Hyper Converged now and next – Troy Mangum – Ep49

Tech Interviews

The IT industry is full of new trends, some you get, some you don't, one such trend, that until recently I didn't really get, was Hyper-Converged, why have I not gotten onboard? A good test with any new technology is does it solve a problem or improve the way I currently do things? Up to now with Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) I'm not sure it really does, is it helping me build a more automated, flexible, agile IT infrastructure? Is it helping me build a hybrid environment? Is it automating my IT environment so that my business gets the agility it wants? Not sure. What HCI does do well is simplify your hardware infrastructure, takes something that may have been installed in a full rack and squeezes it down into 2 or 4U in a single chassis, but is that enough? Not really. What's changed my view? The starting point is nothing to do with changes to the HCI hardware model or addition of some great new feature, it's actually and maybe not surprisingly driven by software, look at what Microsoft and VMware are doing for example, VMware is delivering an increasingly more software-defined infrastructure with every incremental release of their virtualisation stack and Microsoft with Azurestack looking to bring Azure like functionality into your on-prem datacentre. This simplification of the software stack is now starting to drive the need for a hardware stack that matches this simplification and can take advantage of these software-defined infrastructure solutions. It is this changing environment that is the focus of this latest podcast. At the recent NetApp Insight conference, I met with Troy Mangum who shared some research he's been working on reviewing the HCI market, how it stands today and the changes HCI vendors need to make to ensure they build on the early success of first-generation solutions to take advantage of these software-defined infrastructure stacks. We explore a range of discussion points from the research, we look at the drivers behind the adoption of HCI, the need for simplification and easier consumption of IT resources. We also discuss how the current technical design of HCI hardware architectures may limit their ability to grow in the way we need them to. We discuss the risk of silo's and explore HCI tax, before then looking at the future how architectural changes are driving a new breed of HCI allowing a more flexible deployment model, decoupling the component parts so HCI can scale capacity and compute separately, which then begs the question, is this new breed of HCI really HCI at all and does it really matter? And of course, we look at NetApp's entry into this market. Enjoy the show. Full show notes are here :- https://wp.me/p4IvtA-1wJ