Complexity causing data centre blues? Hyperconvergence to the rescue

Published on the 23/07/2015 | Written by Donovan Jackson


The physical contents of data centres tend to stealthily expand, becoming increasingly difficult to manage…

There may be help at hand for CIOs looking to simplify data centre infrastructure. Relatively new vendor SimpliVity is pushing its hyperconverged solutions hard with the promise that they can replace the mess of appliances and assorted boxes which tend to characterise the IT environment. Taking the bait, a Brisbane college said its data centre is a little bit less beastly after putting in a pair of hyperconverged devices.

SimpliVity was founded in the United States in 2009 and publicly launched in 2013. The company is finding a ready market for its wares, growing rapidly to become operational in 60 countries, including kicking off operations in Australia and New Zealand around 12 months ago.

But what is hyperconvergence? Simply put, it is a data centre in a box, combining the full data centre stack into a single device. That means servers, virtualisation, storage and storage switches, backup and WAN optimisation appliances, cloud gateway, backup applications, and probably a few more components besides.

However, hyperconvergence as a term isn’t necessarily well recognised just yet.

That was the case for Rory Chapman, director of ICT at Brisbane’s St Andrews Anglican College. Setting out to replace an ageing storage area network, Chapman instead found himself buying two SimpliVity boxes. “Hyperconvergence wasn’t really something we’d heard much about at the time, but our supplier suggested it,” he told iStart.

So what does hyperconvergence mean to him now? “It’s all about bringing in the different layers of compute and storage into one medium and maximising the performance you get out of that equipment. At the same time, it’s about having deduplication happening on the devices, with the backup and disaster recovery solution coming out of the one box.”

Chapman said that with a preponderance of devices in the data centre adding up to complexity and difficulty in management, simplification is what sold it. “This is the critical thing. Despite all the complexity [of a data centre] we went from signing the purchase order to having it on premise and staff trained up and using it in literally a couple of weeks.”

While he said it is early days yet, with the migration completed over the past weekend, initial performance testing is promising. “It shows good gains over the previous configuration; we’ll continue to monitor to get a full grasp on where we’re at.”

Certainly, however, he confirmed that hyperconverged infrastructure has simplified the College’s data centre, “and I can see why it would be appealing to other companies.”

Chapman said the data centre supports some 1200 devices, predominantly laptops and PCs, and has 50 virtual servers across three hosts with a SAN for storage. That’s been migrated to two hyperconverged boxes, with a third planned for offsite disaster recovery.

Hyperconvergence looks set to become more widely recognised, with Gartner anticipating ‘integrated system’ spending to expand at a 24 percent compound annual growth rate from 2013 through 2018, reaching a total value of US$19 billion.

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