What is convergence?
Put simply, convergence is a term used to describe the combination of storage (disks), network and compute resources (CPU, RAM) on a single physical appliance.
Therefore, in a converged architecture the storage is attached directly to the physical servers, rather than using more expensive direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS) or a storage area network (SAN).
Convergence benefits
By combining resources into single appliances these become the 'building blocks' for a virtual infrastructure, providing a number of benefits such as a simpler management interface, lower costs, faster provisioning of servers, less support costs and easy upgrades to faster networking. Plus the space requirements can be dramatically reduced.
Scalability
Convergence means that the capacity of your network can be adjusted quickly and in line with the demands of your user base or applications just by adding additional servers or nodes.
All resources of each node are aggregated into a single cluster. Addition of more nodes simply expands the storage and compute power available to the cluster, providing flexibility and scalability.
High availability and replication
For those customers who require high levels of application, data or database availability we strongly recommend having live replicas of your data.
At System 15 we are an authorised reseller of StarWind Virtual SAN. This is software that removes the need for expensive hardware-based replication by 'mirroring' the internal hard drives and flash memory between server nodes.
Starting with a minimum of 2 nodes and scaling upwards, StarWind Virtual SAN runs on top of your existing hypervisor (VMware or Hyper-V). It provides an easy to manage, cost-effective solution for SAN replication, without the need for expensive switches or quorum servers.