Break Free from Legacy IT
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) integrates the elements of traditional three-tier datacenter architecture — compute, storage and networking — to simplify operations and dramatically increase IT’s ability to scale and respond to modern business requirements.
It elegantly bridges the gap between complex, expensive and slow-to-provision datacenter silos on one side and, on the other, the loss of control, visibility, and security that comes with running all applications and workloads in the public cloud. It achieves this with a cloud-compatible, virtualized and modular approach — pooling shared compute and storage resources that can be scaled out and consumed as needed, regardless of location. This cloudlike provisioning of resources means that IT can meet line of business demands, heading off the dreaded “shadow IT” phenomenon.
Hyperconverged Platforms Solve Datacenter Challenges
Hyperconverged platforms are simple in theory. Centrally managed, a hypervisor controls virtualized compute and storage resources in a node (including key network functions), and nodes can be clustered to scale. Often this solution runs on commodity hardware, which makes procurement quick and easy. When more compute and/or storage resources are needed, it is easy to add new nodes to the cluster with off-the-shelf x86 servers.
For organizations modernizing their datacenter infrastructure, including those adopting hybrid or multicloud computing, hyperconvergence makes a lot of financial and operational sense. In fact, Gartner predicts that 70% of enterprises will be running some form of hyperconverged infrastructure by 2023. Further, as HCI becomes common, public cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are making it easier for organizations to connect their on-premises HCI platforms to public cloud for effective hybrid and/or multicloud deployments.
Going forward, look for the continued evolution of hyperconverged platforms to focus on supporting the considerable requirements of DevOps initiatives with infrastructure that is open, automated, containerized and application-centric. Talk to a Structured account manager today for details.
HCI Management
Unlike a three-tier architecture, managing an HCI infrastructure does not require as much diversified technical skill. This single platform can handle the biggest of big data storage requirements, consolidating file, block and object storage and leveraging flash technology for speed and efficiency. It can handle the demands of anytime, anywhere computing by delivering the performance of bare metal but with virtualized, cloudlike agility. (Further, most application vendors have embraced HCI and permit deep application integration.) Finally, it tightly integrates with smart networking fabrics to improve zero-touch provisioning, VLAN creation, role-based access control, microsegmentation, end-to-end encryption, and more.
Data Center Efficiency
Improved data center metrics are also a pleasant by-product of hyperconvergence. These infrastructures require less space, power and cooling – benefits that can be favorably factored into the solution’s total cost of ownership. For those organizations where time-to-value is a more important yardstick, hyperconvergence wins there, too. Ease of procurement and deployment means new business initiatives are launched at the speed of cloud — yet with the cost-control of on-premises oversight — supporting time-to-value measurements.
