What Does Hyperconverged Infrastructure Mean?
A hyperconverged infrastructure is an infrastructure model that utilizes a software-centric architecture and has a tight integration with the storage, networking, computing and virtualization software and hardware resources. A hyper-converged infrastructure enables the management of all the integrated resources from a single common toolset. A hyper-converged infrastructure is an improvement over a converged infrastructure, where the vendor provides a preconfigured bundle of software and hardware as a single unit. This type of infrastructure reduces complexity and helps simplify management of resources.
A hyper-converged infrastructure is also known as hyperconvergence.
Techopedia Explains Hyperconverged Infrastructure
A hyperconverged infrastructure is one in which all the components are tightly integrated such that they cannot be broken down into separate components. It is thus effectively used in managing virtual workloads. It is a cloud-like environment where the resources can be scaled without making compromises to performance, reliability and availability. Some of the benefits of using a hyper-converged infrastructure are:
- Elasticity – It provides better scalability.
- VM-centricity – A virtual-machine-focused development or workload is given more importance.
- Data protection – Data loss is reduced and data recovery is made easier.
- VM Mobility – Application and workload mobility is made easier.
- High availability
- Data efficiency – It reduces storage, bandwidth and IOPS requirements.
- Cost efficiency – It reduces wastage of resources and increases cost effectiveness.
Convergence systems can be considered an advancement over the traditional IT infrastructure. Convergence could occur at various levels. The most basic convergence could be an integration of individual storage units, computing and network switching products.
A hyperconverged infrastructure aims to eliminate organizational silos and better manage virtual workloads.
