The blog from our CEO on “The Dirty Little Secret of Hyper-convergence” discusses choice and flexibility being the main benefits of hyper-convergence. In this blog I would like to elaborate on them.

Maxta’s approach of providing “Choice,” leveraging your existing servers is a key component for deploying a hyper-converged solution. With this approach, you will be able continue to use the same management and monitoring tools, dramatically minimizing the learning curve. Additionally, you can utilize the same support model that you are familiar with. You will be able to leverage the global reach of the large server vendors and their ability to support 24×7 2hr. onsite break fix support. This would significantly reduce operational expenses.

The approach adopted by our competitors, Nutanix for example, of trying to build their own onsite break fix support is expensive both in terms of delivery, stocking hardware and training staff. This cost inevitably gets passed on to the end customer increasing the TCO of the solution. It is hard to envision that our competitors can match the outreach and the SLA of the major server vendors.

Flexibility in addition to “Choice” discussed above also includes deployment options. The ability to scale-up and scale-out compute and storage resources independently. Maxta’s approach of providing this flexibility differentiates us from our competitors. Customers can scale-up storage by non-disruptively adding drives to empty slots within existing server or non-disruptively replacing lower capacity drives by higher capacity drives. Customers can scale-out storage by non-disruptively adding nodes to an existing cluster. A similar approach can be used to scale-up and scale-out compute resources.

Our competitors only support the ability to scale-out compute and storage resources and do not provide the ability to scale-up compute and/or storage resources separately. Simple operations that we have all done routinely such as increasing memory or adding drives to empty slots on existing servers that we take for granted is not supported with their systems. This makes it inflexible to precisely tune compute and storage and achieve required performance. It also prevents you from adjusting resources on demand to accommodate performance, latency and capacity requirements. Overprovisioning hardware resources will result in additional investment in software licenses, increased cooling and power, and additional datacenter space requirements. It also limits supporting next-generation hardware at day zero. For example support of Intel Xeon v3 processor or the NVMe technology. It feels like competitors are taking a step forward and 2 steps backwards.

At Maxta, we believe that choice and flexibility are pillars of hyper-convergence. We continue to maximize the promise of hyper-convergence, delivering a new and an innovative approach to data center design.