Infrastructure maintaining and upgrading their own infrastructure, and of course a desire to have the right amount of capacity available at all times,” he said. Hall also said that local organisations considering integrated infrastructure aren’t focusing specifically on HCI. These organisations may also be looking at converged infrastructure (CI) solutions, he said, “or CI software only solutions which can give them more flexibility with the hardware components. It will still be a case of purchasing the right sort of systems to be fit for purpose, and at an appropriate
“One reason [companies adopt HCI] is so that they don’t have to worry about acquiring, managing, maintaining and upgrading their own infrastructure.” — Peter Hall, IBRS use — but the vendor doesn’t support that hypervisor, and may not support it for some time. “Issues like this may drive an organisation to consider a CI software only approach, or a traditional CI offering.” Along similar lines, the Gartner report ‘Beware the ‘Myth-Conceptions’
infrastructure leaders need to consider in relation to HCI solutions: “What are the form factors, configurations and management control points, and are they delivered as interchangeable components? Are the components disaggregated so that they can be upgraded on individual technology life
investment level.”
Surrounding Hyperconverged Integrated Systems’, penned by Gartner analysts George J Weiss, Julia Palmer and Andrew Butler, nominates several questions that
cycles and integrated for maximum performance and efficiency — for example, solid-state drives (SSDs) versus hard-disk drives (HDDs), non-volatile RAM
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED There are several issues that organisations should consider when buying or implementing HCI. According to IBRS’s Hall, the first issue involves looking at the market and deciding what sort of solution will best suit the organisation. “HCI may not even be the answer. HCI vendors typically supply appliances that package up all the vendor’s components: servers, storage, networking, virtualisation and the vendor’s software in the one box. The goal is of course rapid and simple deployment,” he said. “Alternatively, some vendors are offering a software only approach to CI, which can provide a cheaper and perhaps more flexible option, but probably with more effort required in the deployment versus a fully integrated HCI.” Organisations considering HCI solutions should also cast their eyes to the future, and ask questions about upgrades and flexibility. “How do the specific offerings get upgraded? How rigid is the architecture and how flexible is it, especially if a new innovation comes out that might be important to the organisation,” Hall said. He suggested a hypothetical case where an organisation deploys an HCI solution, and later down the track a new hypervisor is released that the organisation wishes to
6 | BIZTECH REVIEW Q1 2017
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