Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions stand poised to disrupt traditional IT architectures in every way possible. Combining compute, data protection, networking, memory, scale out, storage, and virtualization on a single platform, they deliver the benefits of traditional IT infrastructures without their associated complexities. But as organizations look to consolidate on hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, they need data protection services such as Pivot3’s Quality of Service (QoS) feature now found on its vSTAC SLX Hyperconverged product that enables organizations to better protect their applications.
Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions provide organizations with the opportunity to consolidate and then centrally manage disparate applications on a single platform. However, consolidating applications presents its own set of challenges, namely ensuring that each application hosted by the hyperconverged infrastructure solution receives the appropriate level of service.
Absent any policies that guide its actions, the hyperconverged solution will simply attempt to service each application request in the order in which they arrive. While this approach may work fine if the hyperconverged solution only hosts a few virtual machines (VMs) or even a few dozen VMs, organizations want to deploy hyperconverged infrastructure solutions that host potentially hundreds or even thousands of VMs with different priorities. In these situations, the hyperconverged solution needs policies to help it prioritize which actions on which VMs to take first.
This is where the data protection QoS feature now available on Pivot3’s vSTAC SLX Hyperconverged product comes into play by offering the following benefits to applications hosted on the Pivot3 platform:
- Through its policies, organizations may pre-configure performance targets for applications that ensure minimum and maximum performance for them.
- Once set, the Pivot3 QoS uses adaptive bandwidth throttling and adaptive queuing to prioritize which application workloads have access to specific hyperconverged resources and when.
- Organizations have the flexibility to change these performance QoS policies on-the-fly as the needs of specific applications change.
- It can prioritize data protection operations by putting replication jobs for mission critical applications at the head of the line ahead of previously queued up business critical and non-critical replication jobs.
What makes Pivot3’s QoS notable is two-fold.
First, as it moves tasks associated with mission critical applications to the head of the line, it does not forget to service the tasks associated with business critical and non-critical applications. Every time tasks associated with these applications get by-passed to service a task from a mission critical application, Pivot3’s QoS in the background slightly upgrades the priority of the tasks associated with these applications. In this way, should tasks associated with these lower priority applications get by-passed too many times by tasks from mission critical applications, eventually the Pivot4 QoS will prioritize these tasks the same as mission critical applications and they will get serviced.
Second, organizations may set different QoS levels for data protection and performance. By way of example, organizations may need to provide an application with a high level of performance (such as one they are testing or only need temporarily) but that same application may only need minimal or no data protection. Conversely, another application may need only nominal levels of performance but it may need very high levels of data protection. Using these varying QoS levels that Pivot3 makes available, organizations can appropriately address these different data protection and performance needs that each application may have.
Source: Pivot3
Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions bring much needed affordability and simplicity to an architecture that has grown far more costly and complex than what companies ever wanted. Yet as this transition to hyperconverged occurs, organizations now need new tools to keep these hyperconverged infrastructures simple and easy to manage. The Pivot3 QoS is an excellent example of the type of feature that organizations should look for a hyperconverged infrastructure solution to possess to ensure that these types of solutions deliver on their promise initially and over time.