What is a Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)?

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) provides compute and storage unified into a single, scalable management platform.

It is a software-defined IT infrastructure that virtualizes all of the elements of a traditional, hardware-defined data center (storage, compute, networking, and management).

The intelligent software of an HCI is capable of creating flexible building blocks to replace legacy infrastructure.

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How Does HCI Work?

HCIs unify data center infrastructure components – compute, storage, and networking – into an abstracted layer of available IT resources.

Through virtualization, hyperconverged infrastructure converges data center server hardware with locally, direct-attached storage media (HDD, SSD, NVMe) powered by a distributed software layer. This now single pool of virtualized resources can then be distributed as needed.

This distributed platform running on industry-standard commodity servers replaces complex and expensive legacy infrastructure.

The pool of resources can be scaled and applied as required by the assignment.

The Core Components of a Hyperconverged Infrastructure

An HCI platform typically features four tightly integrated software components.

• Storage Virtualization
• Compute Virtualization
• Networking Virtualization
• Advanced Management and Automation.

Benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure

• Consolidating network fabrics to ethernet
• Unified & fully integrated compute storage platforms
• Simplified Management
• Improved workload performance 
• Greater reliability due to cluster and OEM integrations

HCI Considerations

• Power consumption is typically higher based on workload
• Networking Bandwidth
• Workload use cases 
• Knowing your storage growth year-over-year
• OEM compatibility considerations

With a proven track record of building and deploying hyperconverged infrastructures, IDTec looks forward to helping your organization meet its specific modernization requirements.

Reach out and IDTec and our OEM partners will work with you to ensure all your requirements are met for mission success!