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The SMB IT Guy's Guide to Ensuring Your Success From Hyperconvergence


By now, everyone realizes the advantages of server virtualization. Flexibility in the face of rapidly changing technology, reduction in administrative effort on busy IT staff, and cost savings from reducing physical machines is just the beginning. As you may have heard, hyperconverged infrastructure solutions offer all of these advantages, plus the added benefit of simplicity in your environment.

This article is targeted towards small to mid-sized business: 50 to 500 employees supported with 1-5 or so staffers in the IT department. These IT shops don't rely on specialists, but a few really good "jack-of-all-trades". If you are looking for a way to bring this up with the boss, make sure to see the article written for the senior directors or owners in the business entitled The SMB Owner's Guide to Ensuring your Success from Hyperconvergence.

So - there are a lot of different hyperconverged vendors out there and a lot of solutions. If you believe the literature and web demos, they will all do everything you need in your environment. How do you know which is the best and what to look out for?

As with everything in life, the answer is - It depends. No one can answer the question of which is best for you, without the intimate knowledge of your environment which probably only you have. What I can do is provide you with some questions that you might want to ask the various solutions providers. These may help you determine which solution works best for your organization, and that management will buy off on.

Here are 5 questions to help you in your inquiry.

What comes in the box?

Well, not literally, but what does this solution entail? How many servers of MINE will this solution cover, and how much extra capacity will I have? Are there any extras that might later cost me money or maintenance fees? Are installation services needed and possibly included in this solution? Is high availability between hardware units included in this quote? The answers to these questions may not make or break the solution for you, but you should know what you are getting for your money. You need to be able to present this effectively to management so no one gets any unpleasant surprises later. Maybe you only need a barebones system right now. That's fine, but make sure that you know what is included and what everyone's expectations are.

Licenses

There are a few main solutions out there and they all handle this differently. Many manufacturers of these solutions OEM hypervisors, so ask how that affects the cost of your unit(s). Is there the possibility of having to purchase additional software licenses in order to expand? Are all of the management consoles and utilities provided under the license of the hyperconverged product? If not, what isn't included that I may want, and where can I get it? Do I need to deal with the hyperconverged manufacturer, or do I have to drag another vendor into this? How many vendors are involved in this solution and who do I call if I need support? Are there different tiers in the number of licenses? What do my maintenance costs look like 3 and 5 years out? If my server count grows by 20% per year, what additional costs will I encounter? Most solutions providers will be more than happy to work these numbers for you, and your management will love your forward thinking "strategic planning".

Simplicity and Ease of Use

Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions are all about making things simple, right? Find out. Get to know how this particular solution works. You don't need to see the actual code, but it might be nice to know conceptually how everything fits together. Does this solution come with any training? Is training required? Is training an extra cost? Are basic functions like setting up virtual machines, virtual disks, and virtual NICs intuitive? What about more advanced tasks? That pesky application that we have that demands VLAN tagging, how does this solution support that? Can I do every task I need to do from the management interface? How easy is this product to use for non-pre-sales-engineers-that-don't-work-for-the-manufacturer?

Backup, Recovery, and Failover

OK - we are looking at this solution because recovery and business continuity are supposedly made much easier with this. Can I stop dropping by the office after hours and on weekends to do silly little server tasks, like rebooting crashed boxes... for payroll... at the end of the month? How does this solution help me with recovery tasks? How does it handle a crashed server? How does the solution handle network failures, disk failures, or whole server failures? Can I SEE it demonstrated live? How will this solution affect my existing backup strategy? Will my current backup solution work, or does this solution include something that replaces it? Does it do native snapshots? How many? Will it replicate those snapshots somewhere automagically? How can my existing DR plan be improved with this solution?

Scalability

Everyone has a constantly changing environment. How does this solution handle growth and changing needs? What does it take to add 20% capacity to this solution? How much does it cost, and how easy is it to do? Will I have to stop production or do it at 3am? Do I need additional chassis to do this, or can I upgrade the units internally? Will this require downtime? What if I want to start moving things to the edge of my infrastructure? How flexible is this product? Do I have the ability to add more memory, CPU, or plain disk to this solution independent of purchasing the next model? What is the roadmap for this product line - Flash disk, software, and NIC speeds?

Hyperconverged infrastructure promises to be an amazing step in the IT virtualization lifecycle. There are different capabilities and features in all of the various solutions. You just need to ask a few questions to figure out which one is right for you. Not just right for you right now, but right for you in 3 to 5 years. Only after you can answer the questions above will you be able to enjoy the REAL benefits of simplicity that hyperconvergence provides.

Stanton is the Solutions Architect of AR Consultant Group. With over 20 years of storage consultin



Ar

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