George Crump

The HCI Disaster Recovery Problem

by Leave a Comment

While hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) catches the attention of many IT professionals, the HCI Disaster Recovery problem, while seldom talked about, could be its greatest weakness. Proper HCI protection and disaster recovery typically require a separate infrastructure with its own software and hardware. This requirement complicates a critical process, creating a high risk of failure while dramatically increasing costs.

What is the HCI Disaster Recovery Problem

Part of the HCI Disaster Recovery problem is that most data protection solutions have to protect HCI architectures as traditional three-tier architectures. They back up through the hypervisor and to a separate storage system. That separate storage system is often scale-out in nature, so you have nodes backing up nodes.

Disaster recovery requires the same HCI configuration in the remote site as in the primary site. Also, the deduplication capabilities that most HCI vendors provide are bolt-on, which they deliver years after the HCI software first comes to market. As a result, it can’t deduplicate across HCI clusters. If the organization has multiple HCI clusters in one or more locations, it must transmit all the data to the disaster recovery site.

The HCI Disaster Recovery Problem Triples Inefficiency

HCI is incredibly inefficient. The inefficiency is the result of forcing customers to expand with like nodes. If all you need is more processing power, you can’t easily add more advanced CPUs or GPUs to the existing cluster. Even if you use the same processor type, you can’t buy nodes that are primarily processors; you must buy additional storage to match the other nodes in the cluster.

Backing up an HCI architecture, because conventional wisdom is to back up to a scale-out storage system, means you are doubling the inefficiency of the infrastructure. That scale-out backup storage suffers from the same inefficiency as scale-out HCI except in reverse. With scale-out backup storage, you are dragging along, and paying for, more processing power than you probably need just to get capacity.

Making sure an HCI architecture is protected from disaster triples its inefficiency. Forcing identical nodes in the disaster recovery site means that the HCI solution duplicates the same inefficiency at the disaster recovery site as in the primary location. Suppose you are replicating the backup infrastructure in addition to the HCI infrastructure because you don’t trust HCI replication. In that case, you are quadrupling the cost of data protection and disaster recovery costs.

The HCI Ransomware Recovery Problem

Ransomware is another form of disaster. It is unique in that the data center is still operational, but users and applications are not. HCI also has a ransomware recovery problem. HCI solutions do not harden their software. Since most are mostly Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions that claim to be HCI, they run as a virtual machine (VM) within a hypervisor like VMware or Hyper-V. They are at the mercy of that hypervisor’s ransomware hardening.

Running storage as a VM castrates a vital line of ransomware defense, snapshots. Recovering quickly from a ransomware attack requires frequent, immutable snapshots. Given the latest ransomware attack profiles, IT must retain these snapshots for months. Storage running as a VM suffers from the same virtualization tax as other VMs. As a result, they can only keep a few snapshots before needing to expel them for performance reasons.

Solving the HCI Disaster Recovery Problem

Solving the HCI disaster recovery problem requires rethinking HCI. First, the IT stack (compute, storage, networking) needs to be integrated, not layers. At VergeIO, we call this rotating the stack, which removes the layers and creates a cohesive data center operating system (DCOS), VergeOS. It is a single piece of software, not dozens. We call it Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Next week we’ll be hosting a live webinar that compares HCI to UCI. Register here.

Solve The HCI Disaster Recovery problem with replication, snapshots and deduplication.
Solve The HCI Disaster Recovery Problem

While we support external backup applications, VergeOS includes built-in data protection and replication capabilities. They, like everything else, are integrated into the core code, so they operate with minimal overhead. You can execute immutable snapshots frequently and retain those snapshots indefinitely without impacting performance.

VergeOS also supports different node types, so the disaster recovery site can use different hardware than the primary. Also, VergeOS supports global, inline deduplication so that if you are replicating from multiple sites to a central disaster recovery location, it only replicates the unique data from each site. With VergeOS, transfers are fast, and disaster recovery storage costs are negligible.

The HCI Disaster Recovery Problem Creates Compromise

Because of cost and complexity, many organizations compromise when establishing their disaster recovery site. The enforcement of like hardware doubles server acquisition costs, and the lack of efficient data storage can triple or more storage costs.

The most common compromise is using the backup infrastructure as the disaster recovery solution. Backup software can replicate and even deduplicate data, but when it stores that data on the remote site, it is in the backup software’s format. It isn’t operational. If there is a disaster, the organization must wait, potentially days or hours, for restore job completion before allowing access.

Using backup as the disaster recovery solution also makes testing and practicing the recovery process much more complicated and time-consuming. The result is less frequent testing and no practice. The reason most disaster recoveries fail is a lack of testing and experience.

Eliminating Disaster Recovery Compromise

VergeOS provides no-compromise disaster recovery. The costs at the disaster recovery site are easily controlled thanks to node flexibility and data deduplication. The data at the DR site is live and ready to instantiate at a moment’s notice.

Networking is also a source of disaster recovery failures. Misconfigurations, improper remapping, and incompatible hardware between locations can cause many problems. VergeOS integrates software-defined networking and alleviates these problems, ensuring that newly recovered data centers are easily accessible by users and applications.

Testing, thanks to our snapshot functionality, is also easy. Thanks to our Virtual Data Center (VDC) technology, a snapshot of an entire data center can be made in seconds. That snapshot can then be mounted for recovery testing purposes. Deduplication ensures that the only growth in capacity is changes made to the disaster recovery dataset while the test is executing.

Data protection and disaster recovery have been problematic since the dawn of the data center. Continuing to try the same old thing (replace backup software, replace backup storage, try to find a better replication solution, pray the network works) isn’t the answer. With VergeOS, we start at the source of the problem the production infrastructure itself.

Learn More:

  1. Register for our live webinar, “Beyond HCI — The Next Step in Data Center Infrastructure Evolution.” During the webinar, VergeIO’s Principal Systems Engineer, Aaron Reed, and I will compare HCI and UCI in-depth. I’m even going to talk Aaron into giving you a live demonstration of the solution of VergeOS in action.
  2. Subscribe to our Digital Learning Guide, “Does HCI Really Deliver?”
  3. Sign-up for a Test Drive – Try it yourself, and run our software in your labs.

The Full Value of Scale

by Leave a Comment

For data centers, realizing the full value of scale requires a single infrastructure that can scale in multiple dimensions and address multiple use cases. Customers today can select a legacy, single-dimension, scale-out strategy like hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). However, they then experience scale-out sprawl because they need a scale-out architecture for production applications, a scale-out architecture for unstructured data, and a scale-out architecture for data protection. These designs will never enable customers to benefit from the full value of scale.

As we discussed in our on-demand webinar, “How to Eliminate the Data Center Scale Problem,”, the solution is a single infrastructure, not multiple infrastructures. That infrastructure must scale in all three dimensions, not just “out.” It also must allow incremental adoption because most organizations won’t “clean sweep” their data centers.

The Full Value of Scaling Large Instead of Out

While hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendors claim to scale out, most customers find that they, for technical or practical reasons, can only “scale medium.” Despite claiming to converge virtualization, networking, and storage, most HCI solutions are software-defined storage (SDS) running as a virtual machine (VM). They are stacking the three tiers (compute, storage, networking) instead of converging them.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering the Enterprise

For virtualization, these products typically force you to pay separately for a third-party hypervisor like VMware ESXi, or bundle an open-source version, with little to no optimization. When it comes to networking, most HCI solutions provide little to no functionality and instead rely on the often limited capabilities of the hypervisor. The result of borrowing and bundling code creates a burden on the infrastructure, which worsens as IT adds additional nodes. IT professionals refer to this overhead as the virtualization tax. As a result, most HCI infrastructures only support one workload and don’t typically scale that architecture beyond six to eight nodes.

Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI), instead of stacking layers of code on top of each other within each node, rotates the stack into a single layer, creating a cohesive piece of data center operating software. VergeOS, for example, is a UCI solution architected so that virtualization, networking services, and storage services are all integrated, almost eliminating the virtualization tax. UCI’s efficiency can scale to hundreds of nodes without wasting resources so that even the largest enterprise can consolidate all their workloads onto a single infrastructure.

Scaling large helps organizations realize the full value of scale by enabling organizations to keep the same infrastructure no matter how many new workloads the organization needs to support. It simplifies IT operations and dramatically lowers IT cost.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering The Edge

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering the Edge

Only some organizations need massive scale, and even enterprises that do will have Edge locations and branch offices that need localized IT resources. Scaling small is a more significant challenge than scaling large. Mid-size data centers and branch offices often have a smaller IT team, sometimes a team of one. Edge locations are hard to get to and have an IT team of zero. In all cases, space is often limited, but high availability is often a mandate.

The “scale medium” HCI solutions often require three nodes. Overcoming the overhead caused by the virtualization tax requires that those nodes have powerful processors and high-performance storage, even though compute and storage performance requirements are modest. Mid-range processors and a mixture of flash and hard disk drives will meet the requirements of many of these environments. The legacy HCI node-similarity requirement forces customers into using high-end processors and flash-only configurations. The result is that HCI becomes very expensive for Server Rooms and Edge Computing.

UCI can scale small. IT can create a cluster with only one or two small nodes for high availability (H/A). The efficiency of VergeOS enables Edge Computing, especially when IT planners couple it with two mini-servers like Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC). In the space of a shoebox, you can deliver Edge Computing power and consume less than 12 watts, and delivers more than enough performance for multiple workloads.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering for Mid-sized data centers

For the Server Room use case, VergeOS can use two or three low-end to midrange servers, enabling you to consolidate all your workloads onto one infrastructure, eliminating dozens of extraneous software packages and processes.

Scaling small helps organizations realize the full value of scale by reducing the cost and complexity of managing Edge Compute. It also enables mid-sized data centers to keep pace with larger organizations even though they have much smaller IT teams. Whether you have hundreds of Edge data collection points or are an IT team of one, VergeOS can solve your virtualization, storage, networking, and data protection challenges.

The Value of Scaling Vertical

Vertically scaling your infrastructure is one of the essential requirements to realizing the full value of scale, but it is often lacking from HCI solutions. Most HCI solutions require that each additional node added to the cluster has similar processing power, IOPS performance, and storage capacity as the existing nodes. While it is true that some HCI vendors have a concept of a capacity node, that node often comes with ramifications. One vendor, for example, suggests turning off deduplication if you add a set of capacity nodes, which means you will need even more of them.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering Workload Consolidation

Node similarity leads IT professionals only to use HCI for one specific workload. UCI is different in that it can support multiple nodes within the data center operating system (DCOS). A single environment can contain nodes with different processing capabilities from different manufacturers. It can even mix in nodes with Graphics Processing Units (GPU). Nodes can be storage performance focused with NVMe flash, and other nodes can be capacity focused with high-density but low-cost hard disk drives.

The mixture of nodes does not increase complexity. IT can organize nodes by their capabilities into specific clusters. The clusters are then seen through our Global Resource Pool. Using our Virtual Data Center (VDC) technology, an IT administrator can dedicate certain cluster types to particular VDCs, or the capabilities of a cluster can be made universally available to all VDCs. This is all easily done through the VergeOS dashboard.

A VDCs can be created for each workload type or set of workloads with a common resource requirement. For example, suppose you have a mission-critical performance-demanding application. In that case, the infrastructure must deliver consistent, high-performance; you can dedicate the resources from a specific high-performance storage cluster (NVMe Flash) to that VDC. The VDC can even be nested so that you can have a production instance, a development instance, and a QA instance of that application. Our deduplication and snapshots make this nesting practical because they eliminate redundant data.

The vertical dimension also helps organizations realize the full value of scale by doing something they may have thought impossible, complete workload consolidation. When looking at workload or even storage consolidation, IT planners worry about workload integrity, ensuring the workload will get the performance or capacity it needs when needed. With UCI, you can mix nodes and add specific resources for specific workloads ensuring consistent performance and happy users.

The Full Value of Scale: Deep

Scaling Deep is another dimension data centers need to extract the full value of scale. It ensures existing resources are almost entirely utilized before adding more nodes. While scaling large is vital, you only want to scale as large as you must and no further.

Scaling deep requires ensuring the vendor optimizes the software for the hardware it is managing. Delivering optimization while maintaining hardware abstraction requires very talented developers. It also needs to provide features like deduplication to ensure capacity efficiency. These optimizations require that the UCI vendor own the code and can get into the low levels of the software to make those optimizations. Vendors who borrow an off-the-shelf or open-source hypervisor don’t own the code to make the improvements if they want.

VergeIO’s developers have taken talent and ownership to an extreme. VergeIO not only owns the code and has very talented developers, and we created a specific programming language and development environment to get around the limitations of traditional programming stacks. It enables us to remain agile, even 12 years into the product’s maturity.

Scaling deeps helps organizations realize the full value of scale so they can slow the growth of IT spending. Most HCI solutions are less than 10% utilized, but these vendors continue to force their customers to add additional nodes to cover the virtualization tax.

How to Get from Many to One

Clearly, scale-out is not enough; data centers need the multi-dimensional scale that UCI provides. The vision of UCI is compelling, one data center operating system that replaces dozens of others while driving down the cost and complexity of IT.

Starting is simple, identify one workload whose infrastructure needs refreshing. Maybe it’s time to replace a SAN or NAS, or you are considering HCI and are looking for a more cost-effective and scalable alternative. Maybe you are a member of a small IT team with a small data center and are looking to simplify everything. Or You have an Edge Strategy that has stalled or never got off the ground.

You can also get an in-depth education into the VergeOS architecture with our Digital Learning Guide, “Understanding the VergeOS Architecture.“

All of these are great places to start with VergeIO. Want to learn how UCI can map into your infrastructure plans? Schedule a meeting with one of our technical specialists today.

Scaling Infrastructure in Three Dimensions

by Leave a Comment

Scale in Three Dimensions for Complete Workload Consolidation

Scaling infrastructure in three dimensions lowers the cost of equipping, operating, and upgrading the data center. The problem is that traditional three-tier (compute, storage and networks) can’t scale beyond a single silo. IT professionals will also find that even hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) falls short if they measure its scaling capabilities against all three dimensions. Ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) is the first infrastructure to move beyond HCI to deliver a cohesive data center operating system that integrates the traditional three tiers instead of stacking them, enabling a three-dimensional scale.

Scaling Infrastructure Large

The industry needs an infrastructure that can scale large to meet the large enterprise’s or service provider’s demands. Enterprise data centers can no longer create a silo of infrastructure for each workload, and service providers can no longer afford to oversubscribe resources to enable the mixing of different customers’ workloads within their infrastructure. 

Scale-Out is not Scaling Infrastructure in Three Dimensions

The challenge with scaling large is that neither traditional three-tier architectures nor HCI can meet this requirement. Of course, HCI vendors claim that scale-out addresses this requirement because you can increase capabilities by “just adding a node.” Is just adding a node enough? 

Since HCI vendors borrow the hypervisor used in their solutions and make no optimizations, their claims that computing power increases with each additional node are disingenuous. It is true that with HCI, you can add more nodes to increase storage capacity and, to some extent, increase storage performance. Adding more nodes falls short of addressing the storage problem because HCI does not integrate virtualization, storage, and networking; it layers them on top of each other. As a result, storage performance is constantly burdened by the virtualization tax, and that tax rate increases as the number of nodes increase.

The impact is that HCI can’t scale large and maintain any sense of efficiency. Customers who have bought into the HCI philosophy almost always limit their per cluster node count to eight or fewer. They then create separate clusters for each use case, but the resources within those clusters are captive to that cluster.

UCI Scales Beyond Scale-Out

VergeIO goes beyond traditional HCI with its Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI). Unlike HCI, where storage and networking services are virtual machines of a borrowed hypervisor, VergeIO’s VergeOS tightly integrates the hypervisor, storage, and networking into a cohesive data center operating environment. One of the benefits of this integration is the ability to deliver unprecedented scale.

VergeOS delivers:

  • A near elimination of the virtualization tax, which doesn’t increase as node count increases
  • Storage and networking services run as equal citizens to the hypervisor, not as virtual machines
  • Clusters are used to group nodes of specific capabilities, but those resources are globally pooled and are available to all or specific virtual machines.

The result is complete workload consolidation into a single point of operations and management. See our UCI vs. HCI comparisons page for more details or register to watch our upcoming webinar “Beyond HCI – UCI The Next Step in Data Center Evolution.”

Scaling Infrastructures Small

There is another infrastructure dimension that organizations need help addressing, scaling small. The need for a small scale can be as simple as scaling to meet the needs of a server room for a medium-sized business. However, enterprises increasingly require small scale as they deploy Edge strategies. These strategies need Edge Computing power.

HCI Can’t Scale Small

Traditional three-tier solutions are vastly inappropriate for both use cases, and most HCI solutions require starting with three nodes, making them too large for the use case. The few that can start with two nodes can’t scale large, meaning IT will have to acquire a brand-new architecture if the business grows. The infrastructure that scales small and scales large must be one and the same.

UCI Scales to the Edge

The efficient VergeIO UCI design enables VergeOS to also scale small in addition to scaling large. A VergeOS solution can run on two mini-servers, like Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC), and deliver data center power in shoe-boxed-sized space. It doesn’t even need a switch because VergeOS has true network functionality built in. For server rooms, two mid-range servers may be all you need to collapse that server room into a server shelf.

Scaling infrastructure in three dimensions enables Edge Computing
VergeIO can deliver an Edge Data Center in 7″

The efficiency of VergeOS can leverage small servers to support a dozen or more virtual machines and offer incredibly high performance. In particular, the Edge Computing use case needs a global management capability that enables data center IT to manage, operate and perform changes to Edge-based instances.

Scaling small requires more than just running on one or two servers. These infrastructures must be reliable and easy to operate. Edge Computing locations are often hard to visit for servicing. There is also the potential for one organization to have hundreds or even thousands of edge locations.  For the server room, mid-range data center use case, there is generally a small and bustling IT team with many balls to juggle. In both cases, the entire data center operation often runs on that infrastructure. If it is down, so is the business.

For example, one of our most recent customers is a Ski Resort responsible for three mountains of slopes. They use VergeOS to host all their mission-critical workloads. If their VergeOS solution is down, they can’t sell passes, you can’t ski, and you can’t even buy food while you wait for the applications to come back up. The highly available VergeOS UCI solution has never missed a beat so that you can ski to your heart’s content. 

Scaling Infrastructures Vertically

Most data centers have many workloads, each with different requirements regarding computing power, storage performance, and storage capacity. In most cases, addressing these mixed workload requirements will require different types of servers (node) and storage configurations.

HCI Can’t Mix Nodes (well)

Vertical scaling is a problem facing most legacy HCI architectures. They can’t mix nodes of different types, at least not efficiently. In most cases, the nodes within the cluster must be nearly identical. While some vendors claim that you can add capacity nodes, it often comes with an asterisk. One vendor even suggests that you turn off deduplication when adding nodes for capacity. They are concerned that their inefficient deduplication process will impact the performance of the other high-performance nodes. Isn’t a high-capacity situation the reason you want deduplication?

UCI Supports Mixed Nodes, Without Compromise

Scaling infrastructure in three dimensions requires node flexibility

VergeOS can group like nodes into separate clusters yet combines the capabilities of those nodes into a global resource pool. The resources within the global pool can then be designated to a particular workload or made universally available to all workloads.

VergeOS is a data center operating system, not HCI, with storage and networking running as virtual machines. If the organization’s needs are mainstream, then a single cluster with a standard node type will do the job. However, multiple clusters empower complete workload consolidation for data centers with many use cases. Within a single VergeOS instance, you can have multiple clusters with specific capabilities:

  • A cluster of high-end Intel CPUs and NVMe Flash
  • A cluster of mid-range AMD CPUs and SAS Flash
  • A cluster of servers with GPU and Storage Class Memory
  • A cluster of servers with high-capacity hard disk drives
  • A cluster to limit licensing costs, like in the Oracle Cluster use case

You can have as many nodes within each cluster as you need. The resources within the cluster are then made available through the global resource pool. The resources within the global pool are allocated to virtual data centers (VDC). VDCs encapsulate an entire data center, all the virtual machines (VMs), networks, and storage settings, as well as user management and security. Resources within the global pool can be dedicated to a VDC or made universally available to all VDCs, enabling complete workload consolidation while assuring consistent workload performance. 

Conclusion

Scaling infrastructure in three dimensions lowers the cost of equipping, operating, and upgrading the data center as the hallmark of UCI solutions like VergeOS. With it you can scale small, large, and vertically. A common platform that can scale in any dimension makes life easier for IT professionals.

There is even a fourth dimension, deep. Deep scaling is the ability to maximize the investment and capabilities of each node within each cluster within the UCI solution. We’ll explore deep scaling in a future blog.

The result of Scaling infrastructure in three dimensions (or four) is:

  • Dramatic reduction in upfront and long-term costs
  • Significantly easier to operate
  • Better protection from ransomware and disasters
  • IT Professionals that get to go home before the sun goes down and sleep well at night

Learn More

  • Subscribe to our Digital Learning Guide on the VergeIO Architecture.
  • Attend our Live webinar Beyond HCI and learn about the next step in Data Center Infrastructure.
  • Watch our on-demand webinar “How to Eliminate the Data Center Scale Problem.”
  • Watch our on-demand LightBoard Deep Dive on the VergeIO architecture.
  • Test our software for yourself with our free Test Drive.
  • Meet — View our Technical Calendar to meet one-on-one with one of our technical experts to learn more.