Not All HCIs are Created Equal

By Dinesh Singh posted 09-30-2020 16:13

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When you buy a new house, you have a choice to make. We either buy a pre-built ready to a move-in unit or hire a contractor to build the house to the specifications. The choice is usually shaped by the lead time to move-in, desire for customization, available capital, and skillset among others.

HCI is No Different
Choosing a hyperconverged infrastructure is no different. The most common deployment models that have emerged are appliance and ready node. Both are very different in ease of use, resource optimization, operational simplicity, and insights. Below VMware’s mapping for vSAN partners indicate the differentiated value proposition of an HCI appliance and a certified vSAN ready node.

Appliance or Ready-Node
An appliance such as Hitachi UCP HC is a pre-integrated, factory-fitted turnkey HCI solution that combines hardware, software, and virtualization for a faster time to production and simplified deployment. On the other hand, a ready node provides flexibility to separately procure any certified server, that meets application requirement, HCI software license, and integrate on-floor. The latter option provides more configurability options for sure. However, it requires expertise in the team to deploy software, integrate, run QA, optimize before systems can be deployed in production, potentially delaying the IT services to apps. Mid-range commercial customers, who usually have a small team for IT infrastructure and operations, find the appliance model attractive as it minimizes the work for their team and presents the HCI systems ready for consumption.

Why Customers Choose Appliance
Hitachi HCI appliance provides built-in automation for day0-2 operations to set-up the HCI cluster or to add capacity later. Workflow orchestration with Hitachi HCI automates hundreds of manual tasks to reduce the provisioning time from several days to 4-5 hours, accelerating IT delivery. Moreover, HCI appliances deliver high performance as the components are tuned for the most optimum output.

Please refer to my colleague Colin Gallagher’s blog on how to increase cloud agility using Hitachi HCI solutions while maximizing your existing systems.

Reliable Firmware Upgrades
While making HCI strategy, the technology teams expect a seamless firmware upgrade experience with no risk of outages. It becomes more important as HCI, by very definition, will have a greater number of systems and thus increasing the vector for failure. Hitachi HCI appliance delivers an automated upgrade to refresh systems’ firmware in a rolling manner for the entire HCI farm without impacting the live operation. Upgrade packages are pushed over the air to let customers schedule their upgrades that match with their business cycle. Moreover, the firmware upgrade is not limited to only the components inside the node. Hitachi’s management software Unified Compute Platform Advisor allows element management for ToR switches for plain HCI environment and spine-and-leaf switches for Cloud Foundation deployments.

Hitachi HCI appliance continuously monitors hardware components and gathers telemetry data to provide a frictionless operation. Analytics enable customer support teams to improvise customer support for a specific customer.

Single Call Customer Support
Opening support tickets with multiple vendors and dealing with a set of finger-pointing is never fun. Accurate root-cause analysis for allocating to a specific vendor is a cumbersome process that, thankfully, an HCI appliance customer doesn’t have to worry about. Hitachi HCI appliance customers receive single number support for hardware, software, and the virtualization, streamlining the operations. The deep talent pool of VMware certified professionals, including VCDX, VCP, VCAP, and vExperts helps deliver an excellent experience to customers.

We made exciting announcements on enhancements and new workload support on HCI platform last week that you can watch here.

Please leave your comments below for more information.

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Dipta Kundu

05-04-2022 12:27

Informative

Converged & Hyperconverged Infrastructure