Upgrade of Hyper-converged Infrastructure

ITSC has developed a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution since 2017 to manage the virtualization of the University servers so as to deliver high availability, mobility, and efficient scaling of performance and capacity of the server resources.

Hyper-converged Infrastructure Diagram

To foster data efficiency of the HCI environment, the platform has been further upgraded to provide the following features.

• Data deduplication – To reduce disk workload, replication bandwidth and storage capacity by eliminating redundant data and retaining only one unique instance of the data on disk.
• Data compression – To reduce the size of a given data set and to compress the data set in a more condensed format.
• Data optimization – To improve storage efficiency, performance and bandwidth usage by identifying the file types of the data sets and making decision about where to store the data.

By upgrading the HCI platform with the mentioned features, the current virtualization system will not only save significant bandwidth resources as it supports more efficient movement of the data files between the data centres, but also enable easier creation of point-in-time copies of the Virtual Machines (VMs) and to transfer them from one system to another system, or from one data centre to another data centre.