Page 9 - FCW, April 30, 2016

such as application development or delivering innovative services to end users.
Market research firm Gartner expects HCI systems to represent
over 35 percent of the total integrated system market by 2019. Today, HCI
is already being deployed to support general-purpose applications, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and analytics such as with Hadoop clusters. Many organizations have a policy today that all workloads must be virtualized unless you can prove the exception. These organizations now are imple- menting a “hyperconverged first” policy for all new infrastructure.
It’s not a stretch to envision more specific mission-critical use cases for HCI. With law enforcement around
the country encouraged to deploy body cameras for their officers, there’s a critical
resources in a traditional infrastructure, particularly for battlefield operations and the various air, sea and land platforms, is both complex and time-consuming.
The Global Approach
One issue with many HCI solutions is how to handle data integrity and fault tolerance in the event of component failure of disk drives or other storage elements. With most HCI providers,
the answer is to replicate the data from one appliance to one or more additional nodes. That protects against a single disk drive failure or two failures if there is a duplicate. However, if there is a cata- strophic failure across the entire HCI infrastructure, there’s a good chance that data will be lost.
The only provider to solve this dilemma so far is Pivot3, with patented Scalar
erasure coding required to ensure fault tolerance doesn’t increase linearly as machines are added. Storage efficiency can reach 94 percent with a cluster of 16 appliances. Additionally, compute efficiency allows for more virtual machines and subsequent applications to run on the HCI nodes. That is a solid return on investment.
The overall efficiency of this global HCI approach translates into cost savings and a highly dense footprint, since the system does not require multiple storage and replication nodes. It also leads to improved performance.
In an ISR setting, capturing and processing uncompressed video produced by various sensors is important for actionable analysis. Pivot3’s solution can ensure the availability of the data and a platform to process the information. The overall efficiency of a global HCI approach allows for 99.9999 percent availability of both compute and storage resources.
The HCI Value Proposition
Government organizations have already experienced success with HCI, but it might not be for all organizations. There’s still a desire some may have for tighter control over the infrastructure, and HCI can change that granular level of control. However, as the demands on datacenters in particular continue to ratchet up, and as the complexity managing infrastruc- ture increases and the resources that can be devoted to that decrease, the appeal of HCI only seems likely to grow.
For more information, visit:
www.pivot3.com
The overall efficiency of Global HCI translates into cost savings and a highly dense footprint, since the system does not require multiple storage and replication nodes.
need developing to ensure that video can be properly captured, protected from loss and acted upon. With built-in security and scalable storage that is far less expensive and less complex to manage than traditional networked storage, an HCI could effectively handle that.
Military organizations also have an ongoing need to quickly provision compute and storage systems. They face an increasing need to process and analyze the large amounts of data, particularly video, produced during Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) operations. Providing those kinds of
Erasure coding. Instead of replication to one or more appliance, it stripes at the block level, chunks of data, across all the disks available in all of the nodes. This allows for very high levels of data ingest as all of the drives are being written to. Additionally, this enables Pivot3 to protect against 5 disk failures or an entire node and 2 disk failures simultaneously without data loss.
Furthermore, Pivot3 provides a very high efficiency rate—or usable storage versus raw storage. In fact, the usable storage efficiency increases as one adds nodes to a cluster because the amount of
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