Difference Between Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructures

The volume, speed, and dynamism of information flow today can leave an unprepared enterprise behind competitors. This applies not only to companies and startups actively implementing new technologies but also to any business — from large corporations to medium and small enterprises. IT infrastructure has become the basis of modern business. If it works effectively, then the business can adequately respond to consumer requests, flexibly respond to market changes and develop steadily.

Companies operating without converged and hyperconverged environments are forced to independently create, integrate and maintain IT infrastructure, which takes resources and often prevents them from doing business directly.

Converged environments have combined resources, data, and management in one configurable system. And hyper converged infrastructure appliance allow companies to abstract even more from the hardware infrastructure and show what virtualization can give to businesses. The latter became a logical evolution of the former. Today, these types exist and develop in parallel, because they have features and are suitable for different tasks.

Since they were created with simplicity of deployment and difficult activities in consideration, converged and hyper-converged infrastructures make it easier to handle virtual desktop infrastructure and desktop virtualization.

Converged infrastructure increases the efficiency of IT management and accelerates the deployment of the project. If the company is switching to a service model or is just entering the market, then CI will help:

• Centrally manage different functions and devices.
• Transmit and dynamically distribute different types of traffic in one stream.
• Prepare and allocate computing resources in hours, not weeks.
• It's easy to switch to private or hybrid cloud services.
• Flexibly respond to market changes or business priorities.
• Efficiently scale storage networks.

Experts also identify several disadvantages of convergent environments. This is a high cost compared to traditional solutions; implementation limitations concerning, for example, data confidentiality; the high cost of human error due to the mutual influence of various subsystems, and the likely incompatibility of components with partial convergence. But in general, CI makes it possible to use investments more efficiently in the long term.

A hyperconvergent environment will be useful with a small staff and the management of complex systems with many tasks. HCI will provide such benefits:

• Ease of startup and administration from a single interface.
• Easy deployment due to standard server components.
• Performance for working with development and testing environments, cloud services, and Big Data.
• Horizontal scaling without performance limits of SAN controllers or data transfer interfaces.
• Fault tolerance by storing copies on different nodes and organizing geographically distributed clusters.
• Unified, easy management of IT resources, typically, via a single web UI.
• Low cost of servicing the entire IT component of the business.

It is worth mentioning the impossibility of granular updating of hyperconvergent infrastructure. If the amount of memory is running out, and the computing part will work with a margin, then the company will still have to increase the total computing power. This is true for ready-made solutions, and not for creating your own HCI platform.

Transformation Effects
Convergent and hyperconvergent environments have played a key role in the transformation of IT infrastructure. This process allowed businesses to abandon outdated technologies with a large proportion of manual operations in favor of universal automated solutions. Almost all companies that have transformed use CI, HCI, or both infrastructure options to create data centers. And they do not just use them but note their advantages.

Analysts predict that the global converged and hyperconverged media market will reach $76 billion and $18 billion respectively by 2023-2025.

Companies are implementing CI and HCI environments because this approach works and helps businesses develop following the current state of affairs in the industry. We see that the concept of a universal flexible integrated system has replaced disparate infrastructures, has become the basis for a whole market of hardware and software solutions, has catalyzed the IT transformation of the business, and continues to increase momentum on the eve of the fourth industrial revolution.

Summary
As you transition from real computers to virtual desktops, you need devices to operate all the computing tasks typically operated by laptops and PCs. A hyperconverged infrastructure will help with this a lot, as it often demands a large amount of flash memory, which has a positive effect on the performance of virtual desktops. This speeds up I/O operations, smooths out heavy workloads, and allows you to run virus scans and other monitoring activities in the background (without distracting users).

The flexibility of a hyperconverged infrastructure makes it more scalable and cost-effective than a converged infrastructure because it has the ability to add computing and storage devices as needed. The initial capital investment for both infrastructures is high, but the investment will definitely pay off in the long run, especially, with HCI.

The business has changed under the influence of digital transformation and the old solutions for creating and maintaining IT infrastructure work poorly. Convergent and hyperconvergent environments have become the answer to the demand for efficiency and flexibility. CI and HCI solutions are the basis of work and drivers of the development of any modern company.