Hyperconvergence for Education
Maxta Hyperconvergence Software simplifies IT infrastructure for schools by collapsing compute, storage and networking into a single tier using your choice of hardware and hypervisors.
As an IT professional, you’re under ever-increasing pressure to deliver infrastructure that delivers cloud-like flexibility for your students, faculty, and staff. You’ve used traditional storage infrastructure for years, but it can’t keep up with today’s rapid growth. Hyperconverged appliances look promising, but come at a premium price – it can cost $50,000 to add a node, the only way to add capacity. Appliances also lack the flexibility to scale compute and storage separately.
Maxta lets IT professionals at K-12 schools, colleges and universities simplify IT infrastructure and reduce costs dramatically without sacrificing performance or availability, all using commodity hardware – even the hardware you own today.
Hardware and Virtualization Independent
The Freedom to Choose. The Flexibility to Change.
Maxta gives you the choice of server vendor and hypervisor so you can build a private cloud infrastructure that’s best for your school.
Hyperconverged appliances and even some hyperconvergence software restrict your choice of hardware and hypervisor. Maxta provides platform-agnostic Hyperconvergence Software, so you have a choice of hardware and hypervisors. That gives you a clear advantage over costly and complex traditional storage arrays that lock you into their platform. Hyperconverged appliances promise to solve this too but still lock you into a hypervisor, a hardware platform or both. Maxta gives you the freedom to choose both, and easily change platforms down the road.
Simplify Your Infrastructure.
Run Mixed Workloads on a Single Cluster. No Storage Expertise Required.
Why waste your time on managing traditional storage? Manage VMs, not storage.
Maxta is a VM-centric platform. It optimizes performance and availability on a per-application basis, so you can reduce costs and increase flexibility by running mixed workloads on the same cluster – and improve performance for applications by 25 percent. You can run virtual desktops for computer labs, databases, and other applications side-by-side. Traditional storage and even software-defined storage can only create and manage storage objects, such as LUNs or volumes, forcing you to become, or hire, a storage expert.
Choose Your Hardware and Hypervisor
Give Each Department or School Choice
Maxta supports for over 7 enterprise server vendors and multiple hypervisors.
Maxta works with most major server vendors, including Cisco, Dell-EMC, HP Enterprise, Huawei, Lenovo, Quanta, Super Micro, and more. You can choose from pre-configured, pre-validated solutions with Maxta pre-installed, buy your own hardware, or even use existing server hardware. Maxta supports VMware vSphere and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platforms and gives you the ability migrate VMs seamlessly between them.
Maxta also lets you mix and match hardware. That means departments and schools that are part of larger campuses have the flexibility to pick the hardware that’s right for them.
Scale Compute and Storage Independently
All the Advantages of an Appliance Without Any of the Downsides
Schools and universities require the flexibility to scale infrastructure in small increments, shift resources around and grow compute and storage independently – all things hyperconverged appliances can’t offer.
On the surface, a turnkey hyperconverged appliance looks like a good way to go. It’s simple to rack and stack new systems as demand grows. But appliances can’t scale in small increments, or scale compute and storage resources separately, meaning the only way to scale is to buy another appliance – often for $50,000 per node. There’s also a “refresh tax” – whenever you refresh the hardware, you have to buy the software again.
The alternative, hyperconverged software, means you’re never locked into a hardware or hypervisor platform. And software lets you scale compute and storage independently.
Advantages for Educational Organizations
Cost-Effective Infrastructure
Get cloud-like economics for your IT infrastructure with hyperconvergence software and commodity hardware that’s easy to manage.
Choice of Hardware – Even Existing Hardware
Each department can choose the server hardware that’s best for them, or even repurpose hardware they already have.
Never Overprovision Compute or Storage
Scale compute and storage separately by adding disk, memory, or CPU to existing nodes, add new nodes as you need them.
Manage VMs, Not Storage
Improve infrastructure utilization by 40% and improve performance by 25% with VM-level policies.
No Refresh Tax
Only pay for software once with a perpetual or subscription license – not every time you refresh hardware.
No Upgrade Tax
Add capacity to a node, add a node, or add compute only nodes – without appliance or storage vendor markups.
No Vendor Lock-In
Mix and match server hardware, drives, and leading hypervisors within a single deployment, so you’re never locked in.
Documentation:
Download the Maxta for Education Solution Brief (.PDF)