Businesses need more scalable and flexible infrastructures than ever to respond to rapidly growing and highly competitive markets. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) offers organizations the flexibility of the cloud with the privacy of traditional, three-tiered architecture: compute, networking, and storage. This article will outline the reduced costs, greater agility, and simplified operations that businesses can leverage when employing HCI in a private cloud environment.

What is Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)?

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) can be conceptualized as a “platform-in-a-box.” This software-defined solution combines networking, computing, and storage services into one commodity x86 server. HCI is a modular, commoditized, software-integrated infrastructure that allows organizations to scale their offerings and meet growing demands quickly.

Modern HCI platforms from vendors like VMware, Nutanix, and Azure Local offer enterprise-grade capabilities and can serve as the building blocks for scalable private cloud environments.

How HCI Enables Private Cloud Architecture

HCI solutions act as a modern foundation for private cloud environments. Traditionally, private cloud architecture uses a separate external storage system accessed through a network. Hyperconverged storage is placed inside the physical footprint of the compute devices, a server with drives.

Key Concepts

To explain how HCI works within private cloud architecture, it’s important to understand a few key concepts: Software-defined storage (SDS), software-defined networking (SDN), and how an integrated management layer works.

In traditional architectures, storage and networking are often separate, hardware-defined systems. In HCI, software-defined storage (SDS) replaces external disk arrays by pooling local storage across servers. Software-defined networking (SDN) replaces hardware firewalls and routers with virtual equivalents, making network configuration faster, more flexible, and more secure.

An integrated management layer coordinates and automates the operation of SDS and SDN, ensuring efficient resource use, scalability, and reliability across the private cloud infrastructure.

Benefits of HCI in the Private Cloud

Hyperconverged infrastructure offers advantages in cost, scale, and performance. It consolidates commodity servers with embedded storage and software-defined features, and its switching architecture can scale up if the customer needs more network throughput. But HCI can come with a learning curve. As long as that can be conquered with the right experts or internal training, it can come with a lot of benefits for the customer. 

Improved Performance 

In HCI environments, many network functions occur through software-defined routes within the server, reducing reliance on physical switching for internal communication. This can simplify network configuration and improve performance.

Simplified Operations

It’s easy to miss optimizations when you’re switching between tools. Admins manage everything in HCI through software and from a single integrated management layer. Operations can be much more straightforward compared to legacy frameworks as a result. 

Scalability

Because HCI can accommodate traditional architecture and make it configurable and operable from a single console, it’s easier to spin up and reconfigure resources as needed. The modular design of the “platform-in-a-box” is much simpler to scale. 

Stronger Security

With HCI, security starts at the VM level, with microsegmentation and endpoint protection. This reduces the amount of damage that may occur from a natural disaster, data breach, or other cybersecurity incident. 

Cost Efficiency

Because you’re not managing as many devices, your organization can enjoy a lower overhead and fewer hardware layers to manage and maintain, improving cost efficiency and reducing expenses associated with procuring, replacing, and repairing equipment.

Security Advantages of HCI Cloud

As mentioned, HCI cloud comes with clear security advantages, including microsegmentation within network segments, VM-level firewalls, and software-defined perimeter controls. 

Microsegmentation 

Micro-segmentation enables greater security within a network segment. We can take two adjacent VMs in the same network segment and prevent them from talking to each other unless we allow it, increasing the security posture of the private cloud. 

Firewalls 

With software-defined networking, we can add firewall rules between network segments without going to a separate firewall. This level of configuration can help enhance security with granular controls. The management layer of HCI allows businesses to control and adjust firewall controls from a unified place. 

Perimeter Controls 

Security can be placed at VM endpoints within a hyperconverged private cloud, as opposed to the edge outside of the private cloud, which also increases security. Even if the network perimeter is breached, this approach can prevent threats from moving laterally.

HCI Use Cases in Private Cloud

There are a few key reasons businesses use HCI in the private cloud. HCI can be useful when organizations are looking to:

• Move from legacy systems while retaining a three-tiered architecture or the level of privacy enabled by the private cloud 
• Reduce energy consumption associated with powering and cooling excess hardware 
• Increase their physical footprint through edge computing without having to worry about managing an entire data center to support the infrastructure

Managing all layers on one device means you don’t have to power or cool as much hardware, reducing costs and energy consumption. HCI in edge computing can mean you may need some remote hands help in various locations for commodity components, but a central IT team will be responsible for managing all locations remotely.

Emerging HCI Use Cases

Modern HCI platforms now support artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) workloads by incorporating GPU support and high-performance nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) storage. These features accelerate processing and data access, meeting the demands of emerging technologies.

Additionally, leading vendors now offer hybrid cloud integrations, enabling workloads to move between private clouds and public clouds like Azure or AWS. This makes HCI a core enabler for multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies.

Is HCI Right for Your Private Cloud?

If you see your situation in one of the use cases above, HCI is probably right for your private cloud. However, each business will have specific use cases and goals it wants to accomplish. To know for sure, it’s best to consult with cloud experts who can help you build a path to implementation and management.

Build a Future-Ready Private Cloud with HCI

TierPoint’s 40 edge data centers across the United States offer access to highly scalable, private cloud resources, including hosted private cloud with hyperconverged infrastructure. This allows your organization to leverage the scalability of HCI without incurring the costs associated with maintaining an on-premises data center. Learn more about our cloud services and solutions and reach out to a member of our team today.