What applications can be run on hyperconverged infrastructure?
In the world of enterprise IT, “high performance” has traditionally been synonymous with “complex.” It has been necessary to tolerate certain levels of complexity to gain the highest performing solution possible. Because of the assumption that high-performing must be complex, there’s an inherent implication that a simple solution must be low-performing.
Hyperconvergence defies the industry’s notions about complexity and performance by being both simple and complex, yet still high performing. The software that makes a hyperconverged solution work under the hood is actually quite complex. There’s substantial work and intellectual property that goes into making the solution as high performing as possible. However, there’s an equal or higher proportion of dedication to abstracting this complexity from the consumer of the product. What this means, in effect, is that while it looks simple on the surface and is easy to manage, it can hang with the complex solutions in terms of performance.
There are certainly still cases where intricate solutions can be meticulously built and outperform HCI significantly. But for most workloads, performance is not going to be a concern. Due to the current state of technology, and given the correct configurations, HCI is 100% capable of running business-critical applications like enterprise database, messaging, and application servers. The only workloads which tend to not be a good fit for hyperconvergence are those that require special hardware.
Due to the ability to run disparate business-critical systems on one platform, there can also be substantial savings in the way of efficiency. Often, a separate segment of infrastructure is provisioned to serve a single service (e.g. messaging). By deploying many services on the same segment, high data efficiency ratios can be attained and higher density/consolidation is possible.
In short, the answer is that almost any application can be run successfully on a hyperconverged system.