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Beyond virty boxen and hyperconvergence: Regard the mighty data centres of the future

Riding that software-defined wave

Market development

We could view HCIA products as re-invented servers and expect all the main server vendors to aggressively pursue the market, once they are convinced it is going to be a substantial and enduring one. That will probably mean a round of startup acquisitions as they buy in technology rather than develop it.

HCIAs are a major thorn in the side for stand-alone storage array vendors, who face having their entire networked array paradigm fade away. If they embrace HCIAs, as they probably must, then they have to become server vendors as well.

EMC knows this and is responding proactively with VSPEX Blue. NetApp has yet to jump, as have all-flash array vendors Kaminario, Pure Storage and Solidfire, and hybrid array suppliers Nimble, Tegile, Tintri and others.

The expectation is they will first partner with HCIA software suppliers and, if this proves insufficient, develop their own HCIA products through acquisition, merger or in-house development.

Enter stage left the HCIA problems

It’s almost too good to be true. I did say “almost.”

”Installed HCIAs grow by adding nodes, meaning that both CPU power and storage capacity and performance are installed together. You can't, HCIA opponents say, grow performance and storage separately and so run the risk of over- or under-provisioning of CPU or storage resource.

We can expect HCIA vendors to add quality of service SLA features to cope with this and ensure important applications get the resources they need.

We might also expect a degree of HCIA configuration optimisation, with performance-centric and storage capacity-centric nodes. It isn't rocket science.

A looming problem could be keeping control of inter-node communications as the node count goes into the hundreds and beyond. We'll probably see some form of sub-domains being introduced with, say, a 500-node HCIA deployment logically separated into five sub-domains of a 100 nodes each to limit inter-node messaging and provide failure domain capping.

So is this the future of the data centre? Well, the basics aren't rocket science. What’s more, having resources under software control is entirely in keeping with modern thinking about the software-defined data centre. The answer to that question looks encouragingly like a "yes." ®

Bootnote

* Simplivity was, we’re told, actually incorporated in 2008 as Ecological Solutions Corporation, later becoming SimpliVT. It rebranded and pivoted from card-only to HCIA in 2012.

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