Hyperconverged infrastructure can help companies reduce their costs and simplify management of their data center. One of the ways it does this is due to built-in support for high availability and data protection.
These systems typically provide a range of features that mean virtual machine (VM) and disk failures don’t compromise your business. Vendors like Nutanix build in support that copes with problems like hardware failures, node outages, disk corruption, or site-wide disasters. The impact of these problems is minimized due to capabilities that provide redundancy, replication, and automatic recovery when problems occur.
High Availability Means You Don’t Feel the Outages
The goal for many organizations is 99.999 percent uptime, and the built-in redundancies of hyperconvergence go a long way towards achieving that goal. Redundancies can include multiple power systems, as well as memory and CPU. Hyperconverged systems include data replication to multiple storage nodes, allowing transparent recovery in case of disk failure. Virtual machines can automatically be recovered on another node, as well.
Even hyperconverged features not explicitly related to high availability support that goal. Having a single vendor responsible for all technical components means fewer delays in obtaining support. Additionally, hyperconverged vendors provide a single management interface that provides a view across all aspects of their device’s performance, again minimizing downtime.
Redundancy Supports Disaster Recovery
The redundancy that comes with replication doesn’t just minimize downtime when a node fails; it can be leveraged to support your organizational disaster recovery goals. Hyperconverged systems aren’t limited to replicating to other on-site nodes; they can replicate to other storage tiers, including the cloud. This means that, without using additional backup software, you can have an off-site copy of your data available to get you back online in case of a disaster. There’s usually data deduplication too, plus support for incremental backups, meaning this secondary storage is used efficiently.
The replication isn’t just for data, either; hyperconverged infrastructure supports VM replication, making bringing systems back online less time-consuming.
Evaluating Hyperconverged High Availability
Not all hyperconverged infrastructure vendors take the same approach to high availability and data protection, so if those are among your key drivers for choosing this technology, be sure to assess how different vendors handle failure issues including:
- ability to replicate and mirror data across varying hardware
- ease of management, including the ability to readily validate your replicated data consistency
- extent of automation to minimize the impact of failures
Despite the built-in high availability and data protection features of hyperconverged infrastructure, you may still want to use third-party products to achieve a complete solution, particularly if you’ve already have an investment in a solution for your non-hyperconverged systems. Investigate how well your hyperconverged infrastructure will integrate with your backup and disaster recovery software to make sure they’ll complement rather than conflict with each other.
Work With Experts to Assess Your Needs
Working with experts can help you evaluate your requirements to determine whether the built-in capabilities of hyperconverged infrastructure meet your needs or whether you’ll want to incorporate additional software to achieve full data protection. dcVAST’s experience with hyperconverged platforms including Nutanix and Cohesity, as well as Veritas data protection solutions, give us insight into the capabilities and limitations of all these products. Contact us to discuss the best ways you can use these tools to achieve high availability and data protection in your environment.
