Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is essentially a software-centric data center infrastructure. This seamlessly integrates virtualization, compute, storage and networking. The goal of this infrastructure is to reduce complexity, increase up-time, increase redundancy and increase scalability.

Recently, CNE implemented an HCI cluster for a client in rural ND. This cluster consisted of 4 servers – 2 for compute only and 2 for compute and SAN storage. Nfina Intel based servers were utilizing VMware standard as the hypervisor. The SAN utilized Jovian Open-E rather the Vsan. Open-E provides a more affordable option while having superb performance and snapshotting capabilities. One of the existing servers will be repurposed as a backup server once their migration is complete.

This was Phase I of the project, which is represented in the picture above by the “Local Site”. The “Remote Site” will be implemented soon. Once this is implemented, multiple servers can fail while not losing data or functionality.