As 10-Gbps Ethernet has grown and has become a widely accepted standard for deploying data center networks, so has the concept of converged infrastructure. The converged infrastructure approach packages or integrates networking and storage technologies into an easily consumable, deployable, and manageable solution. Data Center Bridging (DCB), also sometimes referred to as Converged Enhanced Ethernet (ECC), merges traditional Fibre Channel and Ethernet networks. While traditional 10-Gbps Ethernet supports IP SAN technologies, such as iSCSI and NFS, Data Center Bridging also supports the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol over the same physical cabling infrastructure. With FCoE you get a unique combination of the functionality and reliability offered by Fibre Channel with the flexibility of integrated Ethernet.

 

Converged infrastructure is typically deployed and aligned with a specific hardware vendor’s technology, such as Cisco UCS or HP BladeSystem. This converged approach aims to combine multiple types of resources into a single logical management entity by collapsing the traditional silos of IT infrastructure. This brings with it several distinct advantages, such as less cabling, reduced hardware stack, and improved flexibility and visibility from a single pane of glass.

Hyper-convergence takes this concept to the next level by grouping compute, storage, and networking into a single virtual computing appliance, with no need for a remote storage array. In the hyper-converged infrastructure, the storage controller function is running on each compute node in the vSphere cluster. The internal server disks on the ESXi hosts provide scalable-shared storage with cloud agility, efficiency, scalability and resilience. The VMware implementations of hyper-converged infrastructure include VMware EVO:RAIL™ and its larger relative system, VMware EVO™ SDDC™.