vInfrastructure Blog

Hyper-converged architectures consolidate and manage computing, networking, and storage resources via software so they can run on any vendor’s server hardware.

Several years ago they where (apparently) strange approach to storage implementation used mainly for cheap solution (using VSA, that lacks, in much cases, of right scalability), or for special user cases like ROBO or VDI (with solution like NexentaVSA for View).

But starting with Nutanix (probably the first real player in those kind of solution) the idea of simple VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) has dramatically changed by introducing a large scalability with new scale-out (or web-scale, using Nutanix terms) approach.

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In an old post about storage architectures is described in a simple way some basic concepts, including the scale-in (or scale-up) vs. the scale-out approach. They are different approaches in scaling with different implications.

Unfortunately there is a simple an well accepted definition on what is a scale-out storage is (or not is): some are limited in specific contests (like this one only for NAS or this SNIA tutorial still applied to a NAS storage), other are too much vendor specific.

But usually a scale-out storage imply:

• Multi-device (or multi-array) storage systems (aggregated in a pool of resources)
• Possibility to scale both in capacity and in performance
• Unified management and usually also a unify view of a single logical storage
• Some kind of fault-tolerance or high availability or data protection across the systems

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