Quantitative and qualitative changes of the hottes

Quantitative and qualitative changes of hyperconverged servers

in the converged infrastructure system that demands rapid deployment, the rapidly growing hyperconverged system has not only become the most important type, but also the product type has begun to change. There are products that separate computing and storage nodes

as most people expect, with high growth rate, Hyperconverged systems are gradually becoming the mainstream of converged systems. With the increase of the proportion of product sales, the hyperconverged systems themselves have also undergone qualitative changes, and some new products that do not fully follow the traditional type of hyperconverged systems have emerged

the super integrated system continues to maintain high growth

according to the survey on the global sales market share of the integrated system in the first quarter of 2017 released by the market research agency IDC recently, only the super integrated system can continue to grow in the entire integrated system market

the so-called integrated system refers to a complete set of IT infrastructure suite products that can cover computing, storage and network requirements at the same time. According to IDC's current classification, integrated systems can be divided into three categories:

integrated platforms: product suites pre integrated and certified by suppliers, including server hardware, storage devices, network devices and basic management software. Typical products are Oracle's exadata database all-in-one machine

integrated infrastructure and certified reference systems: it is also a product suite pre integrated and certified by suppliers, including server hardware, storage devices, network devices and basic management software. The difference from the integrated system is that the components of the certification reference system come from multiple suppliers, such as FLEXPOD of NetApp and Cisco, vxblocks of Dell EMC

hyperconverged systems: a product suite pre integrated and certified by suppliers, which is characterized by the integration of all core computing and storage functions through the same single server resource. Typical products are nutanix's NX series hyperconverged servers

the basic spirit of the three types of integrated system products is to provide pre integrated and certified product suites to accelerate the construction of enterprise IT infrastructure. The difference is in the degree of integration and product composition

in this way, it is necessary to invite professionals from Jinan Kesheng experimental machine manufacturer to inspect and observe the market share survey of fusion system released by IDC in the past few years. It can be found that the certification reference system has always accounted for the largest proportion, accounting for nearly 60% of the total sales, followed by the integrated platform, and finally the super fusion system. However, the super fusion system is the fastest growing one. Up to now, Hyperfusion system has even become the only fusion system that is still growing

a year ago, IDC released the integrated system market survey for the first quarter of 2016, which can see this trend. At that time, it accounted for 62.8% of the sales share, but compared with the same period of the previous year, it only increased by 1.8%; The share of integrated system is 22.5%, but the growth rate is only 0.3%. In contrast, the super fusion system accounts for only 14.7% of the share, but the growth rate is as high as 148%

after a year, IDC's market survey of integrated systems in the first quarter of 2017 showed that the sales of the entire integrated system increased by 4.6% compared with the same period last year, but the total capacity purchased increased by 7.1%, which means that the growth rate of capacity is higher than that of sales. A phenomenon of "increasing quantity" but "not increasing price" reflects the decline of unit storage costs

among the three categories of fusion system products, although the certification reference system still accounts for the largest proportion, the sales volume declined by 3.3% compared with the same period last year, and the integration platform declined by 13.3%. Only the super fusion system still maintained a high growth of 64.7%, and the market share also increased to 24.9%, more than 10% higher than last year. This shows that the super fusion system is the most promising and potential fusion system product

super fusion system with sustained high growth

from IDC's 2016 to 2017 integrated system market survey, it can be seen that the sales of integrated platform, integrated infrastructure and certification reference system have stagnated, and even began to decline, maintaining high growth for the super fusion system

breaking the conventional super fusion system products

with the continuous growth of super fusion system, it not only drives more manufacturers to invest, but also brings new changes to the products

super fusion system is a standardized node chassis containing computing and storage resources. When expanding, it is through stacking more standardized node chassis to form clusters, so as to obtain greater computing power and storage space, This also gives the hyperfusion system two characteristics:

hardware that combines operation and storage: the operation and storage unit of the hyperfusion system is physically integrated and is provided by the same server hardware

symmetrical expansion capability: when the hyperfusion system is expanded, the allocation and expansion of computing and storage resources are symmetrical. Every time a node is added, a certain proportion of computing power and storage space will be correspondingly increased

through the two characteristics of "integration of computing and storage" and "symmetrical expansion capability", the expansion of the hyperfusion system is also very simple. When resources are insufficient, it is enough to stack more nodes. Nutanix, the two leaders of hyperfusion system, and many hyperfusion products based on VMware vsan architecture belong to this standard type of hyperfusion system

however, this feature also brings inconvenience in many cases. Users only need more storage space, but they are also forced to buy a whole node. However, the additional computing power brought by this node is not needed by users

general hyperfusion system suppliers mostly provide several node styles with different uses and performance orientations to try to improve the flexibility of expansion. Some node styles focus on providing large storage capacity, while others focus on providing high i/o performance or high computing performance. However, even so, they still do not get rid of the constraints of the two basic characteristics of "integration of computing and storage" and "symmetric expansion". When users expand, You still have to buy a whole node that contains computing and storage space

in the face of such inconvenience, some new manufacturers try to break the Convention of hyperfusion system and provide a more flexible hyperfusion application architecture

symmetric expansion of hyperfusion system

the standard hyperfusion system has the characteristics of "integration of computing and storage" and "symmetric expansion capability". As long as more nodes are stacked, the computing capability and storage resources can be expanded synchronously, but it also has the disadvantage of being not flexible enough

hyperfusion that provides asymmetric expansion

in our 2017 hyperfusion application server procurement special at the beginning of this year, we found that some products, such as Cisco's hyperflex, support asymmetric expansion architecture. In addition, there are some hyperfusion manufacturers on the market, such as pivot 3, which also support asymmetric expansion, that is, computing power and storage capacity can be expanded independently. When users need computing power, Only the operation nodes can be expanded; If only storage space is needed, the storage node capacity can also be expanded separately

the new mode of separation of computing and storage

goes further. Some manufacturers even abandon the basic feature of "integration of computing and storage" of hyperfusion system, and use aqueous process to replace solvent process to complete the surface treatment of cushion track. For example, the HCI hyperfusion product line released by NetApp recently belongs to this new state

netapp's HCI series adopts a 4-cell 2U server chassis, but the nodes installed in the chassis are divided into computing and storage nodes, in which the computing node is the server node running VMware vSphere software, and the storage node is the full flash configuration node running solidfire storage software

the minimum configuration of NetApp HCI is two 2u/4 twin chassis, including two operation nodes and four solidfire storage nodes (the other two geotechnical test method standards gb/t50123 ⑴ 999 are reserved empty nodes). The operation and storage nodes can be expanded independently, and they are available in three styles, including large, medium and small. The maximum size of the computing node is 64 nodes (the upper limit of VMware cluster specification), and the maximum size of the storage node can be expanded to 100 nodes (the upper limit of solidfire storage cluster specification)

netapp HCI, which separates computing and storage nodes, strictly speaking, can no longer be regarded as a real "super fusion", which also complicates the consideration of expansion, but it can provide more flexibility, which is a noteworthy development direction

NetApp hyper fusion system with separation of operation and storage

the HCI hyper fusion product launched by NetApp recently adopts the architecture of separation of operation node and storage node, which can be expanded independently, so as to obtain greater flexibility