BUYER’S GUIDE

ENTERPRISE SCALABLE HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

ENTERPRISE SCALABLE HCIBUYER’S GUIDE

INTRODUCTION

In the recent past, many enterprises – large and small – have used hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) to efficiently consolidate on-premises infrastructure, especially insmall- to-mid-sized datacenters. This strategy has proven successful for lower-tier applications. In a recent Evaluator Group study, they found that small-to-medium-sizedenterprises have especially taken advantage of this strategy for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), significantly reducing their costs to implement and maintain on-premisescapability.

Today, however, these same enterprises are searching for ways to improve their ability to run existing higher-tier applications in terms of cost, but more importantly, interms of bringing new, even more powerful applications to bear that strategically benefit the business. These include business-critical transactional databases, machinelearning methods, deep analytics with scale-out, key-value databases, and several other categories. However, these strategic workloads require enterprise-level, scalableresources beyond what most HCI vendors can provide, in all three aspects of the technology triad. Therefore, careful consideration must be used to determine optimalinfrastructure, leveraging new aspects of the technology triad to provide greater benefits to the business - those which cannot be achieved cost-effectively or efficientlytoday.

Enterprise scale HCI integrates all three into powerful servers, under software management and orchestration, to provide a robust environment in which to run even themost demanding application workloads. To better understand the concept of enterprise scale HCI, let’s break down the technology triad and their impact on performance,resiliency, and availability –key aspects of enterprise scale HCI.

Thus, this document, designed as a buyer’s guide to enterprise scale hyperconverged infrastructure, will guide you in terms of technologyselection to run workloads efficiently that cannot be run on prior implementations without excessive cost or unacceptable applicationperformance. There are three factors to consider: the technology triad of compute, network, and storage resources.

ENTERPRISE SCALABLE HCIBUYER’S GUIDE

COMPUTE

Compute is fundamental to enterprise scale HCI. The ability to sustain efficient compute is paramount when running upper-tier applications; without it, business-criticalresults may be delayed, or even useless. For example, a near-real-time analytics workload, scanning incoming data, must be able to provide insights for the business withina few seconds after ingesting the data. If these results are not available nearly immediately, their value is diminished or completely negated.

When determining and evaluating resources for computation, both central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) should be considered. Today, thereare an increasing number of business applications which benefit from the use of GPUs, which are inherently excellent at floating-point computations. Of course, general-purpose CPUs are the fundamental basis for server technology in which to deploy enterprise scale HCI, so careful consideration of CPUs is always warranted.

The overall goal in considering compute resources is to provide excellent, cost-effective services for those applications which are intense in nature, requiring:• Low latency (e.g. rapid response to queries)• High throughput (e.g. massive volumes of data processed per unit time• Large user population support (e.g. hundreds of virtual machines, thousands of containers) per server• Or, more likely, a combination of the above

A modern data analytics application often requires all three of these, in order to provide business benefits. An example of an application is one that provides AI-enabledinsights into data, conclusions from machine learning, or customer sentiment analysis. To provide those benefits, CPUs must be powerful, with many cores, memorychannels, and large cache areas.

ENTERPRISE SCALABLE HCIBUYER’S GUIDE

COMPUTE - CONTINUED

This is very important for enterprise scale HCI, because many software vendors license their products ‘by the socket’, meaning there is a fee for every CPU brought to bear in the infrastructure. These costs can often dominate the capital and/or operational expense incurred by the business, so it behooves enterprises to deploy powerful CPUs to maximize the value of their spend on licenses.

In addition to providing cost-effectiveness, powerful CPUs have the resources needed to enable the networking and storage legs of the triad; it is only in combination that one successfully deploys enterprise scale HCI. This is especially true with today’s NVM Express (NVMe) solid state disks (SSDs), which require much more CPU resource per drive than their predecessors which use legacy transports and interfaces, such as serial ATA (SATA), as well as high-throughput network interface cards (NICs) enabling 10, 25, 40, 50 or 100 Gb/sec Ethernet.

Powerful CPUs are a must for enterprise scale HCI. Look for the optimal core count/memory channel andcache resources for your server, those that are most often found near the top of the CPU ‘scale’. Be waryof low- and mid-range CPUs, as they will not be able to handle the workloads efficiently, which is, afterall, the entire point of the exercise.

As in geometry, if any leg of a triangle is disrupted, the structure will collapse.

ENTERPRISE SCALABLE HCIBUYER’S GUIDE

NETWORKING

In any HCI cluster, it is essential to construct efficient networks, so the member servers can communicatewith each other, as well as with the outside world. However, there are two types of networks to consider:

1. The network external to the server, with which we are all familiar, commonly using Ethernet.

2. A ‘hidden’ network within the server, that one must consider in order to achieve enterprise scale HCI,and that network is composed of industry-standard PCI-Express (PCI-E) interconnect paths, known as“lanes”. PCI-E lanes exist between a given ‘socket’ (CPU) and its peripheral devices.

In commodity server design, any given CPU can only directly reach the devices on its own lanes. The lanesextending off the other CPU (in a 2-CPU server, for example) are not directly accessible. This internalpartitioning prevents efficient use of storage devices, in particular – and that means applications run moreslowly than intended. In contrast, an optimal internal network uses a PCI-E ‘fabric’ design, where everyCPU can directly reach every peripheral. This is like an external network, where on a given LAN, everyserver can reach every other server, because of the switches in the network. The same is true for PCI-E –designing in an internal PCI-E switch provides optimal bandwidth, connectivity, and thus applicationthroughput for a given set of CPUs and peripherals.

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NETWORKING - CONTINUED

As for the external network, to establish enterprise scale, high bandwidth is critical, as cluster members must handle significant workloads and send information betweenthemselves, especially for the purposes of protecting data.

For example, a quad-port 25 Gb/s NIC (4x25) can be put to great use in an HCI cluster, or multiple such NICs per server. When coupled with powerful CPUs for compute, high-bandwidth, efficient NICs provide the optimal method to enable communications between the servers.

Because the total bandwidth needed in order to run workloads between servers may well be in the hundreds of gigabits/second, the use of 10 Gb/s NIC forces many moreNICs per server, and hence switch ports, per installation. This is a primary source of ‘network sprawl’. It is more efficient to use fewer, higher-bandwidth ports than more,lower-bandwidth ports. This can reduce overall cost as well, by reducing switch ports and switch count needed to support (say) 500 Gb/s of overall bandwidth.

Be careful about using 10 Gb/s (much less the inferior 1 Gb/s) NICs for significant HCI workloads.

As such, look for high-bandwidth NICs, defined as those rated at least 25 Gb/s.

ENTERPRISE SCALABLE HCIBUYER’S GUIDE

STORAGE

Storage is, arguably, the most important leg of the triad. After all, storage devices are where data resides and persists over time – and data is absolutely the key to all enterprise workloads. Without data, no compute is possible. Paying attention to optimal storage deployment in enterprise scale HCI environments is an absolute must. Like its counterpart, networking, storage also has two key components – one internal (the software) and one external (the devices).

The storage software for enterprise HCI is often called ‘software-defined storage’ (SDS) – and it’s an appropriate name. HCI, in general, is notable for its use of such software to provide virtual storage resources to applications (e.g. virtual disks) and storage services (e.g. snapshot, replication, cloning, etc.).

The advantages of NVMe devices, as opposed to legacy SAS or SATA, are well understood today. Second, beyond mere NVMe, the storage density of the HCI server is paramount. Storage density, defined as the number of integrated SSDs per server, is key for efficient workload processing. The most efficient servers for the concurrent workloads run in the enterprise, have a density capability of at least 72 SSDs per server, if not beyond (e.g. 144). This is far beyond the density of ordinary servers, typically used in legacy HCI deployments.

As for storage devices themselves, first, look for NVMe SSDs, which are a must for today’s enterprise workloads.

But for enterprise-scale HCI, robust and reliable SDS is critical – as well as the ability for the SDS to support the mosttechnologically advanced storage devices, in large quantities, and be able to scale seamlessly across tens or even hundreds ofnodes. Look carefully at the SDS capability of any given enterprise-scale HCI architecture for those characteristics.

ENTERPRISE SCALABLE HCIBUYER’S GUIDE

STORAGE - CONTINUED

Storage density provides several benefits to applications:

• Lower average and peak latency (key for application response time, especially in databases)

• Higher throughput (key for data analytics/streaming workloads

• Capacity of stored data per server (which should be at least 500 TB per server – anything less just puts more strain on the network, which must move data between servers at much more frequent intervals if storage density is low)

Storage density directly influences the other two parts of enterprise scale: the network and compute. With dense storage, the need to move data between servers is greatly reduced, since the chances are the local SSDs can provide the compute elements (CPUs) inside a given server with the necessary data. Instead, the network can be put to good use in replicating and/or protecting data in parallel with computation, rather than waiting for the network to deliver needed data for computation.

Finally, storage density is tightly coupled with the use of powerful CPUs. If you attempt a dense server without powerful CPUs, you will find the server quickly exhausting its CPU resource, merely trying to ‘keep up’ with the SSDs and their ability to deliver data quickly into memory, under CPU control. Or, if you have powerful CPUs with sparse storage (not dense), while you have plenty of CPU for compute, the SSDs will be constantly busy trying to keep up. At enterprise scale, it is essential to construct servers with both powerful CPUs and dense storage. Only in this manner can workloads be run as efficiently as possible, leveraging the power of the server.

ENTERPRISE SCALABLE HCIBUYER’S GUIDE

SUMMARY

To achieve enterprise scale capability, the technology triad of compute, networking, and storage must be carefully considered whendetermining resources to acquire and operate on premises. According to the aforementioned Evaluator Group study, enterprise scale HCImust provide enough performance to deliver acceptable application latency, along with sufficient resiliency and data availability (i.e.system operation in the presence of component failures). All this must be achieved while controlling costs, of course. This is very difficult,or impossible, using existing HCI approaches.

Combining all the above, it is clear that system design – balanced, powerful server architecture – is the key to running significantenterprise workloads in an enterprise scale environment. All three legs of the triad must be present – and ordinary servers are not up tothe task.

Fortunately, there is an example of such state-of-the-art server design, which is embodied in the Axellio FabricXpress™(FX) server. FX isclearly the leader in enterprise-scale HCI server design, as it provides all the capabilities mentioned above, in particular, storage densityand the optimal internal network - switched PCIe – unlike typical servers.

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ABOUT AXELLIO INC.

Axellio Inc. is a leading innovator in all NVMe Flash Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and Edge Computing systems uniquely designed to run tier 1 storage-intensive workloads. As a spin-off of X-IO Technologies, Axellio carries with it a legacy of twenty years of innovation in enterprise IT infrastructure systems andsolutions providing the highest reliability, quality, service standards, and system performance enterprise infrastructure.

Axellio delivers computing platforms built with its advanced FabricXpress (FX) architecture to deliver superior performance, economics, capacity, scalability, spaceand power utilization, and flexibility. Axellio’s FX design enables organizations to shift data intensive tier 1, performance critical applications and workloads thatpreviously required large infrastructures deployed in big, expensive data centers to modern, efficient, simple to manage and scale in a HCI solution with seamlesscloud integration, Edge MicroCloud, or Edge MicroDataCenter solution design – for faster response times and greater operational efficiency. Take Axellio toremote small distributed edge locations, take your simplicity on-premises to a whole new level, or greatly reduce your space and power in a co-lo. No matter yourorganizational goal – if storage density, performance and flexibility help to drive that goal – Axellio has a platform to help you exceed expectations.