1. WWW.LANWORKS.COM
Written By
ERIC RYDZKOWSKI
DEMYSTIFYING
HYPER-CONVERGED
INFRASTRUCTURE
INVESTIGATING THE PROS AND CONS
OF HCI FOR CANADIAN SMBS

2. VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become
the standard. As awareness around its benefits has grown, visualization has
become a go-to for organizations seeking reduced power consumption,
high-availability, more streamlined IT deployment and support for rapid change.
Still, even in virtualized environments, IT infrastructures
exist in figurative silos, with different infrastructure
elements of network, storage, compute, software operating
on different systems (often with different experts). But
for many organizations that division is disappearing.
Large cloud providers, such as Amazon or Google, have
developed an infrastructure model to extend the benefits
of virtualization to meet their exponentially expanding
IT infrastructure needs, dubbed hyper-converged
infrastructure (HCI).
A great deal of confusion still exists around converged
infrastructures, their benefits and challenges, and what
businesses and environments for which they are well
suited. This whitepaper looks at HCI and what small and
mid-sized businesses must consider in evaluating such
solutions.
PERSONALIZED IT FOR YOUR BUSINESS
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ENVIRONMENTS
VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS
ENVIRONMENTS
VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly become
ENVIRONMENTS
have increasingly becomeVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly becomeVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS
ENVIRONMENTS
VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS have increasingly becomeVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS
the standard. As awareness around its benefits has grown, visualization has
ENVIRONMENTSthe standard. As awareness around its benefits has grown, visualization has
become a go-to for organizations seeking reduced power consumption,
ENVIRONMENTSbecome a go-to for organizations seeking reduced power consumption,
high-availability, more streamlined IT deployment and support for rapid change.ENVIRONMENTShigh-availability, more streamlined IT deployment and support for rapid change.
2

3. LEGACY
INFRASTRUCTURE
Many current or “legacy infrastructures” have computers
as a distinct group of servers that connect to an external
set of Ethernet switches for network connectivity and
also connect to fibre channel switches for access to
SAN storage. This is a proven design, but in some cases
this architecture does not scale well for a dynamic
organization requiring rapid growth.
Legacy Infrastructures are very open in nature as it is
quite common to have servers from one manufacturer,
fiber channel switches from another manufacturer and
a SAN from yet another manufacturer. This “best of
breed” model has served us well for many years as open
compute, storage and network standards allow all the
discrete components to work together quite seamlessly.
If you don’t like your SAN vendor, it is quite easy to
purchase and migrate over to a different SAN product
with little or no disruption to the business.
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Ethernet
Servers
Fibre
Channel
Storage
LEGACYLEGACYLEGACYLEGACY
3

4. CONVERGED
INFRASTRUCTURE
A converged infrastructure is well suited to cloud
environments since they pool resources, automate
provisioning and allow for rapid and dynamic scaling.
The market for converged infrastructure is growing as
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service
(PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud-based
models become more popularly embraced.
Forecasts estimate the converged infrastructure market
will see a compound annual growth of 24.1 percent in
the next several years, growing from $11.53 billion in
2014 to $33.89 in 2019.
Virtually all major infrastructure companies are
looking at and developing solutions for the converged
infrastructure space. Open source analyst firm Wikibon
has estimated that by 2017 nearly two-thirds of all
infrastructures that supports enterprise applications will
be packaged as converged solutions.
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Embedded
Ethernet
Server Blades
Embedded
Fibre
Channel
Embedded
Network
Storage
A converged infrastructure is one in which the multiple IT
infrastructure components—server, storage and networking—
are combined into a single unified computing package. These
are often called blade centres or unified computing. This
approach is still hardware-based and each function of the server
can, if required, be used for its particular purpose. That is, a
particular server can be separated and used to run a particular
discrete function or isolated application.
CONVERGEDCONVERGEDCONVERGEDCONVERGED
4

5. HYPER-CONVERGED
INFRASTRUCTURE
Hyper-converged infrastructure takes the decoupling
of function and hardware even further by delivering
the function using software. In this software-defined
approach all infrastructure components run across a
mesh or fabric of low-cost hardware components
turning them into a single pool from which resources
can be drawn.
For example, in solutions from HCI vendor Nutanix, the
storage logic controller normally found in SAN hardware
is treated as a service found on every virtual machine
(VM) and software-defined storage takes all the local
clusters and configures them into a single pool. For
performance, data is dynamically moved to the local
node on which it is being used, and replicated on other
nodes in the cluster for resilience.
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Servers
Single Solid
State Drive for
performance
of local VM’s
Remaining Magnetic Drives
are part of a large drive pool
shared among all servers.
Standard
low cost
server
1
Converged Infrastructure Market by Components (Server, Networking, Storage, Infrastructure
Software, Support Infrastructure), Services ( Installation & Integration, Consulting & Professional,
Maintenance & Support), Architecture Type, and End Users (Enterprises, Cloud Service
Providers, Collocation Service Providers) - Worldwide Forecasts & Analysis (2014 - 2019),
marketsandmarkets.com, August 2014.
HYPER-
CONVERGEDHYPER-CONVERGEDCONVERGEDHYPER-CONVERGED
5

6. In short: hyper-converged is
exciting, up-and-coming technology
with some exciting potential.
However, we have found through
experience with medium-sized business
customers that hyper-converged
systems are likely to create some
significant challenges for SMBs.
Typically, each node is configured with a single Solid
State Drive (SSD) so that frequently accessed data
is served-up lightning fast for VM’s on that physical
host. If you take a host offline (or it fails), the VM’s
will auto-migrate to other hosts in the farm but the
process of moving the data local and caching on
local SSD will start over so performance will suffer
until things stabilize.
Also increasing in popularity, the HCI market is
currently growing at 116 percent, and is expected to
reach $800 million by the end of 2015 and to pass
$1.5 billion worldwide in 2016, according to IDC.
At their simplest, converged infrastructure is based
on blocks of hardware and hyper-converged is
software-defined. But this distinction creates
significant concerns that SMBs must consider.
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6

7. ALL FOR ONE:
THE BENEFITS
OF HCI
BENEFITSBENEFITSALL FOR ONE:BENEFITSALL FOR ONE:
For the right business, with specific needs, HCI provides
some exceptional benefits, in particular:
• Simplicity in management: One hardware system
can result in simplified management, at least from a
hardware perspective. Hyper-converged infrastructure
centralizes management and offers a single console
to manage compute, storage and network. This may
not, however, ultimately result in an easier-to-manage
infrastructure as we will look at later.
• Economics: Because infrastructure elements are
distributed across a mesh of lower-cost servers,
HCI provides a granular and linear, pay-as-you-grow
economic model for IT investment. Need to scale up,
simply add a node to the HCI fabric where it is joined
into the “collective.”
• Distributed architecture: The mesh-like approach
taken by an HCI solution is fault-tolerant. Since
functions aren’t tied to one particular server, multiple
failures can occur simultaneously and the system
“heals itself” by simply using the nodes remaining.
• Storage consumption: Load balancing between nodes
and capacity savings mechanisms in HCI systems reduce
storage consumption. In addition, with systems like
Maxta’s VM-centric HCI solutions, storage administration
demands are reduced, since VMs are being managed
rather than storage.
• Replication & disaster recovery: In addition to
the benefits of the distributed architecture already
managed, many HCI solutions have integrated
replication and disaster recovery technologies built in to
the underlying software.
• Smooth and non-disruptive upgrades: In a traditional
IT infrastructure a mismatch can occur between
various systems as they age and, say, compute or
storage functions become individually upgraded. This
can be a particularly prominent problem in SMBs with
high capital costs. With HCI the entire stack becomes
upgraded by adding new nodes and removing old low-
performance nodes in a non-disruptive and (again)
granular way.
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7

8. HCI CHALLENGES
FOR SMBS
CHALLENGESCHALLENGESHCI CHALLENGES
CHALLENGESHCI CHALLENGES
Hyper-converged infrastructure operates a little like the
Borg on TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, assimilating
all functions under one great big infrastructure mesh. While
that may seem like a great idea, SMBs should consider the
effect such a collective would have on security, staffing
and scalability in their specific environments.
These are no small issues that you would need to
contend with in an HCI environment. These are further
complicated by changes between what national markets
consider “small and mid-sized.” For example, while
certain aspects of HCI might be ideal for a U.S. “small
business,” it is often referring to a much larger company
than found in the Canadian market.
• Security and compliance: Security is always only as
strong as its weakest link, but consider the effect of
all data, storage, compute, system and networking
functions existing on the same hardware and
distributed across nodes of a hardware fabric. What
happens when one of those functions is compromised,
or one of those nodes?
• In addition, regulatory compliance often requires
a firewall or direct separation between particularly
sensitive information—for example, payment card
information in PCI—and other data. How is such a barrier
put in place across such a distributed infrastructure?
While not impossible, it is certainly more difficult to
achieve.
• Staffing challenges: Staffing is almost always a
challenge for Canadian SMBs, but it is one that is only
becoming more difficult in the years to come. A recent
report from the Information and Communications
Technology Council (ICTC) suggests the expected
growth of smart and hyper-connected marketplace
mean that cumulative hiring requirements in Canada
for ICT Talent are expected to be over 182,000 by
2019. According to the report, 31 percent of surveyed
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8

9. employers in Canada already have difficulty or delays
in filling ICT positions due to a lack of suitable talent.
• In traditional infrastructures different experts often
handle different functions, with network administrators
handling the network, or storage experts dealing
with storage solutions. An HCI environment requires
managers with some degree of expertise of all
elements, exacerbating the challenge of finding the
talent needed.
• Scalability: While HCI provides benefits around
scalability, allowing it to be granular and more
dynamic, it also creates challenges around scaling
any one infrastructure component independently.
HCI scales in a linear way, making it ideal for large
scale organizations with huge growth needs across
the board, but inefficient for a smaller organization
that perhaps need to ramp up a great deal of storage
without adding compute performance.
• Although some HCI vendors offer, for example, storage-
only nodes so scaling can occur independent, they are
limited in number making it still more of a challenge to
scale storage independent of compute than a traditional
environment.
• Since control planes and data are converged, mixed
together as VMs and VM data storage, scaling one
means automatically scaling the other. For most SMBs
if performance degrades you upgrade only the node on
which the control plane is running, for example; this is
impossible in an HCI environment.
• Lock-in: Vendor lock-in must also be considered.
To control costs and maintain flexibility, you may
want to be able to select server and storage vendors
independently. Not possible, of course, in a HCI
environment. You become locked into one manufacturer
for your entire infrastructure, limiting flexibility, and you
become married to their support and SLAs.
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9

10. A hyper-converged infrastructure certainly makes a great
deal of sense for a number of verticals and businesses,
especially those with extreme needs to grow and scale on a
dime. That’s why companies like Google and Amazon have
developed and used such technologies for years, so they can
scale their infrastructure quickly with inexpensive hardware.
For companies with a linear growth pattern, where each
technology consumer would have a reasonably similar
growth across the organization (or its customers in the case
of a cloud provider) HCI is a perfect solution. For others,
traditional compute and storage infrastructures absolutely
will still have their place when aggressive and massive (and,
again, linear) scaling is not a requirement.
Those outside of the sweet spot of service providers or up-
and-coming industries experiencing explosive, extensive and
rapid IT resource growth will want to consider the impact of
HCI on their environment very closely and may want to wait
until solutions to the challenges discussed have been better
developed.
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MAKING SMART
DECISIONSIDEAL FOR SOME, BUT…
10

11. ABOUT LANWORKS
For over 25 years, Lanworks has been committed to delivering
the best IT solutions to businesses, by investing in partnerships
with clients, building relationships with vendors and distributors,
expertise in its service portfolio—Life Cycle Management,
Security, IP Communications, Advanced Infrastructure and
Collaboration—Lanworks is positioned to assist its clients
through the entire cycle, from early stages of evaluating IT
solutions to post-implementation support.
REFERENCES
1
Technavio, “Global Disaster Recovery Services Market 2015-2019”, December 24, 2014.
2
MarketsandMarkets, “DR as a Service Market [RaaS; Cloud DR; Disaster Recovery
as a Service; Business Continuity as a Service] - Worldwide Forecasts and Analysis
(2013 - 2018)”, March 2013.
3
Aspect Software and The Center for Generational Kinetics, “The Aspect Consumer
Experience Index: Millennial Research on Customer Service Expectations”, April 2015.
4
Bret Longlois, Catalyst Canada, “With Growth Comes Changes:
The Evolving Canadian Mobile Landscape”, March 2015
5
Leon Spencer, “16 million mobile devices hit by malware in 2014:
Alcatel-Lucent”, ZDNet, February 13, 2015.
6
Panda Security, “PandaLabs Quarterly Report, Q2 2014”
T. 905.212.1555
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WWW.LANWORKS.CAWWW.LANWORKS.CA
T. 905.212.1555
F. 905.212.1560
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MISSISSAUGA . ON . L4W 5A1 . CANADA
ABOUT LANWORKS
For over 25 years, Lanworks has been committed to delivering
the best IT solutions to businesses, by investing in partnerships
with clients, building relationships with vendors and distributors,
and truly valuing our employees. Through the five pillars of
expertise in its service portfolio—Life Cycle Management,
Security, IP Communications, Advanced Infrastructure and
Collaboration—Lanworks is positioned to assist its clients
through the entire cycle, from early stages of evaluating IT
solutions to post-implementation support.