When hyperconverged infrastructure first became popular, it was popular largely to support specific use cases. Have a remote office or want to support virtual desktop infrastructure? Hyperconverged infrastructure was (and remains) a great fit.
But today, hyperconverged infrastructure is even more important because of its ability to provide a cloud-like environment. As businesses have expanded to the cloud, they’ve discovered they need cloud’s availability and agility benefits, but the anticipated cost savings haven’t always materialized. Using hyperconverged infrastructure to build a cloud-like environment in your data center gives you low-cost infrastructure and flexibility without giving employees the ability to run up unexpectedly large cloud computing bills.
A Cloud In Your Data Center
Hyperconverged infrastructure gives you a single system that combines compute capability with storage capacity and the networking needed to access them. You can scale compute and storage independently as needed by adding low cost, standard nodes to your hyperconverged cluster.
That independent scalability the first piece that makes hyperconverged infrastructure practical for building a private cloud. Layer the hypervisor with cloud software that enables self-service access to virtual machines and you’ve got the second piece. The third key feature of cloud, simplified support, is also present in hyperconverged infrastructure, because you’ve got standardized components and a single vendor who’s pretested the configuration to make sure it will work properly. Finally, the high availability of cloud is present because hyperconverged infrastructure’s clusters of nodes support automated failover should a hardware component fail.
If your cloud model is infrastructure as a service (IaaS), that’s just about everything you need. What you don’t get with this approach to cloud is Platform as a Service, unless you do additional work to build out or deploy development tools.
A Link to Cloud in the Cloud
Building a cloud on hyperconverged infrastructure in your data center also supports a streamlined approach to implementing hybrid cloud. Solutions like NetApp enable easy sharing of data between public cloud and your data center, meaning you can take advantage of public cloud when needed—perhaps to try out a new technology—while still keeping your primary data center in your data center. When you combine that solution with Cohesity hyperconverged infrastructure, designed for secondary storage, data that’s normally difficult to access and work with becomes accessible for analytics in the cloud.
Read more about why hyperconverged infrastructure is cost effective here. Then contact VAST IT Services to learn more about how hyperconverged infrastructure can help you leverage the power of cloud from within your own data center.
