What Does Converged Infrastructure CI Hyperconverged HCI Mean to Storage I/O?

What Does CI and HCI Mean to Storage I/O?

server storage I/O trends

Updated 1/17/2018

Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) along with Cluster or Cloud In Box (CIB) are popular trend topics that have gained both industry and customer adoption as part of data infrastructures. Data Infrastructures exists to support business, cloud and information technology (IT) among other applications that transform data into information or services. The fundamental role of legacy and software defined data infrastructures (SDDI) is to provide a platform environment for applications and data that is resilient, flexible, scalable, agile, efficient as well as cost-effective.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure overview

Business, IT Information, Data and other Infrastructures

Put another way, data infrastructures exist to protect, preserve, process, move, secure and serve data as well as their applications for information services delivery. Technologies that make up data infrastructures include hardware, software, cloud or managed services, servers, storage, I/O and networking along with people, processes, policies along with various tools spanning legacy, software-defined virtual, containers and cloud.

As part of data infrastructures, CI, CIB and HCI enable simplified deployment of resources (servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software) across different environments. What do these various approaches (CI, HCI, CiB) mean for a hyperconverged (and converged) storage environment? What are the key concerns and considerations related specifically to storage? Most importantly, how do you know that you’re asking the right questions in order to get to the right answers?

Join me on March 15 at 10:00 AM PT for a live (free) webinar organized by the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF). In this webinar (What Does Hyperconverged Mean to Storage) I will be joined by SNIA ESF chair John Kim of Mellanox to discuss moving beyond the hype to prepare, plan and make decisions for deploying CI, CiB and HCI.

Some of the server, storage I/O and related topics we will be discussing during the webcast include:

  • What are the storage considerations for CI, CIB and HCI
  • Fast applications and fast servers need fast server storage I/O
  • Fast NVM storage including NVMe, flash and SSD
  • Networking and server storage I/O considerations
  • How to avoid aggravation-causing aggregation (bottlenecks)
  • Aggregated vs. desegregated vs. hybrid converged
  • Planning, comparing, benchmarking and decision-making
  • Data protection, management and east-west I/O traffic
  • Application and server I/O north-south traffic
  • Where To Learn More

  • SNIA ESF organized webinar on BrightTalk March 15, 2017
  • StorageIO.com (events, news, tips, resources) and StorageIOblog.com
  • Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC)
  • Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC)
  • Data Infrastructure Primer and Overview (Its Whats Inside The Data Center)
  • Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

    What This All Means

    For many environments some form of converged, desegregated, aggregated or hyper-converged solution or approach will part of their data infrastructures. Join the SNIA ESF folks and me on March 15, 2017 (bring your questions) to discuss CI and HCI storage I/O topics, trends, technologies and themes.

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

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