Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is still an emerging technology and there are a variety of approaches vendors are taking. For many IT professionals, there is still an air of mystery and misconception around HCI. Below are 5 things you might not know about the current state of HCI.

The Meaning of Hyper

The “hyper” in hyperconverged means hypervisor. The term hyperconvergence was intended to refer to solutions that included a virtualization hypervisor in addition to the combination of server and storage, often referred to as converged infrastructure. Well, since hyperconverged sounds so much cooler than converged, every converged infrastructure vendor, whether they included their own hypervisor or not, started adopting hyperconverged to refer to their solution. Many of these solutions still rely on third party hypervisors and don’t really meet the hypervisor criteria for hyperconverged infrastructure.

Is it More Efficient?

Is HCI more efficient than traditional infrastructure? It depends on the vendor. For example, some HCI vendors are still using the same inefficient virtual storage appliance (VSA) models that became popular in adapting traditional SANs to virtualization. These VSAs are notorious resource hogs often consuming large amounts of RAM and CPU that would otherwise be available for application VMs. Other vendors have brought real innovation to HCI to build new storage architecture that is designed specifically to deliver storage efficiently to the hypervisor and make the most efficient use of the hardware.

Improved Data Protection?

While there haven’t yet been any studies specifically on HCI vendor solutions for data protection, a study by EMC (view here) found that more vendors involved in data protection resulted in more data loss. Many HCI solutions include comprehensive backup, replication, and disaster recovery tools to protect data, so they are a single vendor for data protection. The HCI architecture lends itself to better data protection by virtue of converging so many solution components in one.

Is HCI Less or More Expensive than Traditional Infrastructure?

The cost of acquisition can be high with HCI and the price varies from vendor to vendor, but there is a premium added to the traditional hardware cost for the software components and convenience of the various solutions being converged. Even if the price tag is higher than a traditional infrastructure, looking at operational expenses reveals the true savings. First, it saves enormously on implementation and scaling costs, since most of the traditional integration has already been done within the architecture. Then, depending on the vendor solution to varying degrees, management and maintenance costs are reduced over the lifecycle of the solution. The ROI of an HCI solution will usually be dramatically higher than a traditional server/SAN/hypervisor solution.

You have Flexibility to Scale Capacity

This does vary by vendor, but some vendors provide the ability to customize each appliance in an HCI cluster. With these vendors, when you add a new node, you can build it for the resources you need. The most common need is to increase cluster storage capacity, so you can bring in a new node with high storage capacity but with lower RAM and CPU to fulfill that need. With vendors that support this flexibility, you can customize resource capacity each time to add in a new cluster node.

Summary

HCI is a solution that should be looked at more closely for the value proposition it represents as a replacement for traditional IT infrastructure. Mystery and misconception can always be eliminated with research and dialogue with the vendors that are pushing forward HCI as a real, next-generation infrastructure.

As IT departments look to move beyond traditional virtualization into cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms, they have a lot to consider. There are many types of organizations with different IT needs and it is important to determine whether those needs align more cloud or HCI. Before I dig into the differences, let me go over the similarities.

Both cloud and HCI tend to offer a similar user experience highlighted by ease of use and simplicity. One of the key features of both is simplifying the creation of VMs by automatically managing the pools of resources. With cloud, the infrastructure is all but transparent as the actual physical host where the VM is running is far removed from the user. With live migration capabilities and auto provisioning of resources, HCI can provide nearly the same experience.

As for storage, software defined storage pooling has made storage management practically as transparent in HCI as it is in cloud. In many ways, HCI is nearly a private cloud, but without the complexity of traditional underlying virtualization architecture, HCI makes infrastructure management turnkey and lets administrators focus on the workloads and applications, just like the cloud, but keeps everything on prem and not managed by a third party.

Still, there are definite differences between cloud and HCI so let’s get to those. I like to approach these with a series of questions to help guide between cloud and on prem HCI.

Is your business seasonal?

If your business is seasonal, the pay as you go Opex pricing model of cloud might make more sense as well as the bursting ability of cloud. If you need lots of computing power but only during short periods of the year, cloud might be best. If you business follows a more typical schedule of steady business throughout the year with some seasonal bumps, then an on prem Capex investment in HCI might be the best option.

Do you already have IT staff?

If you already have IT staff managing an existing infrastructure that you are looking to replace, an HCI solution will be both easy to implement and will allow your existing staff to change focus from infrastructure management to implementing better applications, services, and processes. If you are currently unstaffed for IT, cloud might be the way to go since you can get a number of cloud based application services for users with very little IT administration needed. You may need some resources to help make a variety of these services work together for your business, but it will likely be less than with an on prem solution.

Do you need to meet regulatory compliance on data?

If so, you are going to need to look into the implications of your data and services hosted and managed off site by a third party. You will be reliant on the cloud provider to provide the necessary security levels that meet compliance. With HCI, you have complete control and can implement any level of security because the solution is on prem.

Do you favor Capex or Opex?

Pretty simple here. Cloud is Opex. HCI can be Capex and is usually available for Opex as well through leasing options. The cloud Opex is going to be less predictable because many of the costs are based on dynamic usage, where the Opex with HCI should be completely predictable with a monthly leasing fee. considering further the Opex for HCI is usually in the form of lease-to-own so it drops off dramatically once the lease period ends as opposed to cloud Opex which is perpetual.

Can you rely on your internet connection?

Cloud is 100% dependent on internet connectivity so if your internet connection is down, all of your cloud computing is unavailable. The internet connection becomes a single point of failure for cloud. With HCI, internet connection will not affect local access to applications and services.

Do you trust third party services?

If something goes wrong with cloud, you are dependent on the cloud provider to correct the issue. What if your small or medium sized cloud provider suddenly goes out of business? Whatever happens, you are helpless, waiting, like an airline passenger waiting on the tarmac for a last minute repair. With HCI, the solution is under your control and you can take action to get systems back online.

Let me condense these into a little cheat sheet for you.

One last consideration that I don’t like to put into the question category is the ability to escape the cloud if it doesn’t work out. Why don’t I like to make it a question? Maybe I just haven’t found the right way to ask it without making cloud sound like some kind of death trap for your data, and I’m not trying to throw cloud under the bus here. Cloud is a good solution where it fits. That being said, it is still a valid consideration.

Most cloud providers have great onboarding services to get your data to the cloud more efficiently but they don’t have any equivalent to move you off. It is not in their best interest. Dragging all of your data back out of the cloud over your internet connection is not a project anyone would look forward to. If all of your critical data resides in the cloud, it might take a while to get it back on prem. With HCI it is already on prem so you can do whatever you like with it at local network speeds.

I hope that helps those who have been considering a choice between cloud and HCI for their IT infrastructure. Until next time.

Scale Computing is making a big push into the Canadian market. Canadian VARs and MSPs might be interested in learning more about what we are doing up north.

The restructured Scale program accommodates managed service providers for the first time, and also makes provision for referral partners.

Indianapolis-based hyper-converged vendor Scale Computing has announced a major restructuring of its channel program. While the program, which had not been tweaked since 2013, was ripe for updating, a major goal of the changes is to increase significantly the number of partners with which Scale works. While that number is approximately 250 today in North America, they would like to get it to close to 1000.

“It was time for our partner program to grow up,” said Jason Collier, Scale Computing’s co-founder. “We sell entirely through channel partners, and have had success with the program, but we needed to make it much more robust than what it was.”

When Scale launched its flagship HC3 hyper-converged offering, a new partner program was launched at the very beginning of 2013, coinciding with the product launch. No significant changes had been made since then, and the changes to the partner community over the last four years made it imperative that the program be updated to deal with those changes.

“We have made accommodation in the new program for both managed service providers and referral partners, neither of which were accommodated in the old program,” said Kevin Greenwood, Senior Director of Global Channels at Scale. “We have also added an extra tier for our most productive partners to provide them with more financial rewards.”

The 2013 program was a two-tier program, on paper.

“Our first program was flat, with just one tier,” Collier said. “Later on, in 2013, we added a second tier, but there wasn’t much of a distinction between the two.”

The new program has three tiers – the archetypal Silver, Gold and Platinum – and the distinctions are designed to be meaningful.

“The differentiation is how much investment is put into the relationship,” Greenwood said.

The Silver tier is the entry level, and is pretty much open to anyone willing to go through Scale’s training. The formalization of the training and certification is a new and important part of the program, and is a critical part of the partner investment. Even the Silver tier requires training, and the required number of people trained goes up at Gold and Platinum.

The exception to the training requirement is Referral Partners.

“We believe these partners, who are typically technology consulting organizations, are a part of our channel,” Greenwood said. “Before, we did not have a model for them to participate, and now we do.”

The top Platinum tier is invitation only.

“This is significantly less than 10 per cent of our total partner base, and 10 per cent would be the logical maximum in a fully-built out program,” Greenwood said.

The way the program works has changed significantly as well.

“In the past, the program was not heavily managed,” Greenwood said. “We are now actively focusing more on activities that will generate the right opportunities for both Scale and partners, including more focus on marketing, lead generation and professional services.

“Professional services are a huge-value add that the channel delivers,” Greenwood indicated. “Partners are already selling a lot of those services. We want the program to bring us into alignment with what partners are already doing in services around installation, migration, disaster services, and data centre optimization.”

“For example, we are looking to franchise out our DR services to our MSP partners,” Collier said.

The ultimate goal of the new program is to significantly increase the number of strong partners doing business with Scale.

“We currently have about 250 partners in North America, of which around 40 to 50 per cent are active, and 20 per cent are highly active,” Collier said. “In Canada, we are crossing over the 50 mark in partners. While we have a sales and technical team in Canada, we don’t have nearly the name recognition in Canada that we do in the U.S., so lead generation activity is proportionately even more important in Canada. We also just hired a channel development manager for Canada to help enable channel partners.”

Collier said that they are looking to get to close to 1000 partners in North America.

“We’ve always been looking to add new partners, but this program is heavily focused on the recruitment of new partners, and we are actively seeking them,” Collier said. “We certainly see that the channel is changing, and managed services in particular are becoming critical. Part of this launch is accommodating to the realities of today’s channel market.”

Collier described Scale as a ‘VMware killer’ that doesn’t use VMware at all, and that this is very much reflected in their partner base.

“It very much impacts channel recruitment,” he said. “We are not looking to recruit those national partners heavily entrenched with the tier one vendors.”

We certainly feel that KVM offers a high degree of value in the SMB space. Powerful, flexible and with good options for kernel level expansion like Scale's unique storage layer.

In today’s markets, businesses need IT solutions to stay competitive and reach customers to drive sales and revenue. New technologies are constantly being developed to help businesses achieve greater efficiency and lower costs.

Despite the availability of these technology innovations, many businesses lag behind the technology curve, continuing to use older, more inefficient solutions. Some smaller businesses simply may not be aware of the latest technology solutions, but for most, there are other more sinister flaws in decision making that prevent IT innovation.

Here are 3 reasons that businesses hold themselves back from innovating in IT.

1 . The Sunk Cost Fallacy

Rather than try to explain the sunk cost fallacy completely, I’ll instead just ask you to Google “sunk cost fallacy” and read one of the many in depth descriptions you will find, if you are not already familiar with it. To summarize it briefly, it is the idea that if you have made a significant investment in a solution, you must continue using that solution because of the investment. It is basically using the rear window when you are trying to drive business forward. That investment is history.

Everyone wants to get the most out of investment but in the technology game, newer better solutions come along all the time. Making the decision to hold onto a solution when there is a better solution available may well end up being a bigger cost than having switched. For example, you might invest in a storage solution that you plan and budget to use for the next 4 years. After 2 years, you may have both a need and opportunity to go to a better solution but you might delay because of the sunk costs of the “4 year” investment.

2. The Rotating Budget Cycle

This is related to the sunk cost fallacy but is more related to adhering to a certain budgeting schedule. IT assets can be expensive and sometimes replacing them gets budgeted on a cycle and the cycles for different types of assets do not align.

For example, you may have purchased some server assets one year, the next year you purchased a storage solutions, and the next year you purchased some software solutions. You create a budget cycle where you are only purchasing part of the overall solution per year. This way of planning may help adhere to steady annual budget that is easier to account for and then you begin repeating this on a 3 year cycle.

But what if one year when you were supposed to buy servers, you want to buy a combined solution that includes both servers and storage? Are you able to adjust the budget to accommodate for the extra spending in that year or have you locked yourself out of that prospect and you instead have to wait until the following year because that is when the storage budget is available.

3. The Brand Name Game

When making any purchase, it is good to know something about the vendor, especially when there is support and warranty involved. It’s good to make sure the vendor is not a sham or a business that will be shuttering in a year or two. But is a brand name a safety net in this case?

The technology industry is known for innovation arising from little know startups as much or even more than from established brands. While small startups may fail or are at risk of being sucked into an abyss through acquisition, it is also not uncommon for large brand name products to be discontinued or brand name vendors to be acquired. Where brand name means a certain level of consistency and longevity in other markets, it is much less the case in technology solutions. By shopping only brand names, IT organizations are putting about as much though into buying IT technology as they would buying a hair dryer.

Smaller vendors with lesser known brands can be more of an asset than a liability in IT solutions because they may offer more personalized services, more responsive support, and more innovative solutions. With older, larger, more recognized vendors, you may be treated as just one of tens of thousands of customers who are shuffled through the support and service queues. The small startup that was passed over because of the lack of brand recognition often becomes the next big brand that replaces the solution you went with.

Summary

When it comes to technology innovation, it is important to stay open to new and emerging technologies to solve your immediate challenges. I know some IT professionals have their headphones on listening to “The Way We’ve Always Done It” by Zero Innovation, but many others are starting to get it. Continuing to use less efficient solutions may not only be slowing you down, it may be costing you more in the long run.

http://blog.scalecomputing.com/3-reasons-businesses-fail-to-innovate-in-it/

Excited to see the lab back up and running again in the new location!

More in our HCI roundup: TGDaily has an article on HCI and True Hyperconvergence and how these will lead to improved infrastructure. TGD introduces some of their own definitions, but has some discussion around the value of different convergence approaches.

@JaredBusch fair enough, I found it through Google but would have a better idea of what to search for to bring it up. I'll make someone aware that this should be under the green button as well.

The DataCenterJournal's article on Next Gen HCI looks at where hyperconvergence is going in the future and specifically looks at how and why networking may be important in the future to be brought into the HCI fold.

@BRRABill said in IOT Security Challenge:

I already have my submission ready.

It's a pretty box that you can throw all that insecure crap in, and then set on your curb.

Now, what will I do with my $25K?

That's exactly enough for a small HC3 cluster!

Youtube Video

@RojoLoco said in IOT Security Challenge:

@scale said in IOT Security Challenge:

@BRRABill said in IOT Security Challenge:

I already have my submission ready.

It's a pretty box that you can throw all that insecure crap in, and then set on your curb.

Now, what will I do with my $25K?

That's exactly enough for a small HC3 cluster!

Or a small new car...

Sure, if you want to be boring.

Youtube Video

Definitely, thank you everyone who took the time to put this together!

We are happy to announce that Scale Computing has won the Best Midmarket Strategy Award at the Spring 2017 Midmarket CIO Forum.

Nothing lasts forever, especially IT infrastructure technology. In the ever-evolving world of IT hardware and software, change is inevitable. Right now, organizations all over the world are seeing the signs they need to refresh, whether they know it or not. End of Life or End of Support are obvious reasons, but what other reasons are being realized or possibly ignored?

#1 – Performance becomes a pain.

IT is an engine that drives business. Over time, increased load and decreased efficiency take their toll on the performance of the IT engine. Performance issues can be dealt with in a number of ways such seeking out and fixing specific hardware performance bottlenecks to improving processes for greater efficiency. As with an automobile, there is a breaking point where the cost of fixing the problems outweighs the cost of repair. Performance issues can be notoriously hard to diagnose without expertise. For that reason, the pain of performance issues often demands IT infrastructure refresh.

#2 – Datacenters need consolidation.

For a variety of reasons, sometimes datacenters need consolidation. The needs may include acquisition, restructuring, or relocating but it may not make sense to consolidate what exists. Often different sites and even different departments use different infrastructure technologies for no particular reason. While it is possible to coexist a number of different SAN/NAS devices and hypervisor architectures, it adds a load of complexity to the combined datacenter. This is a classic opportunity for infrastructure refresh to eliminate complexity

#3 – Capacity is limited.

When you bought your SAN you had space for extra shelves for growth but you filled that faster than expected. Capacity planning isn’t an exact science, not even close. You could add another storage device and cobble the two together but there might be a better way in scale-out architecture. Software-defined scale-out storage built into hyperconverged infrastructure solutions offers very easy and cost-effective scaling, on-demand. Refreshing with hyperconvergence is not only going to help scale storage effectively but also scale RAM and CPU as needed, in a much simpler solution.

#4 – Alice doesn’t work here anymore.

Remember Alice? She was the out-sourced IT consultant who designed and built the current infrastructure with her own unique set of expertise? Well, her fees for continuing to fix and manage the solution whenever there was an issue was just too expensive. No one else can quite figure out how anything is supposed to work because she expertly put together some older gear that isn’t even supported any more. It works for now, thanks to Alice, but if something goes wrong, then what? It could be time to start over and refresh the IT infrastructure with something newer that staff IT administrators can deal with.

#5 – Costs are examined.

IT is a cost center. The challenge is to get the most benefit from that cost. Older technologies like SANs, whether physical or virtual, are costly and were never designed for virtualization in the first place. Hypervisors and management solutions like VMware vSphere come at a high cost in ongoing software licensing fees. There is the cost of integrating all of the storage, servers, virtualization and management software, not to mention backup/DR. Then finally the cost of expertise to manage and maintain these systems. The costs of this traditional virtualization architecture can be overwhelming. Avoiding these high costs is a primary reason IT professionals are looking at technologies like cloud and hyperconvergence to simplify IT.

Whatever the reason for an IT infrastructure refresh, it is an opportunity to lower costs, increase productivity, and plan for future growth. This is why so many are considering hyperconverged infrastructures like HC3 from Scale Computing. It dramatically simplifies IT infrastructure, lowers costs, and allows seamless scaling for future growth. While some workloads may be destined for the cloud, the HC3 virtualization platform provides a simple, secure, and highly available solution for all of your on-prem datacenter needs. If it is time to refresh, take a look at everything HC3 provides and all the complexity it eliminates.

This week we were pleased to have our Scale Computing Support Team featured in the TSANet Member Spotlight! We don’t really talk about our own support team enough and how awesome they are here at Scale Computing, maybe because if we did, they are so awesome that we’d be talking about them all the time. So, it is nice when someone like TSANet takes the time to highlight how great they really are.

So, rather than try to tell you in my own words, let me give you the link to the Spotlight feature and a couple snippets below. Click the image below for the link.

TSANet interviewed Blake Rodier, Technical Support Manager, Dave Demlow, Vice President of Product Management and Support, and Lynanne Gibel, Director of Support and Professional Services at Scale Computing.

“Our support renewal rate is around 93%. That says something about the support organization. We consider ourselves as a part of the product. A lot of our customers want to come back because of the support they receive and I consider that a huge acknowledgement for our team,” said Lynanne.

City governments face unique unique IT challenges, supporting a number of departments ranging from emergency services to parks and recreation. With limited budgets, these organizations look at technology to reduce the costs of the services they provide. Hyperconverged infrastructure is a great fit for city governments because it not only can be implemented at a low cost, but the cost savings continues through reduced operational and management costs.

But don’t just take it from us. These three videos let our customers speak for themselves about HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure.

Youtube Video

HC3 is a great choice for any IT organization looking to modernize for simplicity, scalability, availability, and disaster recovery. Our customer’s success is our success at Scale Computing. We want to help you be successful too. Let us know how we can help.

It's three letter acronym bingo! The Disaster Recovery Journal mentioned that with hyperconvergence now in the $25K entry point is perfect for the SMB and is making big inroads. Of course, we at @scale are a bit surprised by this given that we have been offering HCI under $25K for many years, most of the history of the HCI industry, in fact. So not sure why DRJ thinks that now it makes sense for the SMB, it's really made sense for it from day one. But at least some outlets are starting to pick up on what the IT industry has known all along.

Hurricane Harvey is an on-going disaster of epic proportions. Flood waters are still receding in the hardest hit areas of Texas and Louisiana while the remnants of Harvey are dumping rain in Tennessee. The flooding has affected millions of people and the devastation affecting their lives may take years to recover from. Relief agencies that are working to help the victims of Harvey need support now and will continue to need support for many months to come.

In addition to acknowledging the cost in human suffering, we shouldn’t ignore the financial costs dealt to businesses affected by this disaster. Some of these businesses may never recover from this disaster because of the extent of the devastation, and in some cases, because of insufficient disaster preparedness.

The full extent of the damage will not be known for some time, but it is safe to believe that with over 50 inches of rain falling in Houston and surrounding areas, some businesses had their servers and data storage literally underwater.

Radar Image from Weather Underground on August 25.

I personally have been involved in creating disaster recovery solutions for IT for over 18 years. In this industry, no one welcomes disasters and they are not viewed as events to capitalize on. They are instead taken as harsh realities from which springs renewed desire to improve the way IT is protected and recovered. The lessons we learn from each disaster elevate our efforts to prevent the loss of business critical data and services. And when I say business, that includes government and other organizations whose IT services may be critical to responding to disasters of all shapes and sizes.

Harvey is a reminder that disasters can and will happen and your primary data center could be at ground zero despite your best preparations. Are you prepared to recover from such a loss? Do your disaster recovery (DR) plans do enough to ensure recovery from a total loss of a data center? There are plenty of DR solutions and strategies available today to make sure you can recover from even a regional disaster like a hurricane.

Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions that combine servers, storage, virtualization, and backup/DR solutions into a single appliance can help. With traditional infrastructure solutions that have servers, storage, virtualization, and backup/DR as separate solutions, things get very complicated and often very expensive. Hyperconverged infrastructure provides simplicity starting with rapid, easy implementation and ongoing simplicity through unified management, unified support, and seamless scalability.

Scale Computing’s HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure solution is a prime example of simplified infrastructure that includes robust high availability and backup/disaster recovery at no extra cost. HC3 includes incremental backup, replication, failover, restore, failback as native features while Scale Computing also offers disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) for organizations who want or need a hosted DR site with their HC3 infrastructure. On top of the native features, HC3 supports a wide variety of third party backup/DR solutions including traditional backup/DR players like Unitrends, zero-downtime and real-time replication solutions like DoubleTake Availability from Carbonite, and newer backup/DR appliance solutions like Restoronix, to name just a few.

If you’ve been watching Harvey and wondering how you can implement a better DR plan that is both simpler and more cost effective, you should be looking at an infrastructure solution like HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure. Scale Computing offers DR planning services to make sure your data and critical services are protected while also providing a DR runbook (also provided with DRaaS) that will be your guide should disaster strike.