-> Planning for a refresh of your hardware landscape and you have a large number of VMs (in 100s) on your aged hardware and you also need to refresh your storage (SAN).
-> Planning on a new project deployment in a remote location with the minimum rack space that will require optimization of space and effort.
- High Availability of Application and Data with Zero Downtime ensuring Business Continuity.
- Followed by Consolidation and removing the clutter to manage and get the flexibility to scale and serve the business with the growing demand of Storage and Servers.
Infrastructure Integration Analyst at a government with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 10
2022-02-24T17:59:48Z
Feb 24, 2022
We have decided to deploy Cisco Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for a few business justifications and technical justifications.
Business justifications:
- Continuous improvements: performance, reliability, and scalability from business applications' requirements of the performance.
- Migrate from disaster avoidance strategy from EMC storage to Cisco Stretch storage cluster.
- Continue to improve on disaster avoidance and redundancy.
Technical justifications:
- Software-Defined network, storage, and computing with UCS Cisco Hyper-Converged Infrastructure has been proven in our test environment with highly reliable performance, manageability, scalability, and ease of use.
The key reason is when you want zero downtime and consolidation. It helps you reduce the cost of space, power and cooling.
Secondly, If your existing hardware is going to the end of life, it helps you to remove the clutter and complexity while you get redundant and make it easy to manage your infrastructure.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) can be a considerable CAPEX and companies must decide whether it's worth the spend based on their ability to utilize the value gained and the importance of the IT Systems to their operations.
HCI overs the following major benefits over traditional SAN and Server or cluster environments:
- Enterprise scaling with zero loss of performance based on resources.
- True onsite HA with N+1 redundancy for virtual machines (a copy of each VM is always kept available for instant restoration.
- Ability to pool resources into a single logical unit and carve out these resources to best suit business needs.
- Enterprise-grade reliability for critical applications with higher rates of system performance and availability.
-Ease of management of infrastructure since the system appears and is managed as a single unit.
- improved fault tolerance across the physical hardware pool.
If these benefits are critical to your organization, and your company has the need for an enterprise-grade system, then it may be a good time to consider moving to HCI rather than investing in traditional SAN and Server.
I think that the major argument of vendors for HCI, the management simplicity, is a big lie.
Typically, companies don´t have dedicated teams to every infrastructure component - unless you are a giant enterprise or a tech. company.
The great number of things that must be integrated to make HCI work fine cause a lot of administrative effort to maintain.
Data security and availability is another question to think about: yes, you can build RAID, replication and so on. But the hardware that your data resides in will frequently fail, so, be prepared to RAID rebuild´s and the constant correlated risk´s.
The best on HCI is the cost. I think that it can be the right choice for non-critical ( like VDI) or high parallelized environments, where workload are running in a distributed way.
If you have the legacy and resource-hungry applications you go best with traditional infra.
Hello community,
I am a Principal Engineer at a large tech company.
I am currently researching HCI tools. Which tool performs better: Nutanix HCI or VMware VxRail? Which tool has better scalability?
Thank you for your help.
Product Consultant (Presales) at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Jan 16, 2023
Hi Suresh,
In order to answer your question it is better to understand your requirement. Nutanix HCI supports all major hardware vendors, and hypervisors like VMware, Hyper-V, and native Nutanix AHV) and has award-winning post-sales support.
Now VxRail is a Dell product offering based on PowerEdge servers running VMware only with VMware vSAN. It is limited to Dell hardware and a single hypervisor VMware.
Moving forward as Vmware is no more part of Dell and has been part of Broadcom no one is sure what will be next.
Other than that, there are key differentiators to make decisions and that's where Nutanix shines, you can DM me if you need one to one explanation.
Farhan Parkar
Hi community members,
Can you share 2-3 main pain points you've been experiencing during the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution buying process?
Also, how have you been able to overcome them?
Thanks for sharing your experience.
IT-Teamhead Infrastructure EEMEA at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
Aug 23, 2022
Hello all,
This is my point of view/feedback about an HCI buying process experience.
- Selected an IT-Business Partner which can cover your region/country for the rollout (if you don't buy it locally).
- Collected an order (it can help to receive a bigger discount).
- Plan for 3/5 year Care Packs for NBD Service and Warranty.
- Keep an eye on the local country tax/customs/transport insurance/import regulations for HCI Hardware (like battery, vendor patents, ...).
- Build with IT-Business Partner a Service/Health/Check Service on a yearly basis (if you do not want to make it on your own).
- Full pre-, post-, and installation tasks included with technical documentation.
That was a quick overview.
Greets,
Hannes
IT Engineer at a government with 501-1,000 employees
Aug 24, 2022
Our biggest pain point during the buying process was trying to sort through all of the vendor's proposal documentation to determine which solution was best for us.
Every vendor claims their solution is the best and trying to determine which best served our needs was challenging.
Our solution was to create a checklist of the critical features and capabilities that were essential to us as well as a list of desired capabilities.
We then called in each vendor and went through our list of critical and desired features. Any vendors not able to meet all of our critical requirements were eliminated.
We then compared the remaining vendors on the number of desired features they could provide versus the pricing.
This process greatly facilitated the vendor selection process. It goes without saying that factors like vendor reputation, local support, warranty, etc. were considered before even getting to the checklist.
Doug
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The key aspects for choosing HCI over traditional infrastructure are:
- Highly virtualized environments: more than 50 or 100 VMs
- Management simplicity: Software-defined storage and networking simplifies management.
- Easily implemented data protection strategies.
- Ease of horizontal and vertical growth.
- Operational flexibility, creation and administration of VM very easy.
- Ease of viewing and consolidation of VM
- Optimization of resources, computing capacities and memory are not wasted.
I would consider the following points:
-> Planning for a refresh of your hardware landscape and you have a large number of VMs (in 100s) on your aged hardware and you also need to refresh your storage (SAN).
-> Planning on a new project deployment in a remote location with the minimum rack space that will require optimization of space and effort.
The key reasons for HCI are:
- High Availability of Application and Data with Zero Downtime ensuring Business Continuity.
- Followed by Consolidation and removing the clutter to manage and get the flexibility to scale and serve the business with the growing demand of Storage and Servers.
- Lastly, reducing TCO.
@SANJAY HASIJA thanks for your in-detail answer!
We have decided to deploy Cisco Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for a few business justifications and technical justifications.
Business justifications:
- Continuous improvements: performance, reliability, and scalability from business applications' requirements of the performance.
- Migrate from disaster avoidance strategy from EMC storage to Cisco Stretch storage cluster.
- Continue to improve on disaster avoidance and redundancy.
Technical justifications:
- Software-Defined network, storage, and computing with UCS Cisco Hyper-Converged Infrastructure has been proven in our test environment with highly reliable performance, manageability, scalability, and ease of use.
- Monitoring
- Centralization
- Ease of maintenance
The key reason is when you want zero downtime and consolidation. It helps you reduce the cost of space, power and cooling.
Secondly, If your existing hardware is going to the end of life, it helps you to remove the clutter and complexity while you get redundant and make it easy to manage your infrastructure.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) can be a considerable CAPEX and companies must decide whether it's worth the spend based on their ability to utilize the value gained and the importance of the IT Systems to their operations.
HCI overs the following major benefits over traditional SAN and Server or cluster environments:
- Enterprise scaling with zero loss of performance based on resources.
- True onsite HA with N+1 redundancy for virtual machines (a copy of each VM is always kept available for instant restoration.
- Ability to pool resources into a single logical unit and carve out these resources to best suit business needs.
- Enterprise-grade reliability for critical applications with higher rates of system performance and availability.
-Ease of management of infrastructure since the system appears and is managed as a single unit.
- improved fault tolerance across the physical hardware pool.
If these benefits are critical to your organization, and your company has the need for an enterprise-grade system, then it may be a good time to consider moving to HCI rather than investing in traditional SAN and Server.
I think that the major argument of vendors for HCI, the management simplicity, is a big lie.
Typically, companies don´t have dedicated teams to every infrastructure component - unless you are a giant enterprise or a tech. company.
The great number of things that must be integrated to make HCI work fine cause a lot of administrative effort to maintain.
Data security and availability is another question to think about: yes, you can build RAID, replication and so on. But the hardware that your data resides in will frequently fail, so, be prepared to RAID rebuild´s and the constant correlated risk´s.
The best on HCI is the cost. I think that it can be the right choice for non-critical ( like VDI) or high parallelized environments, where workload are running in a distributed way.
If you have the legacy and resource-hungry applications you go best with traditional infra.