When the concept of the cloud was first introduced, there was no discussion of building your own cloud.
The whole appeal of the cloud, in the beginning anyway, was that someone else had gone to the trouble of building out a massive IT environment that you could now subscribe to as a service. No hardware to manage, no software to update, no vendors to police. No wonder the concept caught on.
Then came converged infrastructure, and with it a lot of those original pain points, while they didn’t completely disappear, were mitigated. There was much less hardware to manage, software could be controlled through a single pane of glass (the hypervisor), and the buck stopped with a single vendor. Suddenly, the idea of building your own cloud was no longer out of the question. With converged infrastructure, you could build your own scalable, virtual IT environment. And so the idea of the private cloud was born.
Private clouds, however, still represent a physical hardware environment that needs to be managed, whereas public clouds are invisible—you literally don’t see them. In other words, there’s still a significant gap between how much hardware and software you need to manage in a private cloud environment with converged systems versus a public cloud. But that’s changing with the arrival of hyperconverged infrastructure.
With hyperconvergence, IT systems are simplified down to their atomic level, relatively speaking: a single, Intel-based server. All of the storage, computing, and networking software is virtualized, stored together on units of a single server, and managed by a single hypervisor. So instead of building with expensive vBlocks, for example, the IT environment is reduced down to even smaller blocks of less expensive servers.
Some vendors have taken to calling hyperconvergence an invisible technology. While that’s a little misleading, hyperconvergence does bring IT departments closer to the “invisible” experience of the public cloud in several important ways:
- It virtualizes the storage area network, so instead of racks of storage devices you have a virtual SAN that can be scaled and managed more easily;
- It lowers hardware costs and reduces opex through easier management and less complexity;
- It enables small and medium businesses to build highly scalable systems but start at a lower entry price point—similar to the public cloud;
- It allows enterprises to quickly move legacy apps into a cloud environment without a lot of heavy lifting and minimal, if any, disruption.
There’s little doubt that hyperconvergence will play an important role in the next wave of IT innovation. IDC predicts that the hyperconverged market will double to $1.5 billion in the next year. A lot of that market will be geared toward private cloud deployments and applications such as virtual desktop infrastructure, which themselves bring further consolidation of hardware and software. We may yet the see the day when you don’t see IT infrastructure in the business, just the impact that it has on productivity and revenue.
Stay tuned for the next blog in my hyperconvergence series, How Hyperconvergence Is Driving the Old Data Center into Extinction. ▪
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