HCIaaS at Nfina

You may have heard of Storage as a Service (STaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), but there is one as-a-service solution that has been on the steady incline in recent years – that solution is Hyperconverged Infrastructure as a Service (HCIaaS). Traditional HCI merges servers, storage, and network assets into a single hypervisor, providing customers with access to simplified, focused data center management.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure as a Service (HCIaaS)

HCI brings the hybrid cloud operational experience into an on-prem device. Storage, compute, and network systems are installed beneath the hypervisor. Deploying hyperconverged infrastructure in one segment of your IT infrastructure delivers excellent benefits, but it is not sufficient to eliminate IT management complications.

Hence, in the hybrid cloud marketplace today, you see dynamic-thinking organizations on the hunt for a new, adaptable HCI solution, hyperconverged infrastructure as a service (HCIaaS), that speeds up tasks with uncomplicated scale, full security, and data management from the edge to cloud. HCIaaS fundamentally simplifies management by allowing you to monitor, update, and provision VMs over on-prem locations via a single device.

Why HCIaaS?

HCIaaS does not just alleviate management complications, it also automates the complex analysis needed to revamp hosting selections for critical applications and datasets over hybrid cloud. The easy solution used to be for businesses to put 100% of their applications into the public hyper-scale cloud. Nonetheless, new research from IDC® displays development in the opposite direction: recovery of workloads to on-premise resources is now going up. (1)  As reported by IDC®, “organizations expect to continue moving workloads between IT environments to find an optimal balance of workload distribution; dedicated clouds will be a primary choice for workload migration off public cloud.” (1)

Considering the necessity for mobility over the hybrid cloud, data centers would typically have to conduct complicated estimations of security, performance, full price of ownership, and effortless management over distributed assets, and then perform the required relocations, both to the data center and back to the cloud. HCIaaS assures that all of this will be automatic.

With Nfina’s HCIaaS, our customers receive access to data storage and backup services without the need to purchase, manage, and maintain their hardware. Our customers also receive storage and geo-redundant backup, ransomware protection, data encryption with an instant rollback feature, backup and DR testing for business continuity, and many more features.

What to Look for in a HCIaaS Provider

It’s important to know the storage needs for your business and what to look for when choosing an HCIaaS provider. Companies must make sure that their data is regularly backed up in case of disruptions such as a ransomware attack or a node failure.

HCIaaS solutions at Nfina prioritize simplicity and ease of use. A fully integrated HCI system will streamline upkeep and improvements, untangle workflows, and ease monitoring and forecasting. Customers must ensure that their HCIaaS provider allows them to transform important maintenance such as capacity expansion and upgrades with zero downtime.

Lastly, your HCIaaS provider must provide impeccable support. When you are in need of assistance, you need quick access to experts that can resolve your problem swiftly. At Nfina, we have well-trained support that is truly customer-centered.

Nfina’s HCIaaS Solutions

At Nfina, we offer multiple types of HCI solutions to best suit your needs. Running this type of architecture as-a-service adds virtualization capabilities to the system within a single chassis and the ability to create immutable array level snapshots as well as the ability to replicate these snapshots to a secondary location for disaster recovery.

Running this architecture allows Nfina-Store to serve as both the underlying storage for the virtual machines running under ESXi, but also simultaneously provide SMB, NFS, or iSCSI storage to any client device supporting these storage protocols. Below are some HCIaaS solutions we offer at Nfina.

2-Node HCI

Deploying Nfina-Store in a dual node HCI system requires two Nfina servers configured with identical hardware which will run ESXi with the Nfina-Store operating system to control the storage between the two nodes. The Nfina-Store software will combine the storage between the two nodes utilizing either 2-way or 4-way mirrored storage pools with the disks present in each mirror residing in opposite chassis. This means that if one of the machines fails, half of the disks remain online and the storage pool remains available to the remaining ESXi node. This allows virtual machines previously running on the failed node to be migrated to the remaining node in the cluster.

This architecture provides a fully redundant HA solution with just two physical chassis which can provide cost savings. The two-node system can run completely switchless for the back-end network fabric which also allows for savings on expensive network switches. This system can tolerate a single host failure and perform system maintenance without any downtime.

3-Node HCI

Deploying Nfina-Store in a 3 node HCI architecture provides the most benefit when more compute, memory, or IO resources are required than can comfortably fit within the two-node solution. The 3 node HCI solution can optionally utilize the third compute node as a backup storage repository. The two primary compute nodes operate in the exact manner as the 2-Node HCI solution, while the third node receives array level snapshot replication for an offline copy of the data. It adds the benefit of also doubling as a compute node which can run virtual machines and provides the ability for long term backup storage restoration options.

Benefits of Nfina’s HCIaaS

Cost Effective | Choosing Nfina’s HCIaaS solution is a very effective way to reduce costs for any size organization. Nfina’s HCIaaS eliminates the need to purchase and maintain on-prem storage hardware, resulting in infrastructure cost reductions. Taxes will also be significantly less when choosing Nfina’s HCIaaS.

Reduced Labor | When using Nfina’s HCIaaS, it eliminates the burden off your business to manage your infrastructure. We manage everything for you.

Reliability | Disaster recovery and fault tolerance are integrated in a HCIaaS system with high availability, so if one node goes down, the other nodes take over the workload.

Complete Authority | Nfina’s HCIaaS delivers full control over intellectual property for secure, encrypted access.

Less Space Needed | Takes up less rack space and utilizes less energy which reduces the costs businesses will spend on power, space, and licensing fees.

Why Choose Nfina as your HCIaaS Provider?

Nfina provides HCIaaS solutions based on your current storage needs and prices accordingly, a notable cost savings over the cost of public hyper-scale cloud providers without compromising any benefits.

Nfina’s HCIaaS is simple and easy to use. As a matter of fact, 91% of IT personnel today recognize that developed cloud operations on-premises as the single most vital step to banishing complexity. (2) 

The risk of downtime and loss of data is significantly less with Nfina’s HCIaaS DR capabilities. Disaster recovery and fault tolerance are fully integrated in a HCIaaS system with high availability.

Simplicity and DR functions are just a few of the many features that Nfina’s HCIaaS solutions provide. Contact us today for details about our HCIaaS solutions.

Sources

[1]  IDC®

[2] HPE®

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Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud and Hyperconverged solutions provide energy efficiency by using high-density, lower-power VMs enabling our customers to scale their digital transformations sustainably by optimizing space, reducing power consumption, and lowering cooling and maintenance costs. Nfina is taking a leadership role in doing what it takes to tackle climate change.

Nfina has been carbon neutral for our operations since opening in 2012.