I would imagine that most folks who have gone either all rack servers or blade servers for the data center will lean a bit towards their chosen solution, but I’m curious about other options that are beginning to permeate the stack. More blended ideas, also called “hyper converged infrastructure”, such as example offerings from Nutanix, Scale Computing, and Pivot3, are entering the market and gaining traction.
The idea with this compute shift is to combine all three food groups into one physical server box: the storage layer (often a mix of PCIe flash, SSD, and SAS / SATA), network layer (iSCSI or NFS front end, with perhaps Infiniband on the back end), and compute (Intel or AMD chips in a “mini blade” format).
The end result is the removal of the traditional stack model. Compute now has direct access, or zero hops, to the storage. There is also a significant reduction in cables snaking back through the data center cabinets. It also removes some barriers to entry; traditional skill sets around concepts such as SAN design are much less relied upon.
Regardless of product, do you feel the hyper converged infrastructure model is right for your data center servers? Or is the traditional monolithic model of racks or blades connecting to a SAN and LAN the way to go?
What do you think some drawbacks and benefits of both models are? I’d be especially curious to hear from folks who have tried the hyper converged model and have some war stories (positive and negative) to share.
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