Infrastructure: Hyperconverged (HCI)

Intro

With over 70% of server operations being virtualized, virtualization is in full swing. As demands of current workloads change, data centers are increasingly turning to Hyperconverged Infrastructures (HCI) that offer simplicity of deployment and maintenance for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), as well as Enterprise ROBO and Edge environments.

Problem

Dedicated storage hardware, often in the form of SAN or NAS appliances, are common storage solutions. However, these approaches have their drawbacks. While dedicated NAS solutions are generally more cost-effective and simpler than SANs, they still require significant monitoring and management, especially as storage needs grow. Meanwhile, SAN hardware introduces additional costs and complexity. Whether a dedicated server or proprietary SAN equipment, its upgrade and scalability options can be limited.

Dedicated storage hardware also introduces significant OpEx increases over time. With every new hardware release, vendors often increase service contract prices for legacy hardware support and may cease support for some hardware by announcing its EOL (End Of Life), forcing customers to buy brand new hardware, even if the old one still worked fine for them.

Network communication can add latency to I/O operations. Although modern high-performance networks (like 25/40/100 GbE and NVMe-oF) have significantly mitigated this issue, it still remains a consideration for low and mid-range storage appliances.

What’s more important, training dedicated staff to manage hardware storage solutions adds additional strain to SMBs, which may not afford the cost and might rely on just one person to manage their entire IT infrastructure.

Solution

StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is a software-defined storage that eliminates the need for expensive dedicated storage hardware (SAN, NAS or DAS). StarWind Virtual SAN achieves this by having the software installed on the same hardware as the hypervisor, be it Hyper-V, vSphere, or Proxmox VE. This provides multiple benefits over a dedicated hardware solution:

• 100% uptime is achieved by replicating data in real-time between all virtualization hosts in the cluster.
• Virtual infrastructure performance is dramatically increased as the hypervisor reads from all cluster nodes. High-speed replication network links (with NVMe over TCP and RDMA) are used to replicate writes to the partner hypervisor with ultra-low latency and minimal CPU overhead.
• StarWind Virtual SAN is reasonably priced, does not require any special knowledge, and gets up and running in minutes. All heavy lifting associated with maintaining the Virtual SAN-centric infrastructure is offloaded to StarWind engineers.

Conclusion

StarWind’s Virtual SAN is hardware agnostic, allowing customers to upgrade their hardware whenever needed, resulting in a cost-effective, evergreen HCI solution. If there is a need for new hardware, StarWind hyperconverged appliances come fully pre-configured and fine-tuned, saving you from the complexities of choosing hardware components and tinkering with configuration parameters.

Unbound by the restrictions of physical SAN appliances, the Virtual SAN is highly flexible and provides smooth storage expansion. StarWind engineers provide a bespoke service package that includes migration, installation, and support, making the resulting solution accessible to any system administrator and saving time for more important tasks and duties.