These days, hyperconverged solutions become increasingly prevalent in small- and medium-size datacenters. And, there’s no wonder: hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) provide decent reliability and set of features typically associated with large datacenters… but for less money! So, why pay more?

We’ve all heard the expression “time is money” and you can’t put it better when talking about IT. Most businesses’ success and efficiency depends on their IT infrastructure. For real. We all want our applications to run as fast as possible and roll them out in a matter of minutes. Moreover, the more data you have, the worse the consequences are in the event of its loss. So, companies want to get back all their data and get it back as soon as possible in case something happens. That’s called Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and the shorter they are, the better it is for your company. Finally, as your business grows, you want to provision it with the right amount of storage and capacity and in case you need to open another branch office, you want to deploy an IT infrastructure shortly without spending months for building it.

Comparing HCI Storage Performance: DRBD/LINSTOR vs Ceph vs StarWind VSAN. Dive into a detailed performance comparison of DRBD/LINSTOR, Ceph, and StarWind VSAN on Proxmox VE.

As time goes on, fewer and fewer people tend to rely on cumbersome SANs. It doesn’t mean that they have become obsolete; it’s just that many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) simply don’t require all the broad specter of services and resources that a storage area network system can offer. That makes perfect sense: if you can farewell with a less complicated and resource-hungry configuration – why pay more? Virtual SANs have become the newfound Holy Grail of small infrastructures. And why not? They offer software-defined storage solutions that support HCI systems and leave external shared storage out of the picture. An introduction of virtual SAN solutions to the market has changed a lot, opening the way for simple storage configurations that can provide maximum possible performance with minimum possible resources required, respectively. Since the market has emerged, it didn’t take long to recognize the leaders, which are StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) and VMware virtual SAN (vSAN). All else being equal, neither is considered better or worse. However, each IT environment is, in a way, unique. I don’t need to tell you about the multitude of configurations out there. So, with the diversity of HCI systems and hardware requirements in mind, this begets a question: are these solutions really giving away an equal performance, all things considered?

Converged infrastructure (CI) simplifies IT with pre-configured systems, while hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) optimizes resource utilization through a unified software-defined approach. Still unsure what to choose?

Monitoring an HCI can be a real pain because of having to shuffle through multiple UIs, each responsible for a different stat. That’s why HCI vendors continuously aim to perfect their options for control. To simplify your Azure Stack HCI monitoring, you can enable Azure Monitor via Windows Admin Center, with its in-built rules, or create your own.

Azure Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure is Microsoft’s attempt to build a hybrid HCI solution that’s aimed to be an everything-in-one. Among others, the new release will have simplified deployment via Windows Admin Center and Azure Portal, a specialized host operating OS, improved resync duration for S2D, and a one-click stack upgrade.

Having actual physical resources today as a foundation of IT infrastructure starts to look like an extravagant decision, to say the least. Why bother with extra resources, if you can make things happen faster, better, with less hardware footprint? However, virtualization development is far from the end. The latest idea on the horizon is the concept of composable infrastructures, which is more complicated than it sounds.

What is RDMA and why do we like it.