Nuancing Management of HCI Deployments

Jerome M. Wendt, president and lead analyst, DCIG, Inc., is the author of this article on December 28, 2017.

Nuancing the Management of Your HCI Deployments

When one examines enterprise data protection and storage products through the lens of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) designs, one would think it either supports an HCI architecture or it does not.

But as one uncovers when one scrutinizes this topic, the answer is not a simple yes or no. Nuancing how well or if a product fits into an HCI design, one first needs to think about the question or even the series of questions that he or she should ask.

As DCIG has begun to re-position its analysis to look at the emerging and existing set of storage and data protection products, one can quickly see many of them introducing or coming to market with HCI architectures.

Consider:
• Cohesity and Rubrik are two vendors that have come to market with data protection solutions built upon hyper-converged architectures.
• Deduplication backup appliance provider ExaGrid has been using the phrase ‘hyper-converged’ more frequently when referencing the architecture of its product.
• Commvault recently announced ScaleProtect that is delivered along with Cisco’s HyperScale Software to provide an HCI data management and protection software solution
• This year Comtrade Software introduced its HYCU software that specifically targets the protection of Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) environments running on Nutanix HCI platforms
• Pivot3 acquired NexGen Storage in 2016 and has since incorporated its QoS technology into its HCI Acuity platform
• NetApp, a long-time enterprise storage player, in mid-2017 announced its own HCI platform aptly named HCI

As one looks at all these announcements from long standing players in the enterprise data protection and storage spaces who are adopting hyper-converged solutions as well as how many of the new entrants into the market are delivering their solutions on HCI architectures, one would think checking the HCI check box would be straight forward.

In one respect, it is. Many of the emerging and existing data protection and storage solutions can now run on HCI platforms. You will get no argument from me on that point.

However, the bigger question is, does a product running on its own HCI platform really solve the bigger management problem that enterprises should ultimately seek to address? Or do all these latest and greatest product iterations just create another new rat hole of management complexity that enterprises need to deal with?

When I look at HCI platform in the context of a perfect world, they should only have one solution that spans on-premises, off-premises, and/or in the cloud that gives them the flexibility to:
• Run applications and/or VMs where they are best suited to run
• Provides them with the analytics they need to quickly trouble shoot issues
• Minimizes or eliminates down time associated with upgrades and patches
• Manages data holistically across the environment

Granted, no such environment existed in any organization for which I have ever worked in either the public or private sector. However, it would be awesome if such a solution existed that could deliver on this ideal. In short, one could put all these products together to create one cohesive, single architecture upon which they could use to build their underlying IT infrastructure for tomorrow’s data centers.

Here’s the problem that emerges with solutions as they are evolving today. If one selects a HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix, VMware VxRail, Pivot3, Scale Computing, or any other HCI platform as their primary production HCI platform, it is unlikely – and I would even say improbable – that any of these new solutions will fit neatly into any of them. Granted, these providers may be able to provide primary or secondary storage to these environments or protect the applications and/or data residing on them, but can function as part of the whole. Or do these other solutions become just another island of storage that organizations must manage outside of their primary hyper-converged infrastructure platform?

The wave of adoption for hyper-converged platforms is just getting started and much yet needs to be sorted out in terms of how well all these platforms interact with one another. However, any organization that adopts a primary HCI platform and then expects any of the storage or data protection products running HCI platforms to seamlessly plug into it may be in for a rude awakening. While these storage and data protection products running on HCI platforms do result in making them easier to deploy, manage, and upgrade, they for now still create silos of data that companies must still manage apart from their primary HCI platform.