Hyper Converged Infrastructures: Beyond virtualization

TL;DR

This paper explores the evolution and current state of Hyper Converged Infrastructures, emphasizing their role in transforming datacenter management from hardware-centric to application-centric, software-defined architectures.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the development of Hyper Convergence and assesses its practical benefits and limitations in modern datacenter environments.

Findings

Hyper Convergence enables centralized datacenter management.

It abstracts hardware layers, simplifying resource management.

The paper discusses the practicality and future potential of Hyper Convergence.

Abstract

Hyper Convergence has brought virtualization and IT strategies to a new level. Datacenters are undergoing a deep paradigm shift from a hardware-centric to an application-centric approach which leverages on software defined architectures, while IT is more and more being delivered as services rather than assets or products. Throughout different evolving phases since the initial attempts to convergence, the concept has been refined down to a level where,ultimately, a whole datacenter could be fully managed from a centralized single point, abstracting the whole hardware layer and exposing it to the administrators as a transparent pool of resources. This paper analyzes the evolution of infrastructures and tries to dig into the reality and convenience of Hyper Convergence.