Appliance-based vs. Software-only HCI Solutions?

What are the main differences between appliance-based and software-only HCI solutions? In the last couple of years, hyperconvergence has made great inroads into the data center, replacing traditional storage arrays and SANs as well as running mission-critical workloads. Today, hyperconverged solutions are predominantly being procured and deployed in two forms: • Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliances: a pre-integrated hardware and software bundle delivered as a branded appliance by a single vendor. Appliance vendors include Dell EMC, Nutanix   and HPE (SimpliVity.) • … Read More

Why Maxta is ‘all in’ on Software

Organizations that have or are moving to hyperconverged infrastructure are well aware that the first question is usually “hardware or software?” We believe the right answer for most is software, and one need look no further than our recent announcement as a reason why. Maxta’s software approach to hyperconvergence makes us far more flexible and nimble in our ability to immediately support new server and storage hardware like the new ®Xeon Scalable Processors from Intel®. On the same day Intel … Read More

Can HCI solutions keep up with new technologies?

In the recent article titled “How HCI vendors threaten innovation opportunities,” TechTarget contributor Alastair Cooke acknowledges the great benefits hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) offers in simplifying data centers, but also identifies the trade-offs users may face by locking into a proprietary HCI appliance vendor. Appliance vendors can be many months behind the release of intriguing new technologies, putting their users at a competitive disadvantage. Something as fundamental as driver development and testing must be prioritized by vendors against other requirements and … Read More

Considering Hyper-convergence: What features do you need in your solution?

There’s little doubt that people are looking for hyper-converged solutions based on recent market data.  However, what are the key features they are looking for and what benefits do they hope to achieve? Knowing what others are looking for can help guide your own decisions when evaluating any hyper-converged solution. ActualTech Media’s 2015 State of Hyperconverged Infrastructure Market survey of 500 tech professionals specifically asked what people were looking for in a hyper-converged solution.  The results revealed that 3 features/benefits … Read More

Looking Forward: The Hyper-Converged and SDS Future is Bright

Is the current flurry of the software-defined data center (SDDC) just hype?  Or are enterprises and businesses across the globe really adopting this new approach?  No one needs to question the prevalence of software-defined computing—because almost all analysts agree that over 50% of all x86 workloads in data centers are virtualized nowadays. But what about the other technologies needed for the SDDC vision?  How is the adoption of hyper-converged infrastructure and software-defined storage (SDS) going?  If storage, along with networking, … Read More

Putting the Software in Hyper-converged Storage

The software-defined revolution is well underway in every cutting-edge data center today.  However, this migration towards “software-defined” is no longer confined to large, public cloud providers who had really pioneered it.  Today—companies of all sizes are exploring and implementing the software-defined data center. While using virtualization to do software-defined computing is commonplace, the next phase should be implementing hyper-converged storage.  Many companies struggle with this challenge, though, because there’s confusion on what hyper-converged storage is, and how a good solution … Read More

The Hardware of Hyper-convergence: What’s really needed for success?

  It’s not a secret: software-defined storage (SDS) platforms are disrupting traditional storage architectures. Companies of all sizes are moving towards the hyper-converged compute/storage architecture favored by large public cloud providers. In such hyper-converged scale out models, the hardware building blocks are rack-mounted, industry-standard servers with internal drive bays that can be populated with direct attached disk drives and SSDs. But will any server with direct attached storage work for your hyper-converged solution?  The answer is paradoxically both yes and … Read More

Disaster Recovery in a Box

Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) planning is a fundamental part of IT deployment and management. Businesses and services must ensure that they can operate even after disasters such as natural calamities, software corruption, crucial server failure, or human error. Failing to plan for disaster recovery could result in data loss, server downtime, financial losses, and regulatory compliance issues for companies. What happens when IT managers are posed the question “Is your Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery plan complete, fully … Read More

Software-defined Data Centers: The future is now

For years, the basic design of data centers has remained in three distinct pillars. Servers have been running applications, storage arrays have been storing and protecting data, and networks have been providing communications both inside and outside the firewall.  However, the vast improvements of both chip speed and multi-core design in the last 10 years have opened the gateway to machine virtualization or software-defined computing—a common practice in almost every data center today.  No longer are applications tied to any … Read More

All the benefits and none of the headaches of acquiring software-centric hyper-converged solutions

During VMworld 2015 Maxta announced an expansion to its MaxDeploy program and today I’m happy to announce the launch of a very cool MaxDeploy™ Web Portal for partners who want to order Maxta software pre-loaded on Dell Servers. We have created the MaxDeploy program that allows us to stay true to our promise of delivering “Software-Centric Hyper-convergence” eliminating the barriers typically associated with purchasing a “Hyper-converged appliance.” We are not in the business of selling flashy bezels. We all know that behind … Read More