Will hyper-converged solutions kill the IT team?

The benefits of hyper-converged infrastructure are largely based on the simplicity of the systems when compared with other, more traditional approaches.

Instead of purchasing hardware and software from a variety of different vendors and them attempting to get them all working together, a pre-configured system is purchased from a single vendor.

The system scales horizontally, so if additional storage or compute capacity is required, you simply buy another node and add it to the existing cluster, without an outage. Software upgrades are also done online, usually by downloading the update from the vendor over the internet, like a simple app.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is another way in which traditional data centre kit is being transformed by the consumerisation of IT as people – used to the simplicity and ease of use of smartphones – come to expect the same experience from all of their IT.

This ease of use is particularly appealing to the small- and mid-size IT shops that don’t have scores of dedicated specialists in each part of the IT stack. Instead, teams of generalists are expected to handle compute, storage, networking, databases, and applications. All at once. If these systems are complex and fragile, they take up a lot of administrator time. Time that could be better spent helping their organisations provide a better customer experience or increasing revenues.

But with the simplicity of hyper-converged systems that require little human intervention, do customers really need the same size IT team? Will customers reduce staff in their IT departments, or will these existing employees be redeployed to work on other things?

CRN asked resellers, distributors, and customers for what they’re seeing out there in the real world.

What is hyper-converged infrastructure?

While there is no clear ‘official’ definition of hyper-converged infrastructure, a working definition says this technology comprises commodity x86 servers with storage and compute in the same chassis, configured as scale-out clusters, with a hypervisor providing hardware abstraction. Virtual machines run on hyper-converged infrastructure, allowing them to move around the cluster sharing the available resources. Adding disk or CPU capacity is done by adding nodes to the cluster.

The primary advantage of hyper-converged infrastructure is simplicity. The nodes themselves are pre-configured units, purchased from a single vendor who supplies the hardware, software and support for the system as a whole. Installing them is generally as simple as racking the systems, plugging them in and turning them on. There are very few configuration options. Adding capacity is as simple as plugging in another node.

The trade-off for this simplicity is a lack of nerd knobs for customers to twiddle in their attempts to eke out every last skerrick of performance. Hyper-converged vendors are betting that a lot of organisations don’t need highly tuned systems, and instead just need some computer to get their work done. The sales growth of the major hyper-converged vendors suggests that they’re probably right.

Big business

Hyper-converged is a hot topic right now, with vendors boasting of billion-dollar valuations and hundreds of millions in investment poured into their coffers. Nutanix took $140 million in investment in August 2014 and reports having more than 1,200 customers, while Simplivity slurped up $175 million in March 2015 and has just over 550 customers. The SMB-focused Scale Computing added another $18 million in investment in July 2015 and boasts of more than 1,000 customers.

IT behemoth VMware entered the market with its EVO:RAIL reference architecture at VMworld 2014, along with a host of vendor partners ready to sell gear made to the EVO:RAIL specification, including Dell, Supermicro and Fujitsu.

VMware parent EMC released their take on the EVO:RAIL platform, called VSPEX BLUE, in February 2015, however industry gossip suggests the EVO:RAIL platform isn’t selling as well as originally hoped. HP recently dropped its support for the program, less than a year after joining it in October 2014.

Other vendors jumping onto the hyper-converged bandwagon in recent months include Atlantis, which has started offering its own OEM branded hardware to go with their software, and Maxta, which bills its software as enabling hyper-converged systems by installing it on hardware you purchase yourself (or through a reseller). Then we have a smattering of other, minor players including Nimboxx and Pivot3.

Next: What's happening in the local scene

The local scene

Market leader Nutanix has been active in the local market for just over two years, and is enjoying plenty of success.

Darren Ashley, managing director of BEarena, Nutanix’s ANZ partner of the year, was intrigued by the prospect back in 2012. “We were at VMworld in 2012,” he recalls, “and went to visit them at the booth. It was a new idea, and it caught our eye.” Some months of negotiating later, BEarena was one of the first Australian Nutanix partners, and the relationship paid off almost immediately.

“The first customer meeting we took the idea to resulted in a win,” Ashley says. “The light just went on in the customer’s mind.” 

After that first customer, Sanity Music, BEarena has since added plenty of others which like the Nutanix solution, including car maker Hyundai – a deployment covered in detail in the August 2014 issue of CRN. “Upgrades can be done online, during business hours, instead of it being a two- to three-month project,” says Ashley. 

He believes the market is still learning about the benefits of hyper-convergence. “The mid-market is very aware, as is the enterprise,” he says. “At about 500 seats or below, the awareness rate drops off. This tech isn’t that relevant for those people.

“We got resistance in the early days. But now we have so many customers that it’s rare to have a ‘startup’ discussion with a customer.”

Darren Adams, Australia & New Zealand VP and general manager of distributor Avnet, agrees the big advantage of hyper-converged systems is simplicity. The distie represents Nutanix as well as EVO:RAIL and VSPEX Blue. “It’s a more modular way to get a solution in place,” he says. “It’s more scale-out. When you want to add another compute or storage node, it’s simpler, more cost effective, more efficient.”

He also agrees that not everyone will want hyper-converged systems. “You can’t easily un-couple the components but then, why would you want to do that? With other approaches there’s more freedom and flexibility to configure things differently,” he says. 

While hyper-converged systems might be more efficient, customers aren’t necessarily reducing how many IT staff they have, says Adams. Savvy IT departments are using the extra time to help their customers achieve their own goals, though more timely access to information.

“Tying your IT department down with systems management is very 1980s,” reckons Adams. “Now you want someone who helps you make money. Hyper-converged enables IT departments to take on the quest to become profit centres.”

When it comes to selling hyper-converged systems, Adams agrees that customers are well informed of the options. “Buyers are more savvy than ever,” he says. “The internet has allowed people to do their own research. They’ve already read an analyst review, or read a blog.”

Customers are more likely to want to test things out for themselves, to see if the marketing matches reality. Proof-of-concept installations are a common way for vendors to get their solutions in front of customers and in use for their specific problems.

Simple, modular systems that are stable and reliable are displacing the complex and fragile collections of kit we’ve learned to accept, if not love. The trend is unlikely to reverse, and is, in fact, magnified by the explosion of interest in automation through movements like DevOps. The modern IT department of today is far more focused on getting things done for their customers than they are with fiddling with finicky technology in a back room.

It’s well past time. 

Serenity IT helps college shift to Simplivity

St Andrews Anglican College in Queensland had a problem: ageing, fragile infrastructure needed too much manual effort to keep working. With a team of just eight IT staff to look after facilities supporting more than 1,300 students and staff, IT director Rory Chapman was concerned that spending time looking after servers and backups was keeping his team from other, more important, work such as spending time on mobility solutions for its large and mostly mobile customer base.

“Backing up the VMs was a challenge. We have more than 30 terabytes of data to move, and we were struggling to pull them back fast enough.”

Chapman, with the help of systems integrator Serenity IT Solutions, chose Simplivity to help them. “We had a requirement to get backups off-site, and we needed to optimise the traffic across the WAN because the school is regional,” says Mona Taimana, technical director at Serenity IT Solutions. The compression and de-duplication capabilities of the Simplivity systems, and their low-bandwidth cross-site replication meant Chapman could achieve his data protection goals without compromising on system performance or purchasing other specialised tools.

“We started the migration on Thursday, and were two-thirds done by Monday – 90 percent of the migration was done in a week,” says Chapman.  

Chapman’s team handled the migration themselves, using the existing VMware tools they were familiar with, which just worked with the Simplivity gear.

When Serenity IT first approached St Andrews with the Simplivity solution, they realised the team would take some convincing. “It was a shift for them,” says Taimana. “We had to explain what hyper-convergence is, what the benefits are.”

Chapman says that the commitment of Serenity IT helped to convince St Andrews to go hyper-converged. “It’s new, so we need the VAR to stand by us if things go pear-shaped.”

Next: Managed IT saves $120,000 in wages

Hyper-converged is not just about customer environments – there is also a clear model for managed service providers to adopt the technology within their own private clouds. Perth-based Managed IT recently became the first Western Australian managed service provider to take up Nutanix to replace old infrastructure.

The government-specialist company became the sixth MSP nationally to adopt the hyper-converged appliances for its customers, according to a Nutanix spokesperson.

While the initial costs for hyper-converged can be higher, Managed IT managing director Michael Wates says that in the long term, the appliances save money due to the reduced labour required for infrastructure support.

“Having Nutanix saves us probably one full-time senior engineer – about $120,000 every year,” says Wates. “You have to look at the big picture and in the longer term [hyper-converged infrastructure] allows our staff to spend more time with our customers.”

The ease of setup also saved on labour costs, with Wates estimating the systems were up in half-a-day, compared to one or two weeks for a traditional storage area network.

For customer Foodbank of Western Australia, Wates says Nutanix was the ideal infrastructure for systems demanding high performance like Citrix remote desktop. Less demanding software remained on Microsoft Azure, which is the MSP’s cloud of choice.