Technical decisions should never be driven by technical factors alone. Technology needs to fit within the context of the business, including how it conducts its current operations, the types of products and services it sells, the nature of its customers, and the company’s plans for future development.
When considering hyperconverged infrastructure, then, it’s not just the benefits for the data center team that matter, though they’re significant, including easier management and a single vendor to work with for support. The bigger benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure are how they benefit the business, and that goes beyond the simple metric of reduced cost due to commodity infrastructure. With hyperconverged infrastructure, the business also experiences these three benefits:
1. Hyperconverged infrastructure scales rapidly.
Hyperconverged infrastructure scales with the simple addition of commodity nodes. This means the IT team doesn’t need to estimate future capacity requirements far in advance of need, and budgets don’t need to account for buying expensive, idle spare capacity. From a business perspective, this means there aren’t any obstacles to responding to opportunity. Growth in demand is easily accommodated, and if you need new environments to develop a new idea, a new development and test environment is quickly available.
2. Hyperconverged infrastructure is highly available.
Minimizing downtime that makes your whole business idle is key to business productivity, business income, and business growth. Hyperconverged infrastructure, built on clusters of nodes, has high availability built in. Failures localized to individual nodes can be automatically handled by shifting workloads to another node. Data is replicated for protection. Hyperconverged infrastructure also comes with features to support backup to secondary or cloud storage, adding additional data protection and meaning disaster recovery is simplified as well.
3. Hyperconverged infrastructure is suitable for branch offices.
Remote office locations are always difficult to support. When they access all their IT resources from corporate headquarters, there can be delays that impact performance, but it’s difficult to justify having local IT resources on-site to support a local data center. Hyperconverged infrastructure makes it possible for remote offices to use technology locally that eliminates performance issues but is still easy to support. When issues arise, there’s only a single vendor to contact, with no need for on-site staff to determine if the problem needs to be solved by the server, storage, or network vendor. Because of that easy support, every branch office can have the IT infrastructure it needs.
What are your reasons for using hyperconverged infrastructure? Contact dcVAST to talk about how hyperconverged infrastructure can help keep your business up and growing. We’ve got close to 30 years of experience helping Chicago-area companies solve their IT problems, offering a range of professional and support services to simplify your infrastructure and storage management. Our managed Nutanix service uses leading hyperconverged infrastructure technology to build a web-scale, hybrid cloud, or simply easy-to-support infrastructure to your data center.
