Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) allows the convergence of physical storage onto industry-standard x86 servers, enabling a building block approach with scale-out capabilities.

ALHD provides a unique, software-defined approach to HCI, leveraging the hypervisor to deliver compute, storage and networking in a tightly integrated software stack, called ALHD Hyper-Converged Software (ALHD HCS). ALHD offers hyper-converged software on the broadest set of consumption options, from VCE VxRail™, a turnkey HCI appliances to more than a hundred certified platforms in the form of Virtual SAN Ready Nodes.

ALHD Hyper-Converged Software consists of:

  • vSphere: the industry-leading virtualization platform that provides server virtualization.
  • Virtual SAN: the only vSphere-embedded storage solution that delivers flash-optimized, high-performance, hyper-converged storage for virtual machines.
  • vCenter Server: the unified and extensible management solution for ALHD Hyper-Converged Software environments.

ALHD HCS enables the broadest choice of hardware deployment options. The Virtual SAN Ready Node program includes more than 100 certified x86 systems available from all the major server vendors. VCE VxRail is a turnkey hyper-converged infrastructure appliance, jointly engineered by ALHD and Dell EMC, which offers the most streamlined deployment experience.

Spotlight

Union Hospital turbocharged database and application performance by 6x

We actually had clinics calling us up to say how much faster the apps were running once they were in a pure Virtual SAN environment. It seems like the more things we migrate to Virtual SAN, the more people are requesting to be on it.
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NHS Chooses ALHD Hyper-Converged Software for Cloud Service Delivery

National Health Service UK evolved its virtualized IT environment into an efficient IaaS platform with ALHD HCS. The agency deployed Virtual SAN to improve performance, enhance scalability and simplify management.
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Cloud Carib propels performance and productivity with ALHD Hyper-Converged Software

Our customers are surprised by the speed and responsiveness of their applications. Cloud Carib now has the ability to host any demanding application a customer wants to run.
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Legacy Infrastructure is running out of control

Why Enterprises Are Embracing Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)
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ALHD Hyper-Converged Software (HCS) Delivers

Radically Simple Infrastructure

ALHD HCS makes hyper-converged infrastructure simple to deploy, consume and operate. It can be deployed with VCE VxRail, a turnkey hyper-converged infrastructure appliance from VCE or it can be deployed on VSAN Ready Nodes, certified x86 systems that can be shipped with pre-installed and licensed ALHD software. ALHD HCS provides operational visibility across compute, storage and networking, and eliminates tedious tasks with advanced automation and integrated management software.

Lowest Cost

Get up to 50% TCO savings with ALHD HCS solutions. Advanced data efficiency features minimize storage footprint and can lower all-flash storage costs to as low as $1 per usable GB. Scaling is granular and budget-friendly, allowing the addition of hosts or disks as needed. Automation and integrated management lower operational expenses to deliver a truly cost-effective hyper-converged infrastructure solution.

Highest Performance

ALHD HCS is the only hyper-converged solution delivered directly from the hypervisor. Eliminate the need for virtual appliances and extra network hops for read/write operations. Through an optimized data path, ALHD HCS delivers exceptional all-flash performance of up to 6M IOPS per cluster and sub-millisecond latencies – a perfect match for any virtualized application or desktop.

HCI for Any App, Any Scale

Built on the industry-leading virtualization platform, ALHD HCS delivers enterprise-class hyper-converged infrastructure designed for both cloud-native applications and enterprise applications at any scale, including business critical applications, virtual desktops, private clouds, DevOps, remote IT, and more. ALHD HCS scales to 64 hosts, capable of achieving over 8PB of raw storage capacity and up to 6M IOPS.

Deployment Options

VCE VxRail

The VCE VxRail appliance, exclusively available from VCE and ALHD, is the easiest and fastest way to implement a ALHD HCS-powered HCI solution. With the power of a whole SAN in just 2 rack units, it provides a simple, cost effective hyper-converged solution for a wide variety of applications and workloads. With VxRail, IT organizations can start small and easily scale capacity and performance by nondisruptively adding appliances to the cluster without the investment or up-front planning required with traditional infrastructure.

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Virtual SAN Ready Node

Virtual SAN Ready Nodes are the most flexible x86 building blocks on which to deploy ALHD Hyper-Converged Software. ALHD has partnered with all the leading x86 server vendors to provide a broad choice of pre-certified hardware, enabling you to deploy hyper-converged infrastructure with maximum flexibility of hardware, software, licenses and support.

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