HPE has had several Hyper-Converged infrastructure (HCI) offerings available for quite some time, primarily the Simplivity product line. It is an excellent product but suffers from the same limitations of most any other HCI product when scaling. If you require more storage, you need to add a node that also include compute and networking, and vice versa. This may not make economical sense to over-provision certain resources that are not needed and can be quite costly.
Another option has been Converged Infrastructure or Engineered solutions. These are usually reserved for the larger SMB and Enterprise customers because of the cost. They offer simpler management and maintenance compared to traditional build-your-own solution, but this comes at a premium. Enter dHCI from HPE.
What are the benefits of dHCI?
Dis-aggregated Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (dHCI) aims to bring the simplicity of HCI with the flexibility of a traditional architecture. This allows workloads that would not have been candidate for HCI to take advantage of the benefits below.
Intelligently simple
Unified management center lets you deploy and scale in minutes with self-service setup and auto-discover. Be up and running in less than 15 minutes — and then stay up with no-compromise, always-on data services, and continuous wellness monitoring from storage to VMs. Manage everything with VM-centric operations in VMware vCenter, and stay current via 1-click upgrades.
Unmatched Performance and Resiliency
Ready for business-critical applications, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI keeps applications running and fast. HCI delivers agility and ease of use, but its architectural limitations make it a risky bet for business-critical apps. HPE Nimble Storage dHCI delivers sub-ms latency, 99.9999% guaranteed availability, built-in data protection, and can tolerate three simultaneous drive failures without a hiccup in performance. No other HCI can touch that.
Flexible Scale and Zero Waste
Scale efficiently and transparently with multicloud workload mobility, paving your way to hybrid clouds. Enjoy the unrivaled economics of an architecture that can scale compute and storage independently — and deliver guaranteed best data efficiency. Eliminate over-provisioning, reduce storage costs by 33-50%, and extend apps and data across your hybrid cloud with bi-directional data mobility and no egress charges.
How do I get started with dHCI?
There are two ways to begin enjoying the benefits of dHCI.
The first, and simplest way, is to purchase the full infrastructure stack including Proliant servers, HPE networking switches, and Nimble storage array. These are ordered as dHCI and come from the factory ready to deploy. Once they have been cabled and have power connected, the solution is ready to deploy with software pre-installed. You will be up and have a basic, functioning VMware environment in 15 minutes.
The second deployment model allow the repurposing of existing, supported HPE servers and networking for a new dHCI stack. A new Nimble array will be ordered with the dCHI software pre-installed and ready to deploy and configure your existing hardware. Now obviously the most important word in this solution is ‘Supported’ and we will work with you to determine if available resources are available for the new solution.
What to do next?
I think that dHCI fills much needed gap between traditional HCI and the full-blown Engineered CI at the top end, and best of all, there is no additional cost. If you are already looking at a new array and to replace your aging servers and network switches, why not also take advantage of the simplified management and upgrades that dHCI provides? And if you have existing, supported gear that can be repurposed while still enjoying these benefits, even better. Below I have links for the Solution Brief as well as the IDC report on dHCI and if you have any other questions, do not hesitate to reach out to anybody else here at SnowCap Technologies and we will be glad to help.