Discover Azure Stack HCI
Azure Stack HCI is a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) cluster solution that hosts virtualized Windows and Linux workloads and their storage in a hybrid on-premises environment. Azure hybrid services increase cluster capabilities such as cloud-based monitoring, site recovery, VM backups, as well as a centralized view of all Azure Stack HCI deployments in the Azure portal. Admins can manage the cluster with existing tools including Windows Admin Center, System Center, and PowerShell.
Why the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Solution?
- Scalability - Go up to 16 servers and over 400 drives, for multiple petabytes of storage per cluster. To scale out, simply add drives or add more servers. S2D will automatically on-board new drives and begin using them. Storage efficiency and performance improve predictably at scale.
- Resource Efficiency - Erasure coding delivers up to 2.4x greater storage efficiency, with unique innovations like Local Reconstruction Codes and real time tiering to extend these gains to hard disk drives and mixed hot/cold workloads, all while minimizing CPU consumption to give resources back to where they’re needed most – the VMs.
- Unrivalled Performance - Whether all-flash or hybrid, S2D easily exceeds 150,000 mixed 4K random IOPS per server with consistent, low latency, thanks to its hypervisor embedded architecture, its built-in read/write cache, and support for cutting-edge NVMe drives mounted directly on the PCIe bus.
- Fault Tolerance - Built-in resiliency handles drive, server, or component failures with continuous availability. Larger deployments can also be configured for chassis and rack fault tolerance. When hardware fails, just swap it out; the software heals itself, with no complicated management steps.
- Manageability - Use Storage QoS Controls to keep overly busy VMs in check with minimum and maximum per-VM IOPS limits. The Health Service provides continuous built-in monitoring and alerting, and new APIs make it easy to collect rich, cluster-wide performance and capacity metrics.
- Security - Maximize Shielded VMs and other layered security capabilities built-in to prevent data leakage, rogue admins and attacks.
A few notable use cases
There are numerous use cases for Azure Stack HCI, nonetheless, it isn’t intended for non-virtualized workloads. Most organizations often choose Azure Stack HCI in the following scenarios:
- Data center consolidation and modernization
- Virtual desktops accessibility
- Industry-best performance
Why adopt an HCI solution over a traditional one?
Increased IT coherence
Get rid of manual operations and the need for isolated operational expertise. Today, a single converged IT team can effectively monitor and manage resources and improve storage capabilities. In additional, with HCI, IT resources are presented storage pools that can be dynamically allocated to deliver the right amount of capacity, performance and security.
Save costs with better storage
Save remarkable costs by using a scale-up/scale-out architecture that requires only industry-standard x86 servers, not expensive, purpose-built networking. After that, simply add capacity as needed with no interruptions. This solution helps organizations avoid vendor lock-in and eliminate overprovisioning, meaning lesser infrastructure spending across your organization's data center.
Greater ability to scale seamlessly
One has to responsive to fast changing business needs. Set up hardware in a couple of hours in order to get workloads running in a matter of minutes. This in turn will accelerate the performance of business-critical applications like relational databases. It is no doubt that HCI scales better than traditional infrastructure mainly because it enables a future-proof IT environment that allows you to scale up and scale out to effortlessly meet specific application needs.