Opinion

Going hyper

Stephen Chew of Curvature explains how to embrace Hyperconverged Infrastructure - on a budget

Comment

Welcome to the September edition of the Storage magazine eNewsletter, which includes a thought-provoking piece on the benefits of a hyperconverged infrastructure, described as ‘allowing innovation but with old hardware’. Curvature’s Stephen Chew describes seeing customers evolve their three-tier architecture (server, SAN, and storage) into a two-tier hyperconverged (server/storage) environment while using existing network infrastructure for connectivity. In short, legacy systems are being leveraged as building blocks for today's environments.

The hyperconverged approach eliminates the need for siloed operations and puts greater focus on a consolidated infrastructure, reducing reliance on precious real estate while consuming less power. It also, argues Chew, opens up the possibilities of software-defined storage: “Software-defined storage has been proven to be much more efficient than native hardware storage, and it reduces the number of hardware storage units you need to maintain and replace. Also, as a virtual computing platform, hyperconvergence gives you continued access to your data in the event of a malfunction or disaster, and it provides the necessary redundancies for data protection, backup, and recovery.”

As an alternative to ‘rip and replace’, this approach has a lot going for it - we expect to see this topic covered more in our pages.

David Tyler, Editor david.tyler@btc.co.uk