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Definition: hyperconverged infrastructure


A datacenter infrastructure from a single vendor that provides cloudlike services for enterprises. In the following history of hyperconvergence, the term "compute" means server hardware.

Legacy Infrastructure (Non-Converged)
Customers place separate orders for compute, network storage and virtualization software and perform all necessary installation and integration.

Converged Infrastructure
Compute, network storage and virtualization from different vendors are packaged as one product. The pioneer is Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) from EMC, which includes a common management console. However, each software component has its own update cycles.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Hyperconvergence provides a server blade that includes compute, local storage and virtualization managed by a single software dashboard that handles all elements as a single pool of resources. Server blades can be easily scaled with minimal configuration. In many cases, hyperconvergence implies eliminating the expense and administration of the storage area network (see SAN).

Nutanix is the pioneer in this field offering server blades with its Acropolis distributed storage, Prism management layer and Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).




A Single Blade (Compute-Storage-Virtualization)
From three to hundreds of server blades managed as a single cluster, Nutanix also supports VMware and Hyper-V virtualization. The App Mobility Fabric manages VM placement, high availability, disaster recovery, resource scheduling and VM conversion to the Nutanix hypervisor (AHV). (Image courtesy of Nutanix.)