2. WHAT DOES HCI
HAVE TO DO WITH
CLOUDIFYING MY
DATACENTER?
The Enterprise Cloud for Dummies eBook (which you can download here) does a good job
explaining scaling limitations of traditional infrastructure, that in turn impede hybrid cloud goals:
The vision of private and hybrid clouds is not new—and companies have tried doing this before.
However, the underlying infrastructure is still based on scale-up storage accessed over a storage
network that is deployed and scaled in big chunks. What's needed is a re-platforming of the
enterprise datacenter. You cannot build cloud capabilities on traditional three-tier infrastructure
with scale-up storage.
Scale-up storage has hard limits. At a certain point, the shared components — controllers and
the network fabric — get overwhelmed. It's inevitable. The question is not if this will happen,
but when. As a result, many scale-up storage systems are bundled with spec sheets that tell
customers that they can grow only so far before they have to add more shared components.
Adding these components also adds complexity to the system.
The end result is unpredictability, a scenario that cannot be tolerated in the modern datacenter.
Businesses must be able to operate with the expectation that their workloads will operate con-
tinuously at predictable levels. In scale-up, as you add more burden to the shared resources,
performance levels can be affected.
Even many of today's array-based scale-out storage methodologies begin to crumble under
their own weight as they grow. The bigger these constructs grow, the more data has to traverse
a storage networking fabric. Eventually, as data gets farther and farther from the CPU and RAM,
performance problems ensue.
A reliable datacenter infrastructure combines the ability to leverage scale-out storage
while maintaining data locality.
We've already noted that hyperconverged
infrastructure is the core of a cloud-
ready datacenter. BUT WHY?
