There’s intense pressure today for organizations to undergo digital transformation with the goal of becoming more responsive, more effective, and deriving more value from the data collected in the course of business. That makes improved data management central to the success of any digital transformation project. Hyperconverged infrastructure can help companies leverage data more effectively as part of their digital transformation.
The Limitations of Conventional Infrastructure
Conventional infrastructure lacks key features needed to use data in the transformed organization:
- Technology is siloed. There are numerous silos in a conventional IT organization. Often each business unit has separate instances and a separate support team. Data is locked down within systems and making copies or sharing data is complicated. IT support is siloed, too, with separate teams responsible for servers, storage, and networking. When problems occur, resolution is delayed as teams determine ownership of the issue before focusing on identifying a fix.
- Technology is frozen and fragile. Adding capacity, whether storage or CPU, requires a long provisioning process. Because every environment is different, often containing a mix of vendors, determining what new technology is compatible is difficult and adding something new can be risky. When demand changes, organizations can’t adapt quickly.
- Technology can fail. When every system is custom-crafted, availability solutions need to be custom-crafted as well. It’s difficult and expensive to ensure high availability, and flaws in the availability strategy may not be discovered until the process fails during a crisis.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solves the Digital Transformation Challenges
Hyperconverged infrastructure addresses those shortcomings of traditional IT hardware.
- Technology eliminates silos. Hyperconverged infrastructure simplifies storage and server management to the point where you don’t need separate teams to support them, eliminating those support silos. Hyperconverged infrastructure supports creating a private cloud in your own data center, and also easily integrates with public cloud, creating a hybrid cloud that makes data accessible and easy to share.
- Technology is agile. Unlike conventional architectures, hyperconverged infrastructure is easy to expand on demand. Fully software defined, it adapts to the current demand. By supporting cloud and self-service, organizations are able to more quickly develop and use the new applications they need. High levels of automation and orchestration mean support and maintenance are handled faster and with fewer errors.
- Technology is available. Hyperconverged infrastructure is designed to be robust and highly available. Cluster-based architectures and built-in replication enable automatic recoveries that minimize the impact of component failures.
- Technology is affordable. One of the biggest challenges of digital transformation is that it means re-making the company, and that can be expensive. Because hyperconverged infrastructure is built around low-cost, standardized components and systems can expand on demand, the new architecture is affordable and doesn’t require investing in large amounts of idle capacity.
Digital transformation can be a slow, cautious process—a strange approach to take when the goal is to be able to do things faster. Deciding to use hyperconverged infrastructure like Nutanix can speed up your change process. Contact dcVAST to learn more about using hyperconverged infrastructure and our managed Nutanix services to make your organization more agile and more effective.
