The following table lists the confluence of technologies that has spurred the growth and development of hyperconverged infrastructure.
Table 1. Enabling technologies for HCI
Technology | Description |
Software-defined storage | Abstracts the storage intelligence from the underlying storage infrastructure. Virtualizes direct-attach storage into a shared pool. Automates provisioning and load balancing. Allows a business to increase available storage resources, both capacity and processing power, by adding entire nodes (e.g. a server with storage software and media) to a cluster. The resulting cluster of nodes in turn acts as a single pool of storage capacity. |
Virtualization | Abstracts compute and network functions. Enables physical resources to be shared. Improves utilization, mobility and security. |
x86 servers | High performance processors, large memory. Flash media delivers consistent, predictable performance. |
Solid-state storage | Uses solid-state drives (most frequently various types of flash memory) to store data. This storage can reside in a storage controller or in a server, but for this assessment we are considering use cases limited to tiered and All-Flash storage arrays. In hybrid arrays, a portion of the drives in the array are solid-state and house the most active data on the array. In All-Flash arrays, all drives in the array are solid-state. |
High-speed networks | Connects nodes together to create cluster. Enables HCI to deliver IOPS and reduced latencies. Connect applications to users |