Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization delivers increased efficiencies for storage and compute at the edge

Customers can realize more value and greater simplicity with cost-effective, open source, integrated compute and storage delivered in a compact footprint

By Daniel Gilfix, Red Hat Cloud Storage and Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) emerged as an infrastructure category about a decade ago aimed at a few specific use cases and has been dominated by proprietary software vendors offering appliances built on their hardware, or rigid configurations delivered with OEM hardware partners.

What’s new?

Today we announced the next iteration of our enterprise-grade, open source approach in this space—Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization 1.5, which benefits from the combined strength of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat Gluster Storage, and Red Hat Ansible Automation.

Where’s the beef?

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization (RHHI-V) is an optimized, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) that has helped organizations across industries like energy, retail, banking, telco, and the public sector make the most of business-critical applications that must be deployed with limited space, budget, and IT staff, including departmental and lines of business ops, remote sites, and development and test environments. Integration with Red Hat Ansible Automation helps reduce manual errors normally associated with downtime while enabling a more streamlined and speedy deployment. Simplified administration via a single user interface means you can consolidate your infrastructure and adopt a software-defined datacenter more efficiently. Such adoption includes using RHHI-V in lieu of a more expensive VMware "lock-in" environment or transitioning from it under professional guidance with the Red Hat infrastructure migration solution.

What’s inside?

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization 1.5 now features advanced data reduction capabilities for even greater efficiencies as well as a series of validated server configurations for optimized workloads to reduce or eliminate the guesswork out of infrastructure deployment. Details follow:

• Data reduction via deduplication and compression. Made possible through embedded Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) code in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can now efficiently eliminate duplicate instances of repeating data and compress the reduced data set. This results in improved storage utilization and enables more affordable high-performance storage options.
• Virtual graphics processing unit (vGPU). With the vGPU capability, you can assign GPU slices to VMs to accelerate 3D graphics and to offload computationally heavy jobs, including applications in computational science, workloads in oil and gas and manufacturing, as well as emerging AI and machine learning applications processing.
• Open Virtual Network support. Support for software-defined networking via Open Virtual Network (OVN) helps improve scalability while enabling live migration of virtual networking components in a hyperconverged Linux environment.
• Deep Ansible integration. Red Hat Ansible Automation enables true “ops value” at deploy and runtime, thereby paving the way toward your broader automation goals. We also deliver Ansible playbooks to enable remote replication and recovery of RHHI-V environments.
• Validated hardware configurations. To help ensure RHHI-V users deploy sound infrastructure configurations, Red Hat has tested a number of use cases with our hardware partners and documents configuration guidelines for optimized workloads. These configurations, along with our new RHHI-V sizing tool, can help you anticipate platform requirements based on their usage patterns, taking the guesswork out of deploying a software-defined HCI platform, and reducing time to value. You can choose among industry standard hardware and enjoy more predictable performance for their desired deployment patterns.

Who benefits?

While RHHI-V was initially targeted at remote office/branch office deployment, we’ve experienced steadily increasing demand to support more mission-critical applications, such as remote tactical operations for public sector, field analysis and oil rig operations in the energy sector, and managing data from a myriad of sensors in factories across both process and discrete manufacturing. Now integrated even more broadly across the Red Hat software stack, RHHI-V is a powerful, general purpose platform for anyone seeking to jumpstart edge computing or modernize their existing data center to accommodate new workloads with greater degrees of efficiency. 

How can you learn more?

For more information on Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization, check out this article by Storage Switzerland. Feel free to also attend our upcoming webinar on December 11. You can always simply access us on the web.