyper Converged Infrastructure... Now what?

 The journey to a Software Defined Data Centre starts now.

Hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) is becoming more main stream. HCI is a subset of the complete Software Defined Data Centre; with the major advantage of targeting low hanging fruit within Data Centre’s; it does this by allowing optimised operation and availability by allowing turnkey appliances to be operational in a short span of time, whilst not requiring advanced technical skills that most customers do not have access to. However as great as any technology is,mind the speed bumps and ensure that they don’t trip you up on your pursuit of implementing a Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC).

An overview of the current HCI landscape

For the past number of years speaking to enterprise customers about implementing HCI has been likened to pushing water uphill. That mindset is changing as understanding increases, and perceptions change. I have often said that the biggest resistance to change is people. However when a technology fundamentally changes business process, simplifies infrastructure and gives IT the ability to become a profit centre, the adoption of the technology happens despite the “neighsayers” As a point of reference think back to the resistance when we as IT professionals moved from the adoption of physical servers to virtual servers, and presently; virtual machines are the norm for 90% of x86 deployments globally.

However I believe that too many sales people are doing an injustice to the way they are selling and expecting organizations to adopt HCI, these are include but are not limited to:

1.   HCI is being sold as a rip and replace – this must change as it should be sold as a transitional technology

2.   HCI is being sold as the answer to every IT challenge- It is important to remember HCI is not a single product but a reference architecture The beauty of  HCI is that HCI has an offering for every wallet size and suits most enterprise applications. Understand the customer requirements before leading with a particular product

3.   HCI is being sold as a SAN replacement product - This is a misnomer and a brief history lesson will serve us well. No technology is perfect and sometimes despite the best intentions the new technology can cause unexpected problems in the data centre, think back to the phenomena of Virtual Machine sprawl, in the heyday of virtualization, it was not uncommon for companies to go from 50 physical servers to 75-100 VM’s purely based on the fact that it was “so easy” to deploy VM’s; and without proper governance in place, it took organizations longer to realize their Return On Investment  and Total Cost of Ownership due to increased license costs and the complexities of managing a larger VM estate

Why selling HCI as a SAN replacement introduces increased costs

I feel that this is such an important thought that to do it justice, it deserves its own heading. One of the unexpected problems that this sales technique introduces is; similar to the problem of what virtual machine sprawl introduced. The challenge is that most organizations have a plethora of storage in their environment so positioning HCI as a SAN replacement means that one ends up have to propose so many additional nodes to take care of the storage that one ends up with more compute and memory which becomes unused; and this drives up licensing costs; data centre floor space requirements; and of course the price. This is one of the arguments that is often faced in the field that “HCI is a great technology but it is crazy expensive”

So what is the solution?

Whilst there is no doubt that HCI addresses most of the complexities that organizations wrestle with on a daily basis, it is not a perfect solution in addressing large organisations storage challenges, the answer is quite simple, the drive to a truly SDDC consists of moving all traditional building blocks namely compute, storage and networking into a software defined state. HCI takes care of the compute requirements and software defined storage (SDS) should now be positioned as a complimentary technology when a HCI solution is proposed, this drives down the number of nodes that need to be positioned to address the storage requirement of the SDDC. Software Defined Storage is also a reference architecture; with various solutions at different price points; be it a SDS solutions that provides; file and block storage; object storage; or offerings that allows customers to virtualize all existing storage regardless of the vendor into a condensed SDS offering

Closing Thought

Don’t allow Software Defined Storage to become the new “pushing water uphill” technology. Embrace it and remember once the compute is software defined and the storage is software defined to wrap a layer of software defined networking around the solution is a relatively simple task,

The age old adage of “picking the right tool for the right job” becomes more important than ever. And the most important process before suggesting any “tool” to our clients; is to understand what the “job” is? Get this right; and 2018 could be the year that the SDDC becomes a reality.