What Is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

Virtualization of compute, storage, and networking—all in a highly scalable node.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Basics:

  • Designed for fast deployment and scale-out, hyperconverged infrastructure combines compute, storage, and networking into a modular node.

  • Hyperconverged infrastructure enables a software-defined data center, improves agility, and helps IT teams manage costs.

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The rising demand for cloud services, along with the need to replace outdated hardware and lower operational costs, is leading enterprises to adopt hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) in the data center. With hyperconverged infrastructure, compute and storage workloads run together on a server. Servers are clustered into a virtualized pool of compute and storage resources over a standard Ethernet network.

Hyperconvergence offers a straightforward path to a private cloud or hybrid cloud because it is a modern, software-defined infrastructure that can be quickly deployed and easily managed. In addition, it works well with hybrid cloud tools, enabling self-provisioning and portability for strategic workload placement.

Benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Simply put, hyperconverged infrastructure empowers the software-defined data center. It improves scalability and agility while enabling an overall software-centric architecture.

High Scalability and Agility

Most businesses start with three or four nodes in a hyperconverged cluster and add more as they need performance and capacity. This modular scale-out takes the guesswork out of how to build your data center infrastructure.

Flexibility

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a proven architecture supporting a range of workloads. Within a hyperconverged system, it’s possible to customize your servers to the needs of specific workloads. For example, you can choose from a wide range of Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors for high compute capability, Intel® Optane™ Solid State Drives (SSDs) for low-latency storage, Intel® Optane™ persistent memory to support large memory workloads, and Intel® Ethernet Products (available in 10, 25, 40 and 100GbE) to accommodate your network adapters, controllers, and accessories needs.

Low CapEx and OpEx

Hyperconverged infrastructure lets you start small and grow incrementally, making it easier to manage up-front capital costs and avoid overprovisioning. By investing over time, you can take advantage of advances in each technology generation. Furthermore, hyperconverged infrastructure can be managed by an IT generalist familiar with virtualization tools, helping lower operational costs.

Data Distribution for Durability

With hyperconverged infrastructure, data is distributed across the cluster, ensuring no single point of failure. Deploy multiple clusters to enhance durability and support business continuity. If data in one location is not accessible, it can be recovered from the other cluster.

Hyperconverged infrastructure lets you start small and grow incrementally, making it easier to manage up-front capital costs and avoid overprovisioning.

Intel® Technologies for Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Intel is driving platform innovation and next-generation capabilities across every infrastructure domain—from compute to storage to network to memory to accelerator technologies. With Intel® architecture-based hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, you have a clear path forward for the data-centric era.

Frequently Asked Questions

Hyperconverged infrastructure combines compute, storage, and networking into a single physical server, or node. These nodes are highly scalable. More can be added as performance and capacity needs increase.

Hyperconverged infrastructure empowers the software-defined data center. It improves scalability and agility, offers flexibility in server configuration, and can help IT teams manage costs.

Servers are clustered into a pool of compute and storage resources over a standard Ethernet network. As a software-defined infrastructure, hyperconvergence offers a straightforward path to a private cloud or hybrid cloud.