devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: HCI

  • Lenovo Updates Diverse HCI Platform Portfolio

    Lenovo today announced a bevy of updates to its server portfolio that expand the number of options organizations have when it comes to bundling stacks of software with Lenovo hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms to reduce the total cost of on-premises IT.

    For example, Lenovo in collaboration with Nutanix and AMD, today launched a Lenovo ThinkAgile HX HCI based on AMD EPYC processors, which promises to reduce by 50% the number of servers required to run the Nutanix HCI software stack.

    Lenovo in collaboration with Microsoft today also unveiled Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Azure Stack HCI Edge appliance based on Azure Stack HCI software. That platform runs the same software stack on-premises that Microsoft employs in its Azure cloud to simplify hybrid cloud computing environments.

    In addition, Lenovo added a Diamanti SR630 appliance to its lineup based on storage software developed by Diamanti optimized for instances of Kubernetes running on bare-metal servers.

    Finally, Lenovo in collaboration with VMware added a Lenovo ThinkAgile VX HCI offering that comes bundled with SAP HANA databases running on top of VMware vSphere.

    Kamran Amini, vice president and general manager of server, storage and software-defined infrastructure for the Lenovo Data Center Group, said rather than optimizing HCI infrastructure for one single platform such as VMware, the Lenovo portfolio is designed to provide IT organizations with the flexibility to enable organizations to deploy stacks of Nutanix, Microsoft, Kubernetes or VMware software as they best see fit.

    The economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has been especially challenging for providers of IT infrastructure platforms deployed in local data centers that many IT teams have been not been able to visit in recent months. However, those IT teams have been relying more on the ability to manage Lenovo servers remotely rather than attempting to migrate existing application workloads to the cloud overnight, he noted.

    It’s too early to say what the impact COVID-19 will have had on IT strategies. While many new applications are being deployed in the cloud, there is still a plethora of performance, security and compliance requirements that make it preferable to deploy some classes of workloads in on-premises IT environments. After more than a decade of having public clouds available as an option, the bulk of application workloads in the enterprise continue to run in on-premises IT environments. If it remains relatively simple to remotely manage those systems from home, the pressure to lift and shift workloads to the cloud becomes less intense.

    Amini said the COVID-19 pandemic essentially served as a wake-up call for organizations to modernize IT management processes using platforms that are designed to be managed from anywhere.

    Now that it’s apparent many IT teams will be working remotely a lot more often, many organizations are revisiting their IT strategies. There’s no doubt public clouds will play a larger role in IT going forward. However, the future of IT in general and cloud computing in particular will be, if anything, more hybrid than ever.

  • Nutanix Extends DevOps Ambitions

    Nutanix Extends DevOps Ambitions

    Nutanix at its .NEXT Europe conference has signalled its ambitions now extend into the realm of DevOps. The company announced it will make available an Acropolis Compute Cloud (AC2) and an Acropolis Object Storage Service on top of its Enterprise Cloud OS software that creates an instance of a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform that can be deployed on-premises or in a public cloud.

    In addition, Nutanix is embedding an App Marketplace in its Nutanix Calm orchestration software through which applications developed on top of Enterprise Cloud OS can be accessed.

    Finally, Nutanix has added Veritas Technologies to the list of providers of data protection software that can be employed to provide backup and recovery software for applications running on top of its core AHV hypervisor.

    Greg Smith, vice president of product marketing for Nutanix, says his company is now moving well beyond simply trying to combine compute and storage in a locally deployed appliance. It envisions organizations employing Enterprise Cloud OS to drive hybrid cloud computing applications across a consistent set of automated orchestration services based on a common platform optimized around an HCI architecture.

    HCI architectures were pioneered by cloud service providers, and Nutanix applied those concepts to local data centers in the form of an appliance. The company then took the software it developed for the appliance to create a portable cloud operating system environment it is now extending with, for example, an object service that is compatible with the S3 interface defined by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

    Smith says Nutanix is making the compute and storage services available on top of Enterprise Cloud OS as an alternative to more expensive compute services based on platforms such as VMware. Nutanix is essentially in a race against other providers of HCI software to extend the reach of its platform. VMware, for example, has made its software stack available on the IBM Cloud and similarly is working to make its software available on AWS. Smith says the Nutanix approach gives IT organizations more control over where they want to deploy HCI software on any platform, including server platforms from Cisco Systems, Dell EMC, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) if they so desire. All three of those vendors also provide access to rival HCI software platforms.

    Nutanix developed its own hypervisor on which Enterprise Cloud OS is built to enable its software to be deployed on multiple platforms. But just to make things more interesting from an IT operations perspective, Nutanix also has HCI software that can be deployed on a VMware hypervisor.

    Against that backdrop, IT organizations are trying to determine the rate at which they want to replace traditional rack-based systems with HCI platforms, which combine compute and storage to reduce the total cost of operating an IT environment. Most legacy applications still expect to access external storage. But as new applications are developed, the expectation is that most of them will run on some form of an HCI platform that can scale out to support a much broader range of applications.

    It’s not likely legacy applications running on rack systems will go away anytime soon. But it is apparent that IT operations teams will be managing a mix of rack and HCI systems for years to come.

    — Mike Vizard