NetApp HCI provides a software-defined approach for deploying and managing data and storage resources. NetApp HCI uses NetApp Element software to provide an easy-to-use GUI-based portal and REST-based API for storage automation, configuration, and management. NetApp Element software provides modular and scalable performance, with each storage node delivering guaranteed capacity and throughput to the environment.

NetApp HCI uses the NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) to automate the configuration and deployment of physical infrastructure, including the installation and configuration of the VMware vSphere environment and the integration of the NetApp Element Plug-in for vCenter Server. The following figure depicts an overview of the process for deploying NetApp HCI.

A common challenge is delivering predictable performance when multiple applications are sharing the same infrastructure. An application interfering with other applications creates performance degradation. Mainstream applications have unique I/O patterns that can affect each other’s performance when deployed in a shared environment. To address these issues, the NetApp HCI Quality of Service (QoS) feature allows fine-grained control of performance for every application, thereby eliminating noisy neighbors and satisfying performance SLAs. In NetApp HCI, each volume is configured with minimum, maximum, and burst IOPS values. The minimum IOPS setting guarantees performance, independent of what other applications on the system are doing. The maximum and burst values control allocation, enabling the system to deliver consistent performance to all workloads.

NetApp Element software uses the iSCSI storage protocol, a standard way to encapsulate SCSI commands on a traditional TCP/IP network. Element uses a technique called iSCSI login redirection for better performance. iSCSI login redirection is a key part of the NetApp Element software cluster. When a host login request is received, the node decides which member of the cluster should handle the traffic based on IOPS and the capacity requirements for the volume. Volumes are distributed across the NetApp Element software cluster and are redistributed if a single node is handling too much traffic for its volumes or if a new node is added. Multiple copies of a given volume are allocated across the array. In this manner, if a node failure is followed by volume redistribution, there is no effect on host connectivity beyond a logout and login with redirection to the new location. With iSCSI login redirection, a NetApp Element software cluster is a self-healing, scale-out architecture that is capable of nondisruptive upgrades and operations.

Previous generations of hyperconverged infrastructure typically required fixed resource ratios, limiting deployments to four-node and eight-node configurations. NetApp HCI is a disaggregated hyper-converged infrastructure that can scale compute and storage resources independently. Independent scaling prevents costly and inefficient overprovisioning and simplifies capacity and performance planning.

The architectural design choices offered enables you to confidently scale on your terms, making HCI viable for core Tier-1 data center applications and platforms. It is architected in building blocks at either the chassis or the node level. Each chassis can hold four nodes in a mixed configuration of storage or compute nodes. NetApp HCI is available in mix-and-match, small, medium, and large storage and compute configurations.

NetApp HCI provides proven multiprotocol and hybrid- cloud support with enterprise grade features. It also offers easy interoperability with multiple different host virtualization technologies and storage solutions. Deploying ONTAP Select and StorageGRID as appliances expands NetApp HCI storage capabilities to include file, block, and object storage services. NetApp HCI provides an agile infrastructure platform for virtual data centers of different flavors. VMware vSphere, Red Hat Virtualization, KVM, Citrix Hypervisor, and so on are supported platforms that can use the NetApp HCI infrastructure to provide a scalable, enterprise-grade on-premises virtual environment.

For more details, see the NetApp HCI documentation.

Cisco ACI, with its policy driven model, makes network hardware stateless. The Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) acts as the central controller managing and configuring all the switches in the ACI fabric. The Cisco ACI fabric consists of Cisco Nexus 9000 series switches which are centrally configured and managed by the cluster of APICs using the declarative policy model.

Cisco ACI uses logical constructs to form a layered policy architecture to define and manage the different functions of the entire fabric, including infrastructure, authentication, security, services, applications, and diagnostics.

The following figure depicts the categorization and relation between different logical constructs in Cisco ACI.

Tenants are logical containers with administrative boundaries that exercise domain-based access control. It is a logical policy isolation and does not equate to a real network construct.

Within the tenant, a context is a unique layer-3 forwarding policy domain. A context can be directly mapped to the Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) concept of traditional networks. In fact, a context is also called VRF. Because each context is a separate layer- 3 domain, two different contexts can have overlapping IP spaces.

Within a context, a bridge domain (BD) represents a unique layer-2 forwarding construct. The bridge domain defines the unique layer-2 MAC address space and can be equated to a layer-2 flood domain or to a layer-3 gateway. A bridge domain can have zero subnets, but it must have at least one subnet if it is to perform routing for the hosts residing in the BD.

In ACI, an endpoint is anything that communicates on the network, be it a compute host, a storage device, a network entity that is not part of the ACI fabric, a VM, and so on. A group of endpoints that have the same policy requirements are categorized into an Endpoint Group (EPG). An EPG is used to configure and manage multiple endpoints together. An EPG is a member of a bridge domain. One EPG cannot be a member of multiple bridge domains, but multiple EPGs can be members of a single bridge domain.

All the endpoints that belong to the same EPG can communicate with each other. However, endpoints in different EPGs cannot communicate by default, but they can communicate if a contract exists between the two EPGs allowing that communication. Contracts can be equated to ACLs in traditional networking. However, it differs from an ACL in the way that it doesn’t involve specifying specific IP addresses as source and destination and that contracts are applied to an EPG as a whole.

See the Cisco ACI documentation for more information.

Cisco ACI provides many advantages over traditional networking. Programmability and automation are critical features of a scalable data center virtualization infrastructure and the policy driven mechanism of Cisco ACI opens a lot of opportunities for providing optimal physical and virtual networking.

The following tables list the hardware and software compute resources utilized in the solution. The components that are used in any implementation of the solution might vary based on customer requirements.

The following tables list the hardware and software storage resources used in this solution. The components that are used in any particular implementation of the solution might vary based on customer requirements.

The following tables list the hardware and software network resources used in this solution. The components that are used in any particular implementation of the solution might vary based on customer requirements.

Next: Design Considerations