Composable infrastructure delivers on convergence promise
The data center has evolved rapidly over the last decade. No longer are enterprises limited to costly and complex traditional IT infrastructures. Today, in addition to the cloud -- public, private and hybrid -- organizations have a number of on-site infrastructure options to choose from, among them converged infrastructure, hyper-converged infrastructure and, the newest arrival, the composable infrastructure platform.
Converged infrastructure reduced compatibility issues and eased management by optimizing data center component integration into prequalified turnkey appliances. HCI further simplified the purchase, implementation and running of infrastructure by consolidating compute, storage and network resources with hypervisors into easily manageable and scalable nodes. Hyper-converged infrastructure isn't perfect, however. For example, it is difficult to increase storage resources without adding more compute and vice versa.
Hence the development of the composable infrastructure.
This newest IT framework enables users to supply computing resources as a set of unified services of a software-defined data center. As a result, it promises to speed up and simplify the allotment of storage, compute and network resources from across a fabric for specific workloads.
How does composing virtual servers work exactly? And how might managers allocate resources to meet the needs of different kinds of applications, use cases and workloads? In this handbook, we answer these questions and more by comparing a composable infrastructure platform to converged and hyper-converged infrastructures, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each of these IT infrastructure paradigms, and illustrating how composable infrastructure techniques work in the real world.
