One of the central ideas of Hyperconverged and almost any modern IT infrastructure product is simplicity. This simplicity of deployment is great; it delivers fast time to value. Simplicity in operation is even more critical as it keeps the cost of ownership under control. Both converged, and hyperconverged products have simple deployment, a matter of a few hours from hardware delivery to a deployed platform. But they are very different when it comes time to apply updates. Updating a vBlock to a new standard release is a professional services engagement and might takes months to plan and weeks to execute. Most hyperconverged platforms include an updating process that can be initiated by customers and completed in one day, although you should test on a non-production system first. There are businesses replacing fleets of vBlocks with fleets of Hyperconverged clusters to make the updating process simpler. In the Build Day Live event last year with Pure Storage I was very impressed with the ability to update the Purity OS on the array without any downtime for the VMs that were hosted on the array. Equally impressive was the ability to upgrade from one model of the array to a more powerful one without any downtime. Hopefully, your on-premises infrastructure is this easy to update. Today I upgraded my Cohesity Virtual Edition appliance that is protecting my lab environment. It took me under 20 minutes, including the 10 minutes to download the update file from the Cohesity support site, I recorded a video of the process which is here on YouTube. I did test the update on another Cohesity Virtual Edition. Hopefully, I’ll be able to show you replication between those two appliances shortly.
Past Cohesity videos
Cohesity Virtual Edition Deployment Walk Through
Cohesity – Archive and Tier to public cloud
Active Directory Authentication for My Cohesity Cluster
Disclosure: This post is part of my work with Cohesity.
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