IT service providers have been employing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for some time now to cost-effectively provide access to applications at scale. Now one of the providers of a HCI platform that was previously only available to service providers is making that platform available to enterprise IT organizations.
The OnApp Enterprise platform from OnApp is based on Intel Data Center Blocks constructed using Intel Xeon processors that run software developed by OnApp. Company CEO Ditlev Bredahl says that the partnership with Intel is enabling OnApp to make available HCI platforms that can scale to 254 servers per cluster.
“The challenge with existing HCI platforms in terms of scale is that they are limited to anywhere from four to 30 nodes,” says Bredahl.
Bredahl says OnApp Enterprise is also differentiated in that OnApp Enterprise includes a full suite of deployment and orchestration tools; user management, access control and governance tools; metering, monitoring and showback/chargeback capabilities; and connectivity to multiple public clouds.
If enterprise IT organizations have access to an HCI platform that truly scales, they can unify compute and storage in their environment more aggressively by relying less on rack-based systems, says Bredahl.
Competition across providers of HCI platforms is already fierce. Most of the new platforms being acquired by enterprise IT organizations are based on a HCI architecture. The challenge IT organizations now face is figuring out to what degree they want to manage HCI platforms and rack-based systems side by side. OnApp is clearly betting that the appetite to replace as many rack-based systems as quickly as possible with a modern HCI platform that scales is high enough to overcome well-entrenched HCI rivals.
