The data center technology has been changing. We have gone through standalone server, shared storage, virtualization, flash and now hyperconverged infrastructure.

Traditional data centers have different IT groups to manage server, network and storage.  Customers are asking for central management, less moving parts, quick deployment and linear scale out. Hyperconverged infrastructure made it possible to merge these silo systems and management structure.  Customers can  purchase and get support from one vendor.

SimpliVity OmniStack is a software-defined hyper-converged infrastructure solution. OmniStack runs on x86 industry standard servers to deliver turnkey hyper-converged infrastructure for the software-defined data center. Clustering multiple OmniStack-powered hyperconverged infrastructure units forms a shared resource pool and delivers high availability, mobility, and efficient scaling of performance and capacity.

SimpliVity OmniStack assimilates all IT infrastructure and services below the hypervisor into a single, scalable 2U building block. Two or more instances of OmniStack-powered hyperconverged building blocks deployed together form a federation—delivering a massively-scalable pool of shared resources. The solution runs on commodity servers OEMed by SimpliVity under the SimpliVity OmniCube brand name and with third-party servers, including Cisco UCS  and Lenovo System X servers, under the SimpliVity OmniStack name.

An individual OmniStack node includes:

•  OVC – OmniCube Virtual Controller – A virtual machine is deployed and pinned to the host servicing an NFS datastore to the ESXi kernel. OVC uses DirectPath I/O for the local SCSI controller and the OA. Manages all aspects of SVTFS file system. Maintains a read cache in OVC’s memory. Multiple OVCs in a VMware Datacenter present a unified namespace of storage across all OmniCubes within that Datacenter as a vSphere Datastore.
•  OA – OmniStack Accelerator – Acknowledges writes, performs data efficiency operations, manages metadata and works with OVC to store metadata in the SSD pool. DRAM is used for transient data. Super capacitors are used to de- stage DRAM to Flash in the event of a power failure.
•  Cache and Metadata SSD Pool – SSD drives (number and sizes vary based on OC model) protected with RAID1 or RAID5 using a local SCSI controller – provides read cache and metadata storage.
•  Capacity Pool – HDD drives (number and sizes vary based on OC model) protected with RAID6 using a local SCSI controller.

You can modular scale out your virtual desktop and application deployments with hyper-converged infrastructure which has three unique attributes: accelerated data efficiency, built-in data protection functionality and global unified management capabilities.

• Deliver highly optimized storage using inline deduplication and compression
• Policy based data management for each virtual machine
  • VM can be backed inside or between data centers
  • Allow any sized application to be backed up immediately
• Embedded storage management in virtual center
  • Single console to manage storage, network and server
  • Leverage existing  data centers and clusters to define failure domains
• High availability
  • Add or remove nodes without downtime and interruption

Next blog I would like to share hyper-converged infrastructure with virtual desktop deployment.