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At its roots, SDS is a mechanism for pooling storage resources from an array together into a logical unit (LUN). Up until very recently, HCI platforms also typically included integrated components for software-defined storage (SDS).HCI can provision the space and power required for a given workload, at the current time. Processor power and storage capacity are the two easiest commodities to collect together. Very basically, HCI builds the environment that a VM workload needs, out of data center resources that are pooled together as commodities (thus, "convergence").In a little over four years' time, the project born from Google's internal container management efforts has upended the best-laid plans of VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, and every other would-be king of the data center. What is Kubernetes? How orchestration redefines the data center
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It is built to stage workloads, run VMs, and migrate them elsewhere in the network as necessary. An HCI-capable server fulfills the role of a hypervisor in a virtualization suite. Fundamentally, HCI is implemented by way of embedding a hypervisor (the component responsible for hosting and managing virtual machines, or VMs) in hardware.
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Each deeper level may pertain less and less to certain market participants whose intellectual investments in HCI may not be as deep as for others. Instead, it will present an examination of HCI in its present state, and leave any qualitative judgments to historians.Īlso: Microsoft adds more devices and services to its Azure Stack hybrid line-up The various layers of HCIīecause vendors in the HCI market space pursue the end goals of the technology to varying degrees, it's important to define HCI beginning at a foundational level, and then proceed into deeper levels where some systems may not choose to wade. This article will avoid evaluating the virtues of both sides' arguments. This is an argument you will continue to see from the makers of workload orchestration systems, many of whom are part of the open-source movement. Some folks perceive HCI today as a means of artificially distinguishing one manufacturer's line of enterprise servers from those of another. In fact, from here on out, we're only going to refer to it as "HCI" in the company of those abbreviations like "ITT," "NCR," and "AT&T" that no longer stand for their original designations. In HCI's present form, the issue is now largely irrelevant. In earlier incarnations of this article, we spent several paragraphs explaining what exactly got "converged" in hyperconvergence. That ideal has always been at least one step ahead, often more, of its actual implementation. Since its inception, hyperconvergence has been something of an ideal state. That's if everything works as advertised. That system can place workloads where they can be run most effectively, make storage and memory accessible to those workloads, and - if the system is clever enough - alter workloads' view of the network so that distributed resources are not only easier to address, but more secure. Yet HCI is rooted in hardware.Įach manufacturer of HCI components has engineered them to be answerable to a centralized management system.
#Nimble storage vs nutanix software
For the sake of this article, data center infrastructure is indeed comprised of software and hardware.
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