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Designing Always-on VDI and Scalable File Services with Hitachi

By Dinesh Singh posted 06-07-2018 00:00

  

Next-generation hyperconverged Unified Compute Platform HC comes together with proven, award-winning object storage Hitachi Content Platform to deliver compelling solutions for enterprises with virtual desktop projects and with distributed computing needs at branch locations.

Highly available desktops 

Many businesses require virtualized desktop environments (VDI) remain always accessible, even in the event of unexpected outages. Customers such as stock exchange, hedge funds, CPG manufacturers etc. require always-on desktops to ensure continuous business operation throughout a disaster.

In the absence of an orchestrated recovery solution, bringing back the desktop is a manual task, which is risky and time-consuming. It could take days or hours to make desktops operations, severely crippling business activities.

Customers now have the option to choose validated integrated solution from Hitachi that incorporates high-performance hyperconverged appliances, file services for user data, profile and application repositories with Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) and object storage with Hitachi Content Platform (HCP).

You can ensure high user satisfaction by overcoming infrastructure bottlenecks with a scalable high performance hyperconverged system, Unified Compute Platform HC. UCP HC system with NVMe SSDs can consolidate your VDI and other applications on single hyperconverged platform with guaranteed Service Level Objective(SLO).

Both HDI and HCP are clustered for high availability. If both nodes go down, a new cluster or virtual machine can be deployed and immediately rebuild its directory from the data stored on HCP. Should an HCP fail, another HCP can pick up the workload. Since HCP is self-protecting and self-replicating with version support and easy self-service, even disaster recovery of a remote site is fairly simple.

This solution further improves the mobility of your employees by allowing them to work from any location, while ensuring seamless access to all apps and data.



Key benefits from Hitachi Vantara’s end-user computing solution –

  1. Always-on desktops with multiple levels of protection of infrastructure and application
  2. Cost reduction per desktop, with much higher VDI density
  3. End-user mobility across remote locations

Branch offices 

Businesses that need to backup data at EDGE locations for recovery and compliance purposes often struggle with complexity of managing NAS filers and tape backups. Under-utilized NAS systems and the need for IT manpower to operate this set-up pushes branch RoI lower. Besides operational complexity, the data remains decentralized and IT has little control over it, giving rise to threats of security breaches. Risk of non-compliance is real. Critical files (such as KYO) can be accidentally deleted or get corrupted in remote locations. Retrievals from backup tapes is unreliable, cumbersome and time-consuming.

Now, the end-to-end data management solution from Hitachi encompasses hyperconverged systems for hosting the branch apps and HDI and HCP for data tiering, backup and archival. HDI presents a seemingly bottomless file (CIFS/NFS) read/write access to local users at remote sites, just like a local NAS device. HDI pushes files to HCP at central location for backup free storage. You can define the policy for HDI to migrate the data at regular intervals, which could be as granular as 15 minutes. For read commands, these files are recalled back to HDI, unless it’s hot data, which stays in HDI, for immediate fulfilment. Data can be pushed out from HCP to public clouds such as AWS or Azure for cost optimization or archival. I plan to cover three-tier data architecture in separate blog.



Key benefits from Hitachi Vantara’s ROBO solution –

  1. Eliminate backup at branch offices, reducing complexity. File versioning for recovery
  2. Seemingly bottomless storage for branch locations, dramatically improving branch office RoI
  3. Automated data protection to satisfy varying service levels
  4. Reduce manpower costs at remote locations, while ensuring compliance with central policies

Please read more about customer success with Hitachi’s integrated hyperconverged systems in my earlier blog here.

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