To understand Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), we need to take a quick history lesson. It’s important to understand the evolution of legacy data centers and how we got the modern data centers we use today.

Legacy data centers are typically composed of a multi-tier architecture made up of a storage tier, a networking tier, and a compute tier. Each of these components would typically be managed by a different administrator using purpose-built hardware creating a natural barrier, or silo, because of the functionality and expertise required to manage them.

The traditional data center model has been in place for decades. Its rigidity and attendant inefficiencies led to a search for solutions culminating in the creation of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). Initially, HCI was thought of as a type of software-defined storage, primarily because software abstraction of the traditional enterprise storage architecture was the last element necessary for a truly software-defined data center. HCI has grown to be much larger than its original scope, combining server virtualization with software-defined networking and continuous availability through self-healing along with advanced management and analytics capabilities.

The Present Day and HCI

Today, HCI is mainstream and offers a cloud experience in the customer’s own data center, bringing efficiencies and agility for demanding IT requirements. AMD has been working closely with our ecosystem partners in delivering fully tested and validated solutions that offer outstanding performance, scalability and TCO. While this is not an exhaustive list, these are some of the most common HCI use cases:

Nutanix is a world leader in HCI and we at AMD are very excited to collaborate with them. We have worked together on optimizing the Nutanix hyperconverged software, Acropolis OS, on AMD EPYC processors. Together, we have enabled choice in hypervisors including Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), VMware ESXi®, and Microsoft® Hyper-V. We have been collaborating closely with our server OEM partners in bringing fully validated HCI solutions including the Nutanix-integrated HPE ProLiant DX385 appliance, the Dell EMC XC Core XC-6515and newly announced Lenovo ThinkAgile HX HCI solution.

You can learn more about AMD EPYC processors for Nutanix solutions on the AMD website.