EXPERT OPINION
3.
HCI doesn’t work for the
entire enterprise to Edge
Computing spectrum
Many HCI vendors came out the gate and
charged straight at enterprise computing
and the enterprise market is definitely the
one in which to make a lot of noise and be
noticed, whether good or bad. But, with
the rise of Edge Computing, we now see
a greater emphasis on HCI as a vehicle
for Edge infrastructure. Some, but not all,
HCI vendors have the right architecture to
answer the call of Edge Computing.
VSA-based HCI solutions can consume
large amounts of resources, making it
nearly impossible to use on the smaller
form factor appliances needed for Edge
Computing use cases.
With Edge Computing, the cost is key and
requiring resource-rich appliances to run
the storage and hypervisor will increase
the cost of the solution at each Edge site.
If you wanted to install HCI on appliances
with a small resource footprint even
up to 64GB of RAM, using a VSA-based
solution that’s going to consume half
that RAM per node. This is simply not
cost-effective. Instead, HCI solutions
with hypervisor-embedded storage use
fewer resources and can install and run
on smaller appliances efficiently, making
Edge Computing a cost-effective reality.
4.
HCI came into existence in order to
overcome a variety of challenges facing
Issue 11
The most egregious of these challenges,
or at least the one felt most personally
by IT pros, can be the finger-pointing
between vendors when a customer calls for
support. Vendors may spend days or longer
debating who owns the problem while the
customer is left without resolution.
The increased integration and automation
capabilities that can be achieved is a
massive benefit of one single vendor
owning the whole stack. This is especially
clear in HCI solutions that use third-party
hypervisors where, when system updates
need to be performed, they must be done
separately for the hypervisor from the rest
of the system.
Handling these system updates separately
isn’t ideal because any one vendor’s
updates have the potential to cause issues
with other vendor solutions. This is why
system updates across a multi-vendor
THE INCREASED
INTEGRATION AND
AUTOMATION
CAPABILITIES
THAT CAN BE
ACHIEVED IS A
MASSIVE BENEFIT
OF ONE SINGLE
VENDOR OWNING
THE WHOLE STACK.
HCI is a bad idea
because it’s a single-
vendor solution
As the well-known saying goes, ‘don’t put
all your eggs in one basket’. In the same
sense, some don’t like the idea of having
their entire infrastructure stack come from
one vendor. They might want to diversify
their infrastructure portfolio among many
vendors, perhaps to avoid that single
vendor not living up to its promises.
But, while managing risk is important in
running any organisation, business leaders
may not have fully thought through the
risk versus reward.
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traditional virtualisation infrastructure –
challenges which are mostly caused by
combining multiple vendors solutions into
a single stack.
Alan Conboy, Office of the CTO,
Scale Computing
solution have historically been arduous
tasks usually performed over long nights
and weekends.
A properly integrated HCI solution really
will fly in the face of these common
myths, as it will enable IT administrators
to focus on apps and workloads, rather
than leaving them chained to simply
managing infrastructure day-in, day-out. ◊
www.intelligentdatacentres.com