Digital transformation is a way to future-proof your IT infrastructure and to innovate to stay competitive, but it is also a way to overcome problems that your business faces. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) can play a vital role in data center transformation and problem solving.
More and more companies are realizing and taking advantage of the potential of HCI. Analysts at Evaluator Group found that HCI has evolved from an option that organizations are just considering to an infrastructure solution that 70% of businesses are using or have plans to deploy.The unique architecture of HCI, which is a software-centric system that integrates storage, compute, and networking into a single chassis with centralized management, allows for many IT challenges to be met.
Here’s an overview of 5 problems HCI solves:
1) Difficulty Scaling
Scaling a traditional IT architecture involves a lengthy process of provisioning and deploying servers, storage, and supporting network resources. Many companies overprovision in an attempt to predict how much capacity they will need to meet future workload demands, leading some servers and storage resources to sit idle.
With HCI, there is no need to overprovision or risk not meeting capacity. HCI is easy to scale because of its building-block architecture. To scale, simply add nodes to a cluster when demand increases. HCI can be expanded by a few nodes or even by hundreds. When you add storage, compute and network scale proportionally.
2) Management Complexity
Managing a company’s IT infrastructure can be complicated, especially with today’s geographically distributed environments and the proliferation of endpoints used for remote work and IoT. Gaining visibility into the entire infrastructure is difficult and management can be a full-time job.
HCI uses software to control and unify your storage and virtualization. All storage is pooled and managed using a single interface. Hundreds of workloads can run on a cluster of servers and be managed through a single pane of glass.
3) Hidden Infrastructure Costs
Traditional IT environments are costly to store and maintain. On top of the cost of provisioning the servers and storage, companies must pay operating costs, such as server room real estate, power, and cooling. These costs add up along with the expense of acquiring top-of-line hardware and paying support staff.
Because HCI uses software for virtualization, your company can use less expensive, commodity hardware and still achieve high performance. The integrated design of HCI means it takes up less space, reducing the expense of the resources needed to power and house it.
4) No Time to Innovate
Legacy IT architectures keep your internal staff busy with tedious management and maintenance tasks. When team members’ time is taken up with housekeeping tasks, they don’t have time to attend to core business, let alone develop business strategy or innovate.
The unified management of HCI frees your staff to collaborate and work on new projects. Centralized management makes it easy to keep an eye on the entire environment and automate certain processes for a more hands-off approach. HCI is also easy to scale and upgrade, requiring only a few clicks to perform tasks that are time consuming and complex in a traditional environment.
5) Lack of Data Resiliency
The infrastructure design of traditional IT environments can lend itself to exposure and risk. Often, this architecture contains single points of failure, which can lead to costly downtime. To protect their data and optimize availability, many companies create a secondary environment, which can be very costly.
With HCI, organizations can run their mission-critical applications and databases on virtual servers with data spread across multiple nodes to reduce data loss. The software features for the virtualized servers provide for high levels of availability, as well as the ability to fail over. If a server fails, the workload can switch to another node in the cluster to prevent interruptions and ensure business continuity without any loss of data.
Get Your Problems Solved
Why put up with persistent problems caused by your aging infrastructure? HCI may be the solution. Not only does HCI solve problems, but it does so quickly because of the speed of deployment. Your company should recognize the benefits and value almost immediately.
At ProActive Solutions, we include HCI as part of our data center transformation offerings. We take a consultative approach to helping you redesign your infrastructure, working with your team to identify and find solutions to your IT problems.
We also partner with Nutanix, a leader in HCI, to deliver best-in-breed, pre-tested solutions that can revolutionize your data center while reducing cost and complexity.
Find out if HCI is right for your company. Request a quote from ProActive.
