Traditional IT operations are constantly being challenged to adapt, as traditional infrastructures are typically comprised of sprawling, siloed, and complex storage options that can’t keep up with the pace of change required by modern enterprises. To maximize the benefits of technological advancements, such as hybrid cloud architectures and cloud-native applications that offer more agility, more resources, and scale, companies must evolve their information technology to utilize these advances. A failure to upgrade legacy infrastructures will result in a costly, long-term transition to these technologies. It takes a new approach for IT to evolve its core infrastructure to one that supports future innovation.
Why Traditional Infrastructure cannot keep up
It takes time – The time it takes to configure storage, modify service levels, and scale capacity in complex sprawling architectures with mixed storage solutions takes time–and focus—away from modernization. The complex nature of data center management is further compounded by the fact that each storage array requires its own set of processes. Recent studies from IDC revealed that the average network manager spends 40 percent of their time on provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting the environment. That’s time that is not spent on modernization.
It is very expensive – Companies generally use storage arrays for five or more years. The maintenance costs of arrays increase with age because vendors typically hike up the rates every year. Maintenance is being paid for with money which would be better used to modernize.
It is not flexible – The shift from monolithic to microservices-based containerized application development shows how traditional infrastructure cannot meet the requirements of modern development and operations.
It is evident that IT professionals across all industries and regions spend much of their time and money managing and supporting infrastructures that do not meet current or future needs.
By combining multiple infrastructure silos into a single entity, virtualization enables improved resource efficiency. Bringing together these silos into one software-defined and integrated system enables organizations to realize Hyper Converged infrastructure (HCI), where compute, storage, and network components work together and are monitored from a single management console.
The key advantages of Hyper Convergence include:
- The ability to tailor policies to workloads rather than solely to hardware
- Facilitating rapid delivery of services by using a familiar, common, and extensible management tool
Using HCI to modernize the data center also aids organizations in staying competitive by speeding up the time-to-market for new applications and services. In a nutshell, it is a software-defined infrastructure that can be applied in the public cloud and at the edge in addition to the core data center. HCI provides immediate cost savings and operational efficiency, as well as ensuring the infrastructure is future-ready. Having disparate environments connected in a consistent way allows IT teams to fully realize the benefits of hybrid cloud – Consistent infrastructures and unified operations across environments that provide support for running and migrating applications on platforms that make sense now and are future-ready.
HCI: Why Consolidate?
A compelling use case for HCI was virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) within IT organizations. There was a good fit between VDI and HCI. The VDI architecture demands a high level of I/O performance, scales linearly, and takes advantage of rich data services, such as dedupe and compression. HCI quickly became the standard because of its high-performance storage and scale-out capabilities similar to VDI. The low-cost, scalable, and easy-to-operate infrastructure proved to be an excellent solution for running a wide range of workloads, including complex business applications.
As a modern infrastructure solution, HCI is now utilized across a wide range of industries for traditional, mission-critical as well as cloud-native applications.
Benefits of Consolidating your Technology on HCI
Simplified operations – Along with improving performance, HCI simplifies application management across multiple clusters. HCI greatly speeds up provisioning of application resources, allowing organizations to adapt quickly to changing business requirements, to monitor the quality of service, and to quickly address problems.
HCI systems have scale-out architectures, which contribute to increased agility by allowing IT departments to add nodes to existing clusters without taking the application offline.
Cost management – Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) helps control both capital and recurring costs. In lieu of purpose-built storage arrays and fiber channel networking, HCI uses industry-standard components such as commodity servers and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Procurement is therefore where cost efficiencies begin.
In addition, HCI gives users the freedom to scale incrementally as the data grows, adding a node at a time based on the data volume they need.
From the moment HCI starts operating, significant operational efficiencies are achieved. Automated software enables administrators to quickly and easily deploy cloud infrastructure, accomplish manual, time-consuming tasks, such as provisioning storage and automate complex tasks such as patching, updating, and upgrading.
Seamless hybrid cloud adoption – Businesses can deliver dynamic capacity, consolidate or migrate their on-premises infrastructure, and develop and test new applications through a single architecture and operation model. As a result, they are able to select whether applications are to be run on-premises or in the cloud. Developing a hybrid cloud strategy requires a common approach to both private and public clouds, and in particular, a strategy that is consistent and easy to manage, compatible with on- and off-premises environments, and ready to deploy VMs, containers, and next generation resources.
With HCI, organizations can align environments in terms of compute, storage, networking, and management, whether on premises, in the public cloud, or at the edge.
Consolidating your technology on Hyper-Converged Infrastructure doesn’t have to be difficult
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