Should you introduce hyperconverged infrastructure into your data center? Many businesses are; Gartner has projected more than two-thirds of businesses using that technology by 2023.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a scalable, modular, software-defined architecture built using low cost, commodity components. HCI integrates compute, network, and storage into a single device managed with a single dashboard. This approach offers numerous benefits to businesses that adopt this technology.
Benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure
The benefits of using hyperconverged infrastructure include:
1. No silos.
Because a single vendor delivers and supports compute, network, and storage, there are no longer separate silos and specialized support teams.
2. Rapid provisioning.
Since there aren’t specialized devices and only one team handles the support, it’s much faster to add new capacity or provide resources for a new project.
3. Cloud integration.
Not only does HCI scale within the data center, it scales from the data center to the cloud. Shifting workloads when needed is easier when businesses use the same infrastructure in the cloud and on premises.
4. Reduced downtime.
Built-in redundancies and high availability capability keeps hardware failures from causing extensive downtime. In addition, HCI expansions minimize downtime because there’s no need to separately install and configure multiple devices.
5. No overprovisioning.
In traditional architectures, businesses must purchase and provision extensive spare capacity long before they need it, or to serve as secondary resources in case of failures. Because HCI can be easily extended, businesses don’t need to keep as much spare capacity lying around. In addition, building an HCI cluster with resources in two locations can reduce the need for backup hardware and software licenses.
Choosing Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Introducing HCI into a business, like any significant technology change, requires a plan.
Begin with an evaluation to assess business needs and the applications and use cases that will be the best fit. Virtual desktop infrastructure is one obvious pick, but the scalability and on-demand provisioning have broad application.
Next comes choosing the right HCI solution for that application; workloads have different storage and performance needs. Consider the hypervisor software as well as the hardware, along with the existing skills on the IT team in order to select an option that can be supported easily.
Finally, do a test-drive of the hyperconverged solution. Similar to cloud, HCI disrupts the ordinary way in which IT services are delivered, and it takes time to adapt. Make sure you understand the impact before rolling HCI out on a large scale.
VAST IT Services supports hyperconverged infrastructure solutions from Nutanix. Contact us to bring the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure to your data center.
