This is a continuation of a series of articles on hosting solutions and services on Azure public cloud with the most recent discussion on Multitenancy here. The previous articles introduced virtual SAN followed by the operational efficiencies and this follows up on the design points and the integrated systems.

HCI products can also be combined into an integrated offering with the opportunity to provide a solution to customers.  They are usually built on one or more proven building blocks for the Software-defined data center. The vSphere and vSan provide two such building blocks and the integrated appliance is preconfigured and pretested. It delivers features for resiliency, quality of service, and centralized management functionality, enabling faster, better, and simpler management of consolidated workloads, virtual desktops, business critical applications and remote office infrastructure.

HCI capabilities can also be offered with a mix and match of storage offerings from different vendors for the purposes of replication, backup and cloud tiering, at no additional cost. These appliances can also integrate with cloud management platform and end-user computing solution. Such appliances can also be promoted to visibility in the management plane. Integrated systems can also combine compute, storage and networking products with certified partner hardware into HCI appliances.

The advantages of a HyperConverged Infrastructure include the following:

-          It can be used to cut acquisition cost, maintenance cost and operational expenses. Both CapEx and OpEx can reduce

-          From acquisition to commission, the HCI requires fewer steps and fewer people than conventional techniques

-          It can enable dynamic responsiveness especially to fluctuations in traffic. The heavier the workload, the more resources are required. The changes are transparent and automatic due to Storage based policy management.

-          It improves precision and granularity because storage services are consumed on a pay-as-you-go basis. The performance, capacity and protection are provided just as much as needed.

-          Consumption can also be made flexible with the partnership between admins. For example, storage admins can provide large datastores for VMs to be created and the virtual infrastructure admins can set policies for individual VMS.

-          Both scale-up and scale out are supported by the HCI system for capacity and performance on a grow-as-you-go basis

-          Newer applications with dynamic resourcing requirements can be quickly accomodated. The popularity of containers and cloud applications is maintained by HCI.

-          There is consistent performance for every application from business critical applications to cloud native applications.

-          There is high availability from these systems even when failures occur.

-          HCI provide a building block towards the private cloud with its modular architecture.

Finally, HCI participates in making the design modular for the foundation of a private cloud.