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A few interesting discussions going on here, and by the looks of it we have a few people working with storage solutions.

Too answer, HCI do have some alignment in your claim towards Hadoop, or sort of.
While it is a bunch of servers, with local disk (Mainly SSD with Cold-Data on HDD to get the volume), there a few key components to think about when talking about HCI, first, Hyper-Converged means different depending on what you are talking about, storage, compute, networking, but in essence it means that we combine two or more solutions into a single, scalable unit. Looking at datacenters this is mainly Compute and Storage.

This in essence means that once we scale, we scale both Compute and Storage linear (Both IOPS and Capacity). As we no longer have any dependencies to what a SAN controller can handle until it bottlenecks, that are out of concern, neither are we in theory not depended on the SAN-network and when it may become a bottleneck, since when we scale with a unit we also in theory scale the throughput on the "SAN-network" since we still need to have data protection of some sort with blocks in different nodes to tolerate failures.

Depending on vendor, a few utilize data-locality, meaning that they migrate the bits as close to the actual compute as possible, others depend on Low-Latency Connections (RDMA over Ethernet, InfiniBand or the like) as this is already invested in the ToR switches.

We also raised some concern regarding scalable and cost-effective on a solution utilizing local storage layer, which I would say is untrue. HCI by design is built for scalability. You can argue and say that HCI by design is:
- Predictable as every unit adds Compute, Memory, Storage Capacity and Storage IOPS.
- Repeatable as HCI is built from the beginning to be clustered by design you get a "Single Pane of glass" management and monitoring for the whole cluster, including Storage.
- Scalable as we combine together the above, we can predict how we scale with each node and since the solution is built on being clustered and repeatable we can easily scale up without much intervention.

A key point to remember is that the same person keeping track on the compute-layer now also keeps track on the storage-layer. This in most cases means lower TCO.
Just to give a pure figure on what is achievable from a rather standard setup from one of the vendors:
6U, 2 nodes per 2U
Random Read IOPS : 30.000/node
Random Write IOPS : 27.300/node

6 Nodes giving a total of:
Random Read IOPS : 30.000*6 = 180,000 Read IOPS
Random Write IOPS : 27.300*6 =163.800 Write IOPS

What about usable storage? Roughly 70TB counting with a redundancy factor of 2.
Now, as in all solutions, as soon as we start hitting Cold Data, those figures will go down, but in those cases I would claim that calculations on an Daily working-set of data has not been done correctly.

As in all solutions HCI also got a few caveats, one mainly being that workloads in most Enterprises doesn’t look the same, which means that a few needs a lot of memory, a few needs a lot of CPU, and a few needs a lot of capacitor and/or IOPS. But as we try and scale linear, with both CPU, Memory and Storage for each unit something might be skewed. A few vendors then have more storage Heavy options, or vice versa on Memory/CPU. But seeing as in this case the workloads are known, and should be the same over the whole solution, then it should be doable to find a unit that scales well for all aspects.

As said before, HCI doesn’t fit all solutions and both discussed have their pros and cons. But since you from the looks of it can get a smaller solution from the start, with lower TCO, complexity that rather scales when you need and does it with ease, but still give you the redundancy and performance directly from the start but in a smaller suite so to say.

And just to clarify, Tintri, Purestorage, SolidFire and the like are not HCI solutions as a few of them should be seen as AFA solutions etc. GridStore, SimpliVity, Nutanix, EVO:RAIL (I bet that I miss out on several others) should be seen as HCI solutions as they combine several components into one, scalable unit.

*Ninja Edit*
Most HCI solutions are appliances, meaning that they have very low overhead when it comes to handling the whole stack, including automation, self-healing and the like.

Thanks for crazy details Dancer, I appreciate the time spent in these repliesl!

Can you throw out a ball park $$ figure for that setup?

So can you run windows servers and such on this stuff? Can I run my MS SQL Cluster on top of this? Do I just carve out luns as with a typical SAN and present them to the cluster?

In which case how would that stack look? There would be say 6U of applicances - plus now the hardware for the windows cluster/DB (or does that run on the appliances as well?)

Cheers!

Most of the HCI solutions combines Storage and Compute into one unit, and they utilize virtualization on top of it to still have the flexibility of Technologies like vMotion and others. Without going into detail, several vendors have options with either VMware, Hyper-V, KVM etc. So we are not talking about adding an extra layer of hardware above the HCI solution where our SQL and other workloads live since this is already integrated (Although, it is possible from a few vendors to use for an example IBM blades as compute where SQL would live, but then again this wouldn't really be HCI and here a traditional SAN would be a better fit from my Point of View, but during a transition phase this is possible)

So to answer the question, yes your Windows Servers, SQL and the like will reside inside this 6U, 6 Node cluster, with each node having 512GB of RAM along with 28 Cores @ 2.6GHz. They would however have to be virtualized inside either VMware, Hyper-V or the like to be able to utilize the platform as virtualization is a key-factor in most HCI solutions.

As I'm no sales-rep nor from any vendor I can't really give any correct $$$ figures, and I'm not sure how much I can share from those figures I have from vendors, but if I salt them a bit and add a few $$$ we can have a ballpark figure around 620-680k $ for the solution in this discussion. This is with redundancy inside one datacenter, being able to fail both nodes, disks and blocks and option to synchronize to another 6U solution in case of disaster (As an example, Iceland)
To summarize we are talking about per node:
512GB RAM
28 Cores @ 2.6GHz
Random Read IOPS : 30.000
Random Write IOPS : 27.300

Total solution:
3TB RAM
168 Cores @ 2.6GHz
Random Read IOPS : 30.000*6 = 180,000 Read IOPS
Random Write IOPS : 27.300*6 =163.800 Write IOPS
70TB of capacity.

HCI solutions are on some basis a higher CapEx investment if you size a traditional solution and compare the performance and price, but since they include both Compute and Storage, fewer personnel to maintain, less Rackspace, less energy consumption, less cooling needs and less complexity as we piggy-back on the investments done on the ToR switches instead of a dedicated network for the storage layer, combining that gives a lower TCO for most of the part. Also instead of being needed to pat the hardware to make sure it’s okay those guys can instead focus on other core business that helps the company.

Now we haven’t really discussed any specific vendor, technology behind it (Data-locality, compression, deduplication, MapReduce etc.) nor haven’t touched all caveats, pros/cons and the like. There are several vendors out there that I’m sure would happily talk with you, and since you seem to have in-house expertise already on traditional setups you should be able to compare them and find what best fits your needs. But seeing that you know what your workloads are, how they perform and how you need to scale, you should be able to start small and only scale when you need, as an example when Dust hits PC, Valkyrie is released or the like, and if needed you can also scale down as there are no hardware tied together between the blocks as this is done in software instead.
Keep in mind that HCI is by design meant to be clustered, and even the smallest solutions are by design fault-tolerant and gives you the redundancy needed even at the smallest setups.

Good News ... for new Hardware Enviroment

I was this week in Barcelona in the VMware VMworld 2015 and have talk with many Friends, co-workers and Costumers
was playing EVE. All was happy to the Hardware Change and use VMware Technology for EVE Online.

I have many Costumers was use IBM SVC Technology with VMware vSphere ... was very Fast System.

I Hope the Transformation Steps ... virtualisation from existing Systems works Fine.

Im sure the change to VMware Virtualisation Technology ... was the right Step ... go to new Expirence with EVE

EVE FOREVER

Tholuse
*in real life VCP,VTSP and Storage Guy*


I have Idea ... we make VMware User Group call VMEVE or VEVE
and next year on VMworld Barcelona 2016 make Special EVENT for EVE Players was visit this Event.

We should create a corp for all the storage/virtualization workers... IOPS fleets and some iScsi congestion on the gate

@Ccp, build some inter-station darkfiber connections ;)

Posting from my cell in Portugal (while on vacations from the US)...

Before finalizing anything, I would suggest a POC using the new Cisco blade chassis', F5 load balancing (LTM and for geographical DNS balancing GTM) and ASM/firewall products, and to top off the storage use EMC's XtremeIO storage. As a systems engineer for over 20 years with experience and certificates in VMware/Redhat virtualization, Dell, IBM, and now Cisco products as Well as automation on the fly with no interruption I believe their is no equal at this point in time. If you have any questions you can contact me. If you have any issues contacting sales reps let me know, I can facilitate vendor contacts. From a player and Engineering perspective, this a great but costly alternative with a lot of flexibility and great redundancy depending on implementing.

Will the server have a choice of skins?

IIRC, they raffled some used TQ blades last Fanfest...

I promised a answer in a day or two which i failed to delivery on , i apologize for that

the reasons are the thread took a interesting turn but regardless i have been working with our LENOVO (IBM name is stuck in my head sorry lenovo marketing) yeah been working with our partners and my storage team on the best response to this.

so little more time but i have not forgotten that i owe you all a response