Hyperscale Definition

What is Hyperscale?

Hyperscale refers to IT infrastructure’s capability to quickly scale up to meet demand. This is accomplished by adding additional resources, such as storage and servers.

Often, hyperscale is implemented using cloud-based services where these resources are readily available and can be rolled out as needed. This fast, efficient scalability enables organizations to more effectively meet surges in customer demand.

Key Attributes of Hyperscale

The term hyperscale describes certain capabilities of an IT environment. The goal of a hyperscale system is to ensure that an organization’s IT systems are always able to meet demand.

There are a few different important capabilities under the hyperscale umbrella. These include:

• Scalability: As the name suggests, scalability is an essential part of hyperscale systems. A hyperscale environment distributes tasks across multiple systems and has the ability to rapidly provision additional resources to meet demand.
• Distributed Infrastructure: Hyperscale environments are often geographically distributed or spread across multiple data centers. This wider footprint can help to enhance performance and offers greater resiliency against potentially disruptive events.
• Resource Management: Hyperscale environments must be able to deploy additional resources on demand. This requires dynamic resource allocation that ensures that resources are optimally used and continually available.
• Efficiency: Hyperscale environments are designed to be highly efficient systems. By optimizing their use of space, energy, cooling, and similar systems, they maximize their capacity while managing costs.
• High Availability: Hyperscale architectures are typically also designed to offer high availability and fault tolerance. By distributing infrastructure across multiple redundant systems, hyperscale reduces the potential impact if a system fails or even if an entire data center becomes unavailable due to a power or Internet outage or similar event.

Common Use Cases for Hyperscale Architectures

Hyperscale architectures are designed to be highly scalable, resilient, and available. This makes them ideally suited for deploying an organization’s mission-critical systems or for applications with unpredictable resource utilization.

Some common use cases for hyperscale architectures include:

• Cloud Computing: Cloud service providers’ infrastructure is an example of a hyperscale environment. This environment is used to offer cloud services such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
• Big Data: Big data and analytics commonly require analysis of large volumes of data in real-time. Hyperscale architectures ensure that these systems have the capacity needed to meet demand.
• Internet of Things (IoT): IoT devices generate large volumes of data, and the amount of data may be unpredictable. Hyperscale architecture helps to manage and process these unpredictable data streams.
• Social Media Platforms: Social media platforms are built using hyperscale architectures. These ensure that platforms can scale to meet demand and minimize the risk of outages.
• Streaming Platforms: Streaming platforms are another example of systems with unpredictable demand for large volumes of data. Streaming providers need to be able to ensure that they can send video data to users with low latency and high availability.

Conclusion

Hyperscale describes network architecture with certain key capabilities such as scalability, resiliency, and high availability. These capabilities are ensured by creating a distributed, resilient architecture where resources are available to users on demand.