Hyperconverged Infrastructure: The Leading Edge of Virtualization

Hyper-convergence: The leading
edge of virtualization
Toronto VMUG
February 2015
Daemon Behr
Solution Engineer
© 2015 Scalar Decisions Inc. 1

Agenda
•  Introductions
•  Converged Infrastructure Landscape
•  Nutanix vs EVO:RAIL

Introductions

Canada’s top IT
infrastructure specialists.

Top tier technical talent.
•  Engineers average 15 years of experience
•  World-class experts from some of the
leading organizations in the industry
•  Dedicated PMO, finance, sales and
operations teams

180

100%
BC Alberta
Ontario
Quebec
Canadian

#51#1
#15
ICT Security
Company
Top 250 ICT
Companies

© 2015 Scalar Decisions Inc.
An integrator of emerging technologies.
9

We are not…

•  Traditional infrastructure usually is a result of building a
network in isolation, a storage environment in isolation, and
then bolting a virtualization environment
•  Converged infrastructure is created when all are designed or
specified with close ties
What is converged infrastructure?

Converged Infrastructure

Converged Infrastructure Landscape
•  Storage led options from EMC (VSPEX) and NetApp (FlexPod)
•  Single Vendor offerings, like Cisco UCS + Invicta
•  Integrated block offerings, like VCE vBlocks
•  SAN-free environments like VSAN
•  Converged VMware offerings, like EVO:RAIL, Nutanix
•  Reducing risk by providing combined architectures

•  Build from scratch
•  Reference designs vs validated designs
•  Validated designs are huge – hundreds of steps to implement
•  How do you scale?
•  How do you scale and stay within supported bounds of the
reference design?
Storage-led Convergence

•  Dell Storage and Dell Compute
•  Dell VRTX
•  Cisco UCS + Cisco Invicta Storage
•  HP Servers + Lefthand Storage
Single vendor offerings

•  EMC vBlock
•  VSAN Ready Nodes
•  EVO:RAIL Offerings
•  Dell XC
•  Nutanix
Converged Offerings

Simplicity does not precede
complexity, but follows it.
-  Alan Perlis
[first recipient of the Turing award]

•  Single company doesn’t mean single product
•  Circular dependencies of firmware, drivers, OS
•  How do you expand?
•  How do you lifecycle components?
•  How do you maintain it all?
Complexity

Maintenance and Upgrades
It took
30years to
repaint the
Golden Gate
Bridge..
Now, it never
Stops being
painted

•  We show value through experience, not through being the
people who do tedious stuff
•  Quick infrastructure implementation means we can more
quickly move on to business infrastructure transformation,
moving your workloads onto the platform
Our view of convergence

•  Linear scale-out compute and storage
•  Not just VMware (like EVO:RAIL)
•  Hyper-V, KVM
•  Strong support organization, through Nutanix Pulse
Market leader in Hyperconvergence

•  “We only run VMware”
•  .. Well, except for those few Hyper-V boxes
•  .. And the KVM ones
Diversity is important

What is Nutanix?
•  Managed virtualization infrastructure
•  Tight integration with VMware
•  Clustered file system across all nodes
•  SSD/HDD tiering
•  Now partnered with Dell, to run on servers with an enterprise
class heritage

•  Build clusters of Nutanix systems as large as your vSphere
clusters, or larger
•  Start with 3 nodes, grow to up to 48, one node at a time
•  Scale out storage at the same time you scale out compute
Start small, grow big

•  Options for “Compute heavy” and “Storage Heavy” nodes
•  Start small, grow big
•  Node types can be mixed in a cluster
•  Grow as you need – capacity on demand
•  No need to size compute, no need to size SAN
Scale out with Nutanix

•  VMware VSAN has come leaps and bounds since its original try
as the VSA
•  Nutanix has always been miles ahead of VSA’s functionality
•  Nutanix NDFS includes many enterprise level SAN features,
such as ILM tiering, scale out to eliminate controller IO
bottlenecks, phone home for disk replacement
•  No need to architect SAN separately from compute – as you
grow compute with Nutanix, the SAN grows too
No SAN?

•  Early days for EVO:RAIL, this will change
•  Nutanix is Tier 1 ready. EVO:RAIL right now is Tier 2 only
•  Nutanix can grow one node at a time, vs 4 right now for
EVO:RAIL
•  Nutanix supports every VMware license, EVO:RAIL requires
Enterprise Plus
•  Nutanix supports 48 nodes, EVO:RAIL supports 16
Nutanix vs EVO:RAIL

•  Validated designs are all they sell
•  Simple management and support
•  One-click, non-disruptive upgrades
•  Single source of documentation
•  No need to worry about VMware HCL – if it isn’t on there,
Nutanix doesn’t have it
Why Nutanix for converged?

What is right for you?

•  There is no slam-dunk solution that works for every company
•  The right solution depends on size, desire to change, historic
growth, growth plans, and features desired (which leads to
budget)
It depends..

•  You know your business requirements best, but how many
virtualization environments do you implement per month?
•  Look for the “V” in Value Added Reseller – our engineering
team, over 80 staff, work with sales, and validate every
solution sold. We make it work the way we said it was going to
work
•  A “V” VAR’s technical resources can quickly translate your
business requirements into technical specifications, saving you
time, and reducing risk
Working with a VAR vs DIY

Read our blog post about using Uses, Considerations, and
Recommendations for VMware vSAN by Dan Sylvester, Manager,
Technical Pre-Sales, Western Canada.
http://blog.scalar.ca/Blog/bid/102964/Uses-Considerations-and-
Recommendations-for-VMware-vSAN
What’s Next?

Connect with us!
facebook.com/scalardecisions
@scalardecisions linkedin.com/company/scalar-decisions
slideshare.net/scalardecisions

Hyperconverged Infrastructure: The Leading Edge of Virtualization

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