What are the advantages of hyper-converged architecture compared with traditional three-tier architecture?

The local upgrade and hyper-converged architecture of different products have improved the IT infrastructure in all directions, which are explained below.

1, which effectively improves the reliability.

A common misunderstanding of software-defined data center architecture by many enterprise customers: Is the system built by x86 server reliable? Although the x86 server itself has a single point of failure, hyper-convergence itself works in cluster mode. The first problem to be solved in its core distributed storage system is to build a large-scale system with higher reliability by using technologies such as multiple copies, which is the core of building a software-defined data center.

Moreover, compared with traditional centralized storage, distributed storage has many advantages in reliability, and the comparison is as follows:

In addition, SmartX, Nutanix, VMware and other vendors provide enterprise-class storage services ranging from data checksum to rack awareness, active and passive, remote backup and other functions, as well as enterprise-class high availability and data protection solutions integrated with third-party products.

2. Concurrency performance is greatly improved and IO delay is reduced. The following still introduces why hyper-converged architecture can improve the performance of SMTX operating system and reduce access delay.

Among them, the distributed architecture improves the aggregation performance of the whole system; SSD cache mechanism improves the access performance of single node; I/O localization mechanism has advantages only in hyper-converged deployment mode, which can further reduce access delay. It should be noted that I/O localization is mainly supported by SmartX and Nutanix, but hyper-convergence based on open source products such as Ceph cannot be supported.

To give a concrete practical example, due to the bottleneck of dual control, HP 3PAR 8440 has basically reached the maximum performance among eight SSDs, but the reading and writing performance can be achieved only by using four SmartX hyper-converged nodes.

3. The expansibility is greatly improved. As mentioned above, compared with traditional storage, the core distributed storage of hyper-converged architecture has an essential improvement in scalability, including the following features:

Among them, the support of heterogeneous nodes needs to be confirmed with vendors, similar to SmartX, but many vendors do not provide such support.

4. The difficulty of operation and maintenance is greatly reduced. For the difficulty of operation and maintenance, we can compare the two architectures for the whole operation and maintenance cycle:

As can be seen from the above figure, hyper-converged architecture not only automates a lot of operations in the whole product operation and maintenance cycle, but also has short time and high efficiency. IT can effectively reduce the requirements for personnel, liberate IT personnel and enable them to carry out more innovative activities.

5. Reduction of procurement cost and total cost of ownership In terms of the cost that customers are most concerned about, the procurement cost of server+hyper-converged software (or hyper-converged all-in-one machine) has been greatly reduced compared with that of server plus traditional high-end storage. But in addition to procurement costs, hyper-convergence has more advantages in total cost of ownership.