Liqid Delivers Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure for VMware HCI Deployments

Liqid announced its disaggregated composable infrastructure solutions are now optimized to meet the unique demands of VMware vSAN and VDI installations. With on-demand, bare-metal resource orchestration and automation, virtualized environments are freed from the physical limitations of the underlying hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware on which they are deployed. Bare-metal servers can be created through software to effectively treat bare metal hardware as disaggregated resource pools, breaking with the one-to-one model that tethers virtualization licensing to physical CPUs. Disaggregated accelerator technologies like GPU, FPGA, and Intel Optane memory can now be added on demand and utilized as shared resources in quantities that best correspond with a given virtualized compute task. Hypervisors such as vSAN can orchestrate resource allocation via Liqid APIs, extending the life of existing hardware and allowing IT organizations to grow infrastructure as required.

“Because hyperconverged systems are sold based on static hardware bundled at the point of purchase, IT users are forced to add resources they do not need in order to grow vSAN and other virtualized implementations, leaving hardware underutilized in some instances, overtaxed in others,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., Executive Director Research & Technology Fellow, Cloud & Data Center Research Practice, IHS Markit. “With composable infrastructure for vSAN and other hyperconverged environments, hardware can be right-sized for the job, then released for use by other virtual machines when complete, delivering the ultimate in software-defined infrastructure at all levels of compute activity, down to the bare metal.”

Disaggregated Composability Completes the Mission of Virtualization

Hyperconverged data center architectures can no longer scale to keep pace with the uneven demands of virtualized compute environments. With limited ability to disaggregate data center resources, traditional hyperconverged systems can quickly become uneven, with some resources sitting idle while others are taxed to their limits.

To address these challenges, Liqid delivers composable, software-defined infrastructure solutions and services that automate, orchestrate and compose resources at the bare-metal level, optimizing hardware deployments for virtual environments. IT users can significantly increase data agility, capacity, and bandwidth, leveraging pools of disaggregated GPU, FPGAs, CPUs, NVMe SSD, and Intel Optane memory extension technologies to create balanced systems that can adapt on-demand or through automation and policy based management. The ability to create multiple bare-metal servers on demand through composability reduces the number of software licenses required for virtualized deployments.

“The problem with hyperconverged environments has always been just that: convergence. By decoupling hardware purchasing cycles with the requirements of hypervisors such as vSAN, virtual machines can be matched through software with bare metal servers that address the needs of specific applications, then released for use by others when not in use,” said Sumit Puri, CEO and Cofounder, Liqid. “Systems stay balanced, licensing costs can be reassessed, and IT users can prepare for emerging, high value applications, with disaggregation eliminating the need to purchase equipment until it is required.”