Organizations can often fall victim to over-provisioning their HCI solution because most appliance models have limited choices for storage and processor/memory combinations. However, SvSAN is designed to be flexible, and allow users to configure to their precise requirements. You can use Storage Performance Analysis (find more here) to understand your organization’s workloads and configure your infrastructure to your exact needs.
Instead of buying complex systems on expensive appliance hardware, configuring to your present demands enables significant savings to be made on hardware and can potentially avoid the need for a complete refresh. This can be achieved by leveraging a lightweight, hardware and storage-agnostic solution such as SvSAN.
But organizations change, and there will be times where your storage and processing needs vary. This is where SvSAN excels, as it can meet those demands without disruption and with minimal additional expense. It can do this by scaling up, or scaling out, while remaining simple and cost-effective.
Scaling up nodes: It’s really easy to scale up your existing nodes with higher performance or higher capacity storage. Additional disks can be added, slower HDDs can be replaced with SSDs, or drives can be upgraded to ones with more capacity. All of these upgrades can be made without impacting service availability, by upgrading one node at a time and using the witness to help resynchronize each upgraded node, once it’s back online.
Scaling out nodes: As well as scaling up existing hardware, you can add extra compute-only nodes to an SvSAN cluster, which can improve application performance and improve resiliency. As with scaling up nodes, scaling out can be carried out without causing any disruption – new nodes are simply introduced to the network. Furthermore, because the new nodes are compute-only, they do not require additional SvSAN licenses.
To find out more about creating a lightweight solution, that has the flexibility to change with your organization then you can download our full Scaling with SvSAN white paper.
