In this CEO’s Viewpoint video, George Teixeira, CEO & President at DataCore Software, shares what’s driving customers’ interest in hyperconverged infrastructure and some of the main use cases.
In How Software-Defined Storage Enhances Hyper-Converged Solutions, Sushant Rao of DataCore Software details real world scenarios of how a hyperconverged infrastructure is the right approach to combine storage, compute, networking and virtualization in one unit.
One of the fundamental requirements for virtualizing applications is shared storage. Applications can move around to different servers as long as those servers have access to the storage with the application and its data. Typically, shared storage takes place over a storage network known as a SAN.
However, SANs typically have issues in virtualized environments. The first is providing consistent, reliable I/O performance where it is needed. As different applications start, stop and process data, the load on the SAN varies greatly. If a database starts a large job processing data, the SAN may become overwhelmed, which will start impacting the performance of other applications that are acting in a normal state. Applications that are performance-sensitive are particularly susceptible to this issue, including databases (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server); applications and ERP systems based on databases (SAP, Oracle Applications, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics); VDI (VMware and Citrix); and communications systems (Microsoft Exchange, VoIP).
Due to the challenges of using SANs in a virtual environment, organizations are currently looking for new options. Hyperconverged infrastructure is a solution that seems well-suited to address these issues.
