Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) has quickly gained adoption in many IT environments due to its relative simplicity and the ability to efficiently scale the number of applications for private cloud and virtual environments. As HCI systems have matured, IT administrators and application owners have grown comfortable with their capabilities, particularly the ability to quickly scale their deployments while maintaining efficiency through the use of a consistent set of integrated management tools.

According to the latest Evaluator Group research of HCI, many companies express concern over the capabilities of their HCI environments, particularly regarding performance and scalability, along with data protection and disaster recovery features. In order to assess the capabilities of NetApp’s HCI system, Evaluator Group was asked to evaluate it in our lab using a variety of typical enterprise workloads and use cases.

In this Lab Insight, we report on the findings of our in-depth testing of NetApp HCI in scenarios designed to represent typical usage in an enterprise hybrid cloud environment. Testing was designed to assess system usability, performance and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities, along with scaling and availability. Additionally, the NetApp HCI system was evaluated during unplanned events in order to understand the potential impact to availability and performance.

In summary, the NetApp HCI system was able to leverage its disaggregated HCI design. Tested as a solution, the system was shown to scale storage performance and capacity independently from computing capabilities. Additionally, the impact of a storage failure was minimal while running a set of common virtual applications.

NetApp HCI Test Highlights:

• Performance: Industry leading HCI storage performance (3 compute + 5 storage NetApp HCI)
  • IOmark-VDI: Certified for 3,200 VDI users IOmark-VDI standard storage workload
  • IOmark-VM: Certified for 1,440 VM applications, using IOmark-VM storage workload
• Scalability: Ability to linearly scale capacity and performance of storage independently
• Availability: Tested ability to withstand storage node failure with minimal compute impact
• Enterprise QoS: Tested QoS control per volume and per VM (using iSCSI and VVOLs, respectively)
• Always on Data Reduction: All testing and results with data reduction enabled

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