Presentation: NetApp hyper converged infrastructure (HCI)

As announced in my last post, NetApp has published today just his hyper converged infrastructure HCI. And so the box looks. On four rack units, we find both compute and storage units. The four rack units are derived based of the Solidfire, which is therefore in the minimal configuration with four nodes. The configurations for the HCI solution we see here in the picture. From my point of view, the medium variant can cover needs of a medium-sized company has the complete storage and compute. Currently, NetApp HCI is based on VMWare, but we will get also KVM to face in the near future.  Really exciting at NetApp HCI solution is the ability to mix the different nodes. Do I need so more compute nodes or even a storage node so I can make a free slot to a compute node. This makes NetApp HCI solution from my point of view unique compared to other HCI manufacturers. NetApp names then balancing the whole thing. Nice facts that we see are up here. But other market companions have made to combine compute and storage.

So what makes NetApp HCI?

For one, it is certainly to mix the possibility of compute nodes and storage nodes. On the other hand it is certainly the full integration in the NetApp DATA FABRIC world. So, for example, a backup integration in CommVault and VEEAM is directly given, the VMWare site recovery manager is supported, the HCI can be secured with NetApp AltaVault in the cloud, I can use NetApp storage GRID for archiving. Proud owner of a NetApp FAS, the NetApp HCI SnapMirror can perform backups on this and the whole thing is integrated directly in the new SnapCenter 4.0.

How does it work now?

In principle I can get once four rack units compute and storage in a NetApp HCI system. The systems are connected via 10 GbE or 25 GbE. Storage Protocol iSCSI is used. I do so from a NetApp HCI system initially block storage presents!  The establishment of the overall system, so connect power to a finished vCenter using VMs there is, thanks to the wizard only takes 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, I therefore have a functional vSphere cluster with shared storage and can begin to deploy my VMs on it.

Block storage via iSCSI? NetApp is yet unified storage!

Yes Yes only block storage… And here comes the clever part. So that you can speak even file protocols from your HCI system, offers to let NetApp the ability in the HCI or multiple ONTAP select run systems. Furthermore, you can use file protocols, such as CIFS or NFS from the HCI. Very cool. How quickly the commissioning works, to illustrate this video:

What have to say?

• This guaranteed performance for your workloads resulting from the underlying NetApp Solidfire architecture, which could guarantee always IOPS and latencies.
• NetApps HCI is only SSD
• Full integration in VMWare vSphere, thus the system becomes a zero touch storage. You must not care about the storage system, but controls everything from your vCenter.

I hope I was able to get you a glimpse over NetApps HCI. Today the publication, usually the information turn over, so I will provide some additions in the next few days. Update: NetApp United colleague Stefan Renner has also written: https://virtualsyntaxerror.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/netapp-hci-is-here/