Digital transformation is critical to the success of any business, but it doesn’t work in solitude. There is also the need to support artificial intelligence, big data, and the hybrid cloud as well as meet the fast-paced demands of traditional workloads. Modern day IT infrastructure weighs down datacenters with a range of difficult-to-manage components, restricting them from staying abreast with the evolving demands of the cloud and business.
By centralizing management and resources, a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) reduces costs, minimizes complexity, lifts staff burdens, and enhances performance.
What is hyper-converged infrastructure?
HCI integrates virtualization, compute, networking, and storage in a single cluster. Beginning with as few as three nodes, one can easily grow to match storage and computing needs. Hiperconvergencia brings cloudlike simplicity within a single, easily managed platform. So, it simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of data center resources by integrating intelligent software with x86-based server and storage resources in a turnkey software-defined solution. A single hyper-converged infrastructure solution can replace individual storage networks, servers, and storage arrays to create a nimble datacenter that easily scales with your company.
Why hyper-converged infrastructure?
Increased operational efficiency
HCI offers operational efficiency benefits without significantly interfering with operations or demanding IT experts to acquire different skills than the ones they already have. HCI is similar enough to what’s familiar to be embraced easily and quickly but different enough to bring some radical changes to the company.
Efficient use of time
HCI is meant to be tried, procured, and applied with little effort, and continual maintenance is more or less the same. This triggers a shift in the focus of IT companies – from “keeping the lights on” to true innovation and progress.
Reduced context switching
Datacenters use a wide range of technologies, including storage arrays, servers, firewalls, hypervisors, backup appliances, monitoring tools, replication software, network switches and routers, and so on. HCI consolidates a majority of these management consoles into a single place from which the whole system is managed. Although HCI doesn’t swallow up each component, one is guaranteed of a dramatic streamline in management workflow.
Managing resources wisely
Utilities and physical space in data centers are very valuable resources. But when they are carelessly used, it can cause a spike in utility bills. Besides, additional space will mean more overhead. An HCI replaces a range of devices, leading to a small data center footprint.
Flexible scale
HCI scales easily. One can add extra resources by integrating a new node to the cluster and even scale compute and storage separately. And the best part is that HCI systems come with built-in self-encrypting tools and drives to ensure security.
What to look for in a hyperconverged solution
A good HCI should:
Offer support and performance for any application – it should support a vast range of app deployment models. To run a mission-critical app, an HCI system needs to be fast and consistent – and that calls for low latency and IOPS variability.
Be scalable – It should support today’s IT needs as well as to adapt to the needs as they evolve, offering the flexibility and simplicity to manage any use case and workload
Integrate with any cloud – it should offer the flexibility to support multi hypervisors and deploy apps in any cloud environment that’s most appropriate for them.
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