Page 8 - FCW, April 30, 2016

EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS: HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE
Simplify and Save with Hyperconverged Systems
Embracing a hyperconverged infrastructure can save
costs, reduce complexity and improve performance.
There is a lot of buzz in the market about hyperconverged infrastruc- ture (HCI) platforms these days. One key observation to make is that not all HCI are created equal.
Over the past decade, IT organizations have faced decreasing budgets and strained resources. At the same time, they’re expected to increase the services they are delivering. This has driven organizations to make IT more efficient and responsive—to get “more bang for the buck.”
In response to that call, virtualization and standardization have become primary drivers of modern secure infrastructure. These drivers have led to a new generation of IT architecture called converged infrastructure. The latest evolution taking place today is hyper- converged infrastructure platforms.
In a traditional IT infrastructure, each component of a data center— servers, storage and networking—is usually obtained from different best- in-class vendors. Then each component is integrated and supported by the
IT organization itself. That’s often a challenge due to configuration conflicts between the various technologies.
Come Together
Convergence is an evolution from traditional IT infrastructure siloed systems. Instead of discrete collections of resources, a converged infrastructure utilizes pre-engineered systems optimized as a compute and storage
platform. The advantages of this approach are simpler infrastructure design, easier management and support, lowered costs and improved speed to deliver resources. Industry researcher IDC has pegged the global convergence market at more than $10 billion a year and growing. Most of that growth is due to increasing hyperconverged sales.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) takes convergence to the next level of standardization and density. Instead of using storage, networking and compute from different vendors that are optimized together, HCI uses x86 servers to create a scalable, modular building block approach. When you need additional compute or storage, the plug-and-play platform allows for a new node to be added.
The modular servers utilize a hypervisor to allocate the compute and networking resources and a software based storage controller controls the internal disk drives. This allows for a highly scalable, ultra-standardized, flexible way to distribute resources to various applications and services. It also allows for easier future capacity, resource and cost planning.
Save and Simplify
Overall, HCI presents an easy and cost- effective way to provide needed IT resources. IT organizations are saved the task of designing and operating a complex environment that consists of multiple vendors. With HCI, they can point their staff to more productive work
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