“Why can’t I add a 33rd node?” One of the great advantages of Hyperconverged infrastructures (also known as “HCI”) is that, relatively speaking, they are extremely easy to set up and manage. In many ways, they’re the “Happy Meals” of infrastructure, because you have compute and storage in the same box. All you need to do is add networking. In practice, though, many consumers of HCI have found that the “add networking” part isn’t quite as much of a no-brainer as they thought it would be. Because HCI hides a great deal of the “back end” communication, it’s possible to severely underestimate or misunderstand the requirements necessary to run a seamless environment. At some point, “just add more nodes” becomes a more difficult proposition. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) is hosting a live webcast “Networking Requirements for Hyperconvergence” on February 5, 2019. At this webcast, we’re going to take a look behind the scenes, peek behind the GUI, so to speak. We’ll be talking about what goes on back there, and shine the light behind the bezels to see:
  • The impact of metadata on the network
  • What happens as we add additional nodes
  • How to right-size the network for growth
  • Networking best practices to make your HCI work better
  • And more…
Now, not all HCI environments are created equal, so we’ll say in advance that your mileage will vary. However, understanding some basic concepts of how storage networking impacts HCI performance may be particularly useful when planning your HCI environment, or contemplating whether or not it is appropriate for your situation in the first place. Register here to save your spot for February 5th. Our experts will be on hand to answer your questions. This webcast is the second installment of our Storage Networking series. Our first was “Networking Requirements for Ethernet Scale-Out Storage.” It’s available on-demand as are all our educational webcasts. I encourage you to peruse the more than 60 vendor-neutral presentations is the NSF webcast library at your convenience.