Cloud Computing: Getting Hyperconverged On Power Systems
July 17, 2017
Grazed from ITJungle. Author: Prickett Morgan.
A few weeks ago, when pondering the possibilities of how Big Blue might reimagine and reinvigorate the IBM i platform, we outlined how this might be done – and how it might apply to a much broader customer base after it was done – in an article called The Cognitive Systems/500 2018 Edition. We forgot one of the possible components of a modern, integrated system and, amusingly, IBM has just announced support for it.
The bit of the software stack we forgot to mention was what is called hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI for short, and this server-storage halfblood has become the underpinning of virtualized infrastructure at private datacenters for a number of key workloads and by thousands of organizations worldwide…
The idea with these HCI setups is fairly simple. Rather than have clusters of servers that support virtual machine hypervisors connect to usually expensive centralized storage area networks (SAN), HCI puts a distributed and virtual SAN on top of or inside of the hypervisor and the server nodes in a cluster do both the virtual compute and the virtual storage at the same time. These HCI stacks emulate, in a way, the sophisticated storage that was created by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook a decade ago to underpin their consumer facing and cloud computing applications…
Read more from the source @ https://www.itjungle.com/2017/07/17/getting-hyperconverged-power-systems/