IT professionals who’ve attempted to architect a high-performance vSAN often hit a brick wall. No matter how many nodes and how much network bandwidth they build into their design, they face poor utilization and high latency. As a result, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is pigeonholed into specific use cases, like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and fails to be deployed broadly across the enterprise. This siloing of HCI defeats its primary purpose: consolidating and simplifying data center operations. A high vSAN performance is essential for organizations to realize the promise of HCI.
The challenge is further compounded because high-performance storage I/O is no longer limited to specialized use cases. It has become a requirement for modern workloads. What was once considered high performance is now the baseline, pushing organizations to scale storage I/O performance to meet evolving application demands. Yet, HCI struggles to deliver, forcing businesses to rely on expensive dedicated storage arrays even for workloads that require mainstream performance. A dedicated storage array is 10X the price of the equivalent capacity in a vSAN, if the vSAN can deliver the required performance. Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) bridges this gap, delivering the promised simplicity of HCI while addressing its limitations.
Why HCI Can’t Deliver a High-Performance vSAN
HCI promises to simplify IT infrastructure by combining virtualization, storage, and networking into a single solution. However, beneath the surface, it relies on separate software components hidden behind a graphical user interface. This fragmented design introduces inefficiencies, with storage operating as a virtual machine (VM) within the hypervisor. As a result, storage competes for resources with other VMs, leading to higher latency, lower efficiency, and underutilization of available bandwidth.
HCI comes with strict hardware requirements, further limiting its flexibility. Strict hardware requirements lead to higher upfront hardware costs and make scaling the infrastructure more complex because nodes have to match or be close in configuration to the previous set of nodes. Over time, it becomes difficult to find modern server hardware that matches four- or five-year-old servers. The result is that customers must refresh the entire cluster in one big forklift upgrade—despite HCI initially promising “no more forklift upgrades.”
How UCI Solves the High-Performance vSAN Problem
Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) addresses the inherent inefficiencies of HCI by integrating storage, virtualization, and networking into a unified architecture. Unlike HCI, which depends on separate components, UCI leverages a single, optimized codebase that eliminates resource contention and improves performance.
VergeOS, the leading UCI platform, delivers consistent, scalable performance without requiring proprietary hardware or additional storage arrays. During our upcoming webinar, we will demonstrate this high-performance live so you can see it yourself. VergeOS provides complete hardware flexibility, enabling organizations to mix nodes with different processing and storage capacities. This flexibility allows businesses to scale incrementally, avoiding the costly and disruptive forklift upgrades associated with HCI.
Proof that UCI Delivers
In tests done with Solidigm, VergeIO was able to prove the capabilities of its vSAN:
- 1 Million+ IOPS at 30 GB/s Throughput: Using 64K block sizes, VergeOS demonstrated over one million random read IOPS with sub-millisecond latency, addressing the needs of performance-critical workloads.
- 12 GB/s Write Throughput: VergeOS delivered 195,000 random write IOPS, maximizing the bandwidth of a 25Gbps network connection while maintaining low response times.
- An eight-node cluster built using $1,500 servers achieved over a million IOPS at a cost per IOPS of just 0.67 cents, making high-performance storage accessible to organizations of all sizes.
The Importance of 64K Block Sizes
Testing with 64K block sizes provides a more accurate representation of real-world virtualized environments, where larger block sizes are commonly used for storage I/O. Traditional 4K block tests measure raw storage device performance, but they fail to capture the demands of virtualized workloads, which include virtual machines, databases, and large-file applications. By utilizing 64K blocks in testing, VergeOS showcases its ability to handle these real-world demands while maintaining exceptional performance metrics, making it an ideal solution for enterprise environments.
Conclusion: a High-Performance vSAN You Can Afford
Modern applications require infrastructure that scales both performance and affordability. While HCI struggles with the demands of today’s workloads, UCI fulfills the promise of a unified, high-performance platform. VergeOS combines optimized performance with flexibility, enabling organizations to handle any mainstream or high-performance workload without expensive, proprietary hardware.
With VergeOS, IT leaders can consolidate their infrastructure, reduce costs, and scale their performance to meet growing demands. To see VergeOS in action and learn more about these results, join our upcoming webinar for a live demonstration. It’s time to move beyond the limitations of HCI and unlock the full potential of UCI.
