George Crump

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Watch VergeIO’s SE Director, Aaron Reid, and CMO, George Crump, as they take you through a live VMware migration to VergeOS. See how easy VergeIO’s new IOmigrate capability is to use. Learn how to use VergeOS for VMware DR and Ransomware Resilience today, then switch to VergeOS to enjoy 50% savings and 100% simplification.

Available Now

Join us for the demonstration and see how you can convert from VMware and improve storage performance and resilience while simplifying your network.

See:

  • A live migration from VMware to VergeOS
  • How to use VergeOS as a Disaster Recovery site
  • How to simplify networking and make it more resilient

Filed Under: Past Webinar, Webinar Tagged With:

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IT needs to understand Edge Computing’s unique challenges, so they can make the right infrastructure design decisions. Treating Edge Computing as a smaller version of the data center will put data at risk, increase complexity and raise costs. There are critical differences between Edge Computing, Remote Office, Branch Office (ROBO), and Core Data Center use cases:

Data Center Edge ROBO Core
Serviceability Limited Accessibility Accessible Local
Management Remote Remote Local
Data Protection Replication On-Premises On-Premises
Footprint Shelf Closet Data Center
Power Constrained Available Plentiful
Comparing Edge, ROBO and Core Data Centers

Edge Computing vs. “The Edge”

Edge Computing is different from what is commonly referred to as “the Edge.” When we refer to “the Edge” we are referring to a data collector, like a sensor or a Wi-Fi Camera, even though they too have a small processor of some sort. Edge Computing is the consolidation of processing power that gathers data from a variety of these sensors, and processes that data. The goal is to either make real-time decisions, like an autonomous vehicle, or consolidate the collected data and send a subset back to a larger data center.

While collecting sensor data and acting on it covers a wide swath of Edge Computing use cases, there are others. It might also be a Point of Sale (POS) system that an organization with dozens or hundreds of retail locations. Other Edge Computing use cases are content delivery systems, video surveillance processing and storage, as well as dynamically adapting retail advertising.

In addition to real-time decision-making, Edge locations may also, even with today’s network capabilities, be bandwidth constrained. The need to make the decision locally is instant, compared with the seconds required to send data to another location and respond with a decision. In these cases, instant versus seconds makes a critical difference. It may also be that the bandwidth to the Edge Computing location isn’t reliable enough, or that the cost to transmit a large amount of data isn’t worth the expense.

Register for this week’s Virtual CxO Roundtable to get answers to all your Edge Computing and Private Cloud questions.

What Makes Edge Computing Unique?

Edge Computing is unique from the core data center and remote office branch office in three key areas:

  • Available Space
  • Serviceability
  • Data Protection

Edge Computing is Space Constrained

Edge Computing’s unique challenges include small footprint
A Complete Data Center in a Shoebox

The first of Edge Computing’s unique challenges is the physical space available to host the infrastructure. As we indicate in our table, the available data center floor space shrinks from a full-scale facility in core, to a closet in ROBO, to, at best, a shelf in Edge Computing use cases. In some situations, the “data center” is the space underneath the cash register.

The constraints placed on Edge Computing mean that whatever infrastructure you deploy at the Edge needs to run, efficiently, in that small footprint. The good news is the hardware to accomplish the feat is available. Mini-servers, like Intel NUCs (next unit of computing), can provide plenty of processing capabilities while consuming a few dozen watts of power. The problem is finding an efficient software operating environment for those servers.

Edge Computing is Hard to Service

The second of Edge Computing’s unique challenges is that it is hard to get to, physically and maybe remotely. The lack of accessibility makes Edge Computing hardware difficult to service if something goes wrong. Most locations are not in major cities. Sometimes they are “in the middle of nowhere” on purpose because that is where the sensors perform best. Other times they are small towns, hours away from major airports. The lack of accessibility and serviceability make redundancy and remote operations critical.

Edge Computing Needs Redundant Availability

Redundant Edge Computing is something that IT planners may overlook, but because of the lack of accessibility, continuous access becomes critical. If the Edge location goes down, sensor data and remote transactions can’t process. It can mean the loss of critical information that can’t be recreated, or the loss of revenue and unhappy customers.

What to look for:

Given the space efficiency of mini-servers, it makes sense to deploy two or three units, even if one has all the processing power that the location needs. Redundancy at the Edge means that the software platform responsible for running operations needs to seamlessly fail to the surviving servers without complex changes to networking. It also means that a replacement server must be easily preconfigured to automatically join to the surviving servers when it arrives at the location.

Edge Computing Needs Redundant Operations

The Edge Computing solution should also be easy to remotely manage and operate. While most solutions provide some form of monitoring capabilities, these are often “after-the-fact” products. An add-on product creates a single point of management failure, and the Edge location doesn’t know something is “listening”. Instead, IT planners should look for solutions where reporting is the responsibility of the Edge Computing solution. The edge software platform should send its telemetry data to multiple points, which eliminates the single point of failure.

Moreover, the remote capabilities should include more than remote monitoring. It is not uncommon for Edge Computing locations to number in the dozens, if not hundreds. Having to log in to each location to perform an update or change to a security setting is incredibly time-consuming and increases the chances of human error.

What to look for:

IT planners need to look for a solution that can perform operations like updates or setting changes, globally. Executing once instead of individually logging in to each server increases the efficiency of the IT staff and lowers the overall cost of the Edge Computing initiatives.

Edge Computing is Hard to Protect

The third of Edge Computing’s unique challenges is it has unique data protection needs. In numerous instances, the Edge creates unique data that can’t be recreated if lost due to hardware failure or site disaster. The challenge is because of the lack of available space and operational concerns. There is no room or administrative staff to support on-premises backup infrastructure.

The Problems with Protecting the Edge with the Public Cloud

Many organizations will consider protecting this data in the public cloud, but end up ruling it out because:

  1. The recurring costs to store dormant data are too expensive
  2. The data is needed at core data center for further processing
  3. There is too much Edge data and not enough bandwidth
  4. Disaster recovery from the Public Cloud to the edge is difficult

What to look for:

IT planners need to look for a solution that can leverage the extra redundancy within their Edge Computing design to facilitate a reasonable on-premises data protection strategy. While protecting data within the same infrastructure does not technically meet the 3-2-1 data protection rule, it gets close. If the Edge solution can also replicate data efficiently, then it does meet the requirements of the 3-2-1 rule. Global Inline Deduplication is a critical requirement so that redundant data is only sent once and replication jobs are complete in record time.

Edge Computing is NOT Remote Office Branch Office

Remote Office and Branch Office (ROBO) IT infrastructures are not the same as Edge Computing infrastructures. First, in most cases, they are significantly easier to get to. Second, there is available space, even if it is a server closet, for a more robust infrastructure that includes data protection.

ROBO infrastructures also tend to support a wider variety of workloads, including file sharing, and multiple business applications as well as core infrastructure utilities. They do, however, share the need for remote operations and can certainly benefit from many of the capabilities that infrastructure at the Edge requires.

Most IT vendors can’t span all three use cases with a single software solution. They may address the specific needs of each use case, but they do so with alternative solutions which require unique training for each one, patch monitoring and implementation as well as unique data protection.

What to look for:

IT Planners should look for an infrastructure solution that can span all three location types and add in the public cloud. Imagine the efficiency of running the same networking, storage, and hypervisor software throughout your sprawling infrastructure.

VergeOS, One and Done

VergeIO is an ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) company. UCI differs from Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) in that it rotates the traditional three-tier IT stack (networking, storage, and compute) onto a linear plane through a single piece of software that we call VergeOS. The result is an efficient data center operating system (DCOS) that can deliver more performance and run a greater variety of workloads on less physical hardware. If you are being asked to do “more with less,” VergeOS is your solution.

In one bootable operating system you eliminate the need for separate storage software, proprietary networking hardware, independent hypervisors, separate “cloud” functionality, data protection software, disaster recovery software, and multiple management interfaces. All of these functions are included in VergeOS’s single piece of software.

VergeOS is able to address all of Edge Computing’s unique challenges. It provides

  • Downward scale to one or two nodes
  • Seamless redundancy, data protection and ransomware resiliency
  • A mesh-like management framework for monitoring and operations
  • upward scale for branch offices, core data centers and the cloud

With VergeOS, you don’t have to “go to” the cloud. You can “be the cloud.”

Next Steps

  • This week we are holding a Virtual CxO Roundtable on “Edge Computing and Private Cloud Infrastructures. We will answer questions about these two topics we’ve been collecting the last few weeks, and we’ll take questions live from our audience. If you have a question, you can submit it in the comments section below. Register
  • We also have a complete tutorial built on developing and Edge Computing Strategy. Subscribe to our Digital Learning Guide, “Creating an Edge Computing Strategy.”
  • Learn More:

Filed Under: Edge Computing Tagged With: ,

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The unpredictable cost of the Public Cloud and the difficulty in guaranteeing performance levels has many IT professionals trying to figure out how to repatriate cloud workloads or forcing them to re-examine their cloud migration strategies. There have been several high-profile examples of companies completely exiting public cloud services like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Maybe complete cloud repatriation isn’t required, but if you are to repatriate cloud workloads, we have a template you can use to help you make those decisions.

Why Repatriate Cloud Workloads?

The primary motivation for repatriating cloud workloads is to lower costs. Other concerns include guaranteeing performance and increasing security. Most organizations have not eliminated their data center, so they still have assets available to repatriate cloud workloads. From a hard cost perspective, on-premises infrastructure is far less expensive, especially if you can get five or more years of serviceability out of the investment. If you are going to use something for a long time, owning it is always better than renting it.

The public cloud model generally lures IT leaders with its promise of operational simplicity and eliminating hardware refreshes. Repatriating workloads means IT must learn to live with those two problems or look for a new operating environment.

Why Not Repatriate Cloud Workloads?

Moving a workload back on-premises isn’t the issue. There are plenty of methods to get your applications and data out of the cloud. The question is, what on-premises infrastructure will you use to host the repatriated applications?

The on-premises architectures are either the traditional three-tier architectures with a storage, virtualization, and networking infrastructure or a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) that claims to converge those three infrastructures. HCI, as we explain in our article “Move Beyond HCI to UCI” most HCI solutions don’t actually converge anything; virtualization, storage, and compute are three (or more) distinct code bases.

Both three-tier architectures and HCI suffer from inefficiency, complexity, and a lack of longevity. They don’t efficiently use the hardware resources that IT applies to them, which is a waste of IT budget dollars. Because of their multiple layers, these architectures are challenging to manage, patch, and upgrade. And their inability to integrate different hardware into the same operating environment requires IT to perform a storage or server replacement or refresh every four to five years.

Don’t repatriate your cloud workloads to the same environment that caused you to push those workloads to the public cloud in the first place. Use cloud repatriation as an opportunity to upgrade your data center to a private cloud.

Create a Private Cloud

To repatriate workloads, organizations need to take the best of the public cloud and combine it with the best of on-premises infrastructure. The goal should be to create a private cloud where the organization owns the infrastructure instead of renting it but has the serviceability and flexibility of the public cloud.

The problem is the term private cloud is a term that almost every infrastructure vendor, but their products don’t deliver the promise. A private cloud needs an infrastructure that can scale small enough to support Edge Computing use cases and large enough to support the most demanding enterprises. A private cloud is not a software-defined data center (SDDC). It is a software-defined organization where every data center and Edge location are part of the same operating environment. It should enable entire workloads, not just virtual machines, to move between IT locations at the click of a button and, when they arrive at the new location, be fully functional, including networking.

Delivering a private cloud that provides better-than-public-cloud operations requires a data center operating system that consolidates virtualization, storage, networking, and data protection into a single piece of software, creating an ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI). UCI simplifies operations at the primary data center location, remote data centers, and the Edge.

To learn more about making the private cloud a reality, register for our webinar “Infrastructures: Edge Computing and Private Cloud.”

VergeOS, The Way to Repatriate Cloud Workloads

VergeOS is the way to repatriate cloud workloads or keep workloads on-premises that you are considering moving to the public cloud. The ultraconverged solution includes virtualization, storage, networking, and data protection within a single piece of software. VergeOS enables you to create virtual data centers (VDC) and assign specific hardware resources to them so you can guarantee workload performance. It also, in most cases, leverages existing servers, even if they are a couple of years old. With VergeOS, you can also use VDCs as a method of IT delegation, creating secure, isolated environments and assigning them by a line of business, location, or function.

how to repatriate cloud workloads

In the Atria release of VergeOS, we’ve delivered the Recipe Marketplace, a catalog of preconfigured virtual machines, and even complete workloads with all the associated virtual machines, networking, storage, and data protection settings. In the initial release, we include recipes to set up a Docker Container environment, LAMP stack, and an Object Store, with more on the way. You can also create your own recipes for workloads common to your organization and use the marketplace to present them to groups to which you delegate VDCs.

The Atria release also includes Site Manager, a global mesh-like management framework that enables IT to manage multiple data centers and edge locations from a single interface. Site Manager is built directly into the VergeOS code base. It is not a separate piece of software. As a result, each location knows about the other locations and can report telemetry information to multiple points, eliminating the single point of management failure concern common in add-on solutions. With Atria, VergeOS creates an organization-wide ultraconverged infrastructure that simplifies IT and dramatically reduces costs.

how to repatriate cloud workloads

Conclusion

As Chris Evans at Architecting IT pointed out in his article “The Great Cloud Repatriation Debate – Compute,” it is not clear how many organizations are looking to repatriate cloud workloads. Still, there are plenty of organizations that slowed their cloud migration. There is also little doubt that there is concern over the public cloud model in terms of cost, guaranteeing performance, and security. The hesitation to move workloads back on-premises may be IT knowing that the environment they would repatriate those workloads is more complex and brittle than the public cloud because of legacy three-tier architectures and HCI. Armed with ultraconverged Infrastructure software like VergeOS, IT can provide a better-than-cloud experience for themselves and the organizations they serve.

Next Steps

Template: Get our free “Cloud Repatriation Template.”

Watch: Our in-depth LightBoard Video on Edge Computing and Private Cloud Data Centers.

Subscribe: To our Edge Computing Tutorial “Creating an Edge Computing Strategy.”

Watch: Our On-Demand webinar “Beyond HCI” for a comparison to HCI and a demonstration.

Filed Under: Private Cloud Tagged With:

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Unleashes the Edge and Makes Private Clouds a Reality

Ann Arbor, Mich, February 7, 2023 — VergeIO, the Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) company, today announced the immediate availability of its latest software release of VergeOS, the Data Center Operating System. The new release enables organizations to rapidly extend their infrastructures to the Edge with a new mesh-based management capability. It also provides a new Recipe Marketplace to simplify large data center deployments delivering on the full promise of the private cloud.

The new release, Atria, is named after one of the brightest stars in the sky; it aligns with the VergeIO’s north star, “simplify IT.” Unlike traditional hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI), UCI integrates virtualization, storage, and networking into a single data center operating system, VergeOS. With UCI, storage, and networking are equal citizens to the hypervisor, not virtual machines (VM) crippled by a virtualization tax. The integration enables clusters of dissimilar hardware to be globally pooled and provisioned via Virtual Data Centers (VDC) for complete workload consolidation while maintaining workload integrity.

“Over the past few years, we have seen a strong uptick in on-premises data center modernization efforts in order to simplify operations and become more cloud-like. The innovation from VergeIO aligns directly with those key objectives of delivering incredibly simple scalability of resources.”

Scott Sinclair, Practice Director at the Enterprise Strategy Group

Unleashing the Edge

UCI’s cohesive integration of virtualization, storage, and networking enables IT to use the same data center operating system at the Edge and in the core data center. Because of its efficient and optimal utilization of available hardware, VergeOS can deliver excellent Edge performance from two micro-servers, like Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC) hardware. In the space of a shoebox, customers can deploy a complete data center. In the core data center, customers can scale to hundreds of nodes and support various workloads from a single piece of software.

In the Atria release, VergeOS adds a mesh-like management capability, Site Manager, which provides the ability to report each site’s status while enabling IT to operate each site from a single interface remotely. For example, IT administrators can easily, securely, and safely manage software updates at hundreds of Edge and data centers.

Site Manager will parse through all the telemetry information that each site reports and highlight specific information that IT needs to be immediately aware of so it can, through the same interface, correct any issue that may arise. With Site Manager’s mesh design, there is no single point of management failure.

With the Atria release, VergeIO is creating a new edition of its software, “Edge Edition,” which supports a highly-available pair of nodes, 64GB per RAM per node, and unlimited storage.

Transforms Core Data Centers into Private Clouds

For IT professionals looking to simplify the provisioning and management of data center resources, describing core data centers as private clouds is more marketing-speak than reality. The Atria release of VergeOS makes the private cloud a reality in the core data center with the addition of VergeIO’s Recipe Marketplace. With a few clicks, the marketplace enables IT to deploy complete workloads, including all the VMs for that workload, the operating system and application software for those VMs, as well as the storage and network configurations.

In the initial release, the Recipe Marketplace will have over a dozen built-in recipes; customers can clone them or create their own and, in the future, contribute them to a community-driven marketplace. With VergeOS’ ability to consolidate different servers, storage, and networking into a cohesive operating environment, the Recipe Marketplace completes the private cloud vision.

External Backup Support

While VergeOS includes both built-in backup and multi-data center replication, the Atria release enables external backup software applications like Veeam, Commvault, and others to back up the VergeIO environment. External backup enables IT to integrate the VergeOS environment into their existing backup and disaster recovery procedures.

Performance Optimizations

There are also 140 different enhancements in the Atria release. VergeOS significantly improves performance load distribution so that all the elements within the data center operating system are used to maximum efficiency. The VergeIO development team’s goal is to ensure that every dollar the organization invests in hardware is fully utilized, and the Atria release continues that commitment.

“With this release, which includes 140 enhancements, we are leveraging the power of our ultraconverged architecture to deliver scalability, functionality, and agility from the Edge to Enterprise to Cloud. Atria is a great step in our quest to reduce complexity and cost in IT infrastructure.”

Greg Campbell, Verge founder and CTO

Please go to the VergeOS release page for more details.

Media Contact:
Judy Smith, JPR Communications
818-522-9673
[email protected]

Filed Under: Press Release

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To simplify operations and reduce data center costs, IT professionals need one infrastructure for Edge and Core data centers, not a dozen. So far, three-tier and hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) have fallen well short of the one-infrastructure mark.

Atria, the new release of VergeOS, meets the one infrastructure need and goes well beyond it. The update includes a unique global site manager capability that enables remote monitoring and operation of edge locations without creating a single point of failure. It also includes a recipe engine and marketplace that enables small data centers to deploy quickly and enterprises to automate complex provisioning tasks.

One Infrastructure for Edge Computing

One Infrastructure for Edge and Core
Edge Computing Should NOT require new infrastructure

Edge use cases are almost as numerous as there are Edge locations. Some have very simple requirements others have very sophisticated ones. In general, if an organization has an Edge Computing need, it means deploying and managing dozens, if not hundreds, of remote locations. Those remote locations typically need IT staff and are difficult to get to for servicing.

There is also limited space to place the Edge Computing infrastructure. At the Edge, a server closet is a luxury. Edge devices are often stuffed under a cash register or tucked away on a shelf somewhere.

In most cases, the infrastructure at the Edge is as critical as it is at the core. If that Edge location goes down, business stops. Orders can’t be taken, and conditions can’t be sampled. Ideally, Edge locations need to be highly available and remotely operated.

VergeOS is an ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) that integrates virtualization, storage, and networking into a single piece of software. This integration delivers a high degree of efficiency which enables the software to scale large to meet the needs of the most demanding of enterprises and scale small to fit within the constraints of Edge Computing.

Atria Delivers Global Scale

VergeOS Atria adds Site Manager, which enables IT to remotely monitor, manage and operate any number of Edge locations. Other monitoring utilities are separate add-on packages that “listen in” on remote locations. The Edge doesn’t know it is being listened to and doesn’t know it has the responsibility to update the rest of the organization. The monitoring software becomes a single point of failure.

One Infrastructure for Edge and Core
Global Operations with Site Manager

Site Manager is built into the VergeOS operating system; it is not an add-on. And, since VergeOS is the same core code at the Edge and in the data center, every instance of itself knows about the other instances (unless you choose not to). Site Manager creates a mesh-like network where each edge can synchronize its telemetry data with multiple or all other VergeOS sites.

With Atria’s new Site Manager capability, the IT team can monitor any Edge location. The data center team can also perform more operational functions like triggering a rolling upgrade of each location and creating new virtual machines (VM) or virtual data centers (VDC), all from a GUI that provides a dashboard of all of your Edge locations.

One Infrastructure for the Data Center and Enterprise

Besides managing Edge Computing locations, one of the biggest challenges for data centers is rapidly responding to provisioning requests. Provisioning is a problem for small to medium-sized businesses with server rooms, and the largest enterprises.

As provisioning requests continue, the chances of human error increase. It might be as simple as forgetting to set the data protection policies (snapshot schedule and replication target) or remembering the network configuration that the application needs. It can be as annoying as tracking down the correct ISO image for the operating systems and applications you are deploying. But it can also be as complex as setting up a secure, compliant environment to meet a regulatory standard.

Atria Delivers the Recipe Marketplace

Integrated into the Atria release of VergeOS is the Recipe Marketplace. Essentially an application service catalog that enables IT professionals to not only deploy the perfect VM in seconds. They can even deploy complete applications, all the VMs, all the networking, the storage configurations, the data protection policies, etc… into a specific VDC. Atria reduces to one-click, hours of work and eliminates any chances of you missing that one setting that can come back to haunt you later.

One Infrastructure for Edge and Core
Deliver Uniformed Provisioning with Atria’s Recipe Engine

The Atria release includes over a dozen recipes for small to medium-sized data centers that you can use right away. We’ll continue to grow the catalog of recipes over the next few quarters. If there is any particular recipe you want, let us know.

Enterprises and Service Provides can create their own recipes to deploy the organization’s specific workloads. Again perfectly, every time. You can even create a marketplace specific to your organization. For example, a service provider offering different applications can develop their recipes and present them to their specific customers.

One Infrastructure with a Custom Fit

Starting with the Atria release, we are delivering VergeOS in Editions for specific use cases. Ranging from the Edge Edition to the Enterprise Edition, they are tailored to the specific needs of each of these environments.

Disaster Recovery Edition – De-Risk VMware Exit Strategy

New to the “Edition” line-up is the Disaster Recovery Edition. While it is intended for VergeOS customers and enables them to stand up a disaster recovery site while saving on licensing costs, it also has a capability that makes it a great starting point on your journey to complete workload consolidation; VMware Disaster Recovery.

If you are concerned about the Broadcom acquisition of VMware and are looking for a low-risk way to move away from the platform. VergeOS DR Edition is a great place to start. It enables you to reduce your VMware DR costs by as much as 70% while improving your ability to recover from disasters like ransomware, hurricanes, fires, and floods.

The DR Edition provides a seamless backup of your VMware environment and replicates it to a disaster recovery VergeOS environment. In most cases, VergeOS can run on existing hardware, further minimizing DR costs. The DR Edition allows you to run unlimited DR test runs to ensure everything will work when you need it and your team will know what to do when disaster strikes. All replicated data is protected by our immutable snapshots providing ransomware resiliency.

Some customers even use the remote environment for bursting. If you have a peak workload demand, spin up less critical workloads in your VergeOS instance until the peak passes.

Want to learn more about creating a DR strategy with VergeOS? Schedule a meeting with one of our technical experts.

Next Steps

  • Watch our Lightboard Session that dives deep into the new capabilities within Atria featuring our CTO Greg Campbell and CMO George Crump
  • Read our Atria release detailed overview page
  • Register for our Webinar “IT Infrastructures — Edge Computing and Private Cloud.”

Filed Under: Edge Computing

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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.

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