In the past, systems administrators had a virtual toolbox that they used in their everyday tasks and scheduled maintenance routines.
Often that consisted of a ragged collection of scripts, proprietary, and open-source apps, favored tools and interfaces. That’s still the case, of course, although typically, the numbers of tools required has fallen, and the tools themselves have certainly changed.
Ten years ago, cloud compute maintenance was a hit and miss affair, for example. Now, of course, the big vendors deliberately make it easy for sysadmins, offering both web and CLI interfaces, plus APIs that plug into common orchestration solutions. Life should, at least in theory, be a whole lot easier.
It’s indubitably true that the latest generation of converged and hyperconverged platforms accomplish complex tasks that just three or four years ago would have taken whole teams days, if not weeks, to prepare. But it’s strange that the interfaces on most hyperconvergence platforms aren’t the single point of reference for the entire IT stack that one might imagine they might be.
In fact, most HCI components still rely very much on their own UIs, relating to storage, compute, orchestration, scheduling, logging, and so on.
On top of that, containerized applications and services usually have their own points of control and there might be yet another for micro service orchestration. Additionally, production applications inside VMs or under abstraction also present their own control layers. In short, although hyperconvergence seemed to offer a single point of reference on a high-level control plane for everything from bare metal to public cloud, that’s really not the case in reality.
Systems administrators and DevOps, therefore, are still virtually dipping into a rattling bag of tools, despite the convergent solutions they are charged with administering.
The exception to this situation comes from the HCI vendor that you might expect. For many years now, StarWind‘s hyperconverged offerings have been a significantly disruptive influence on its competitors, creating convergent solutions that are not only a magnitude easier to deploy than competitors’ offerings, but the resulting speed and reliability metrics are far superior.
Plus, it’s more than worth mentioning that the StarWind HCI platform makes some other vendors’ eye-watering price tags seem, at best, obtuse.
The StarWind Command Center continues the Ukrainian outfit’s tradition of punching significantly above its weight when placed alongside the best Silicon Valley has to offer. From a single web tab, administrators can now see all their cores, subnets, VMs, nodes, NASs and SANs, and all relevant tasks, logs, and alerts. That means instead of having to switch from tool to tool, browser to JAR to CLI and back, 80 percent of all HCI-related tasks can be done in one place.
As a further bonus to StarWind’s users, the same GUI designed to be used to address all other StarWind platforms. So storage administrators will also see their virtual tape libraries, SANs and VSANs, and the individual nodes that make up each. The StarWind ethos of speed, scalability, and ease of deployment is presented here, and like the company’s hardware, its software is backed by the company’s renowned 24/7/365 support.
The StarWind Command Center comes bundled with the company’s HCA (hyperconverged appliance), and although it doesn’t – at least for now – aim to replace vSphere Web Client or similar, it’s just the sort of single pane of glass interface that systems administrators are looking for.
To see the interface itself, or get more information about how your organization can deploy an HCI either from a central data center or any edge installation, get in touch with StarWind to talk through the options.
