SAN vs HCI: Understanding the Difference
Today’s enterprises demand high speed data access with high volumes of data storage. Storage area network and Hyper Converged infrastructures provide solutions for compute, storage and networking and move past the hardware-based infrastructure limitations to more flexible software-based infrastructure. They help businesses to manage their storage devices with more flexibility.
In today’s topic we will learn and compare Storage area network (SAN) and Hyper Converged Infrastructures (HCI) technologies, their key differences and understand their working.
What is SAN?
SAN is designed to connect storage devices within enterprises, data centers, offices or any other environments. In SAN storage, all storage devices, routers, switches and other networking technologies are connected to a single network fabric. Protocols such as Ethernet and Fiber channel are used to enable network nodes or connection points such as switches for communication.
Host bus adapter (HBA) connects host servers to the SAN to provide interfacing to storage devices or network devices within the network. The purpose of this is to pool storage resources concurrently. Regardless of the physical location one can access servers, flash arrays, and other storage devices in the network. SANs are useful for large organizations which need to connect to storage resources – especially critical applications in big enterprises. They are good candidates for customizing storage network as per organization needs.
Advantages of SAN
- Provides automatic backup
- It provides high data storage capacities
- Reduction in cost of deploying multiple servers
- Improved performance
- Improved backup and recovery options
What is HCI?
Hyper Converged infrastructure (HCI) is a combination of products – storage, compute and networking. The HCI platform includes both hardware and software components. These can be commodity hardware or vendor specific hardware. All HCI components are virtual – separated from the underlying physical layer of compute, storage and networking which are managed by a hypervisor or software which runs a virtual machine. Everything on the HCI platform comes from one vendor due to which traditional HCI systems are prone to vendor lock-in.
Advantages of HCI
- Ease of scaling, in and out based on business needs extra nodes can be added
- Improves business agility in enterprises
- Improved data protection and disaster recovery with each node in pool contributes to a reliable and redundant shared storage
- Supports hybrid cloud environment
- Supports faster deployment
- Reduction in footprint as all components of data center are combined into a single appliance
SAN vs HCI
| Features | SAN | HCI |
| Type Of Storage | Storage area network is used to connect to storage devices within a network using a fiber channel | A Hyperconverged infrastructure is combination of hardware and software components such as compute, storage and networking |
| Customization | SAN at times might have network and storage components from different vendors and generally more customizable compared to its counterpart | HCI is usually comprised of single vendor components and due to this there is a risk of vendor lock-in and limited customization possibilities |
| Ease Of Management And Deployment | SANs are more complex as it requires network expertise and in case switches and networking components are from different vendors then integration process takes more time | HCI is usually an entire stack provided by single vendor and meant to work together. And in some cases, implementation assistance is also available from HCI vendor |
| Application Support | SANs do support multiple applications including non-virtualized and virtualized workloads | A non-virtualized application usually does not run in hyperconverged environment because HCI is purely a virtualized technology |
| Use Cases | Support for critical workloads such as CRM and databases, significant support on backups | Ideal for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), linear storage scaling and SMB storage |
Download the comparison table: san vs hci
Continue Reading:
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Tag:storage
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