Page 6 - Federal Computer Week, January/February 2019

HCI: Paving the
TWay to Cloud
Hyperconverged infrastructure is the foundation for the modern data center
he government is awash in valuable data it could use to advance public missions, but many agencies continue to rely on legacy technologies that aren’t up to the processing tasks needed to leverage those
troves of information. At the same time, tight budgets and constrained resources make it imperative that agencies operate more efficiently and “do more with less.”
The cloud is increasingly seen as an answer to those demands, despite its mixed history in government. Indeed, for many agencies, moving to the cloud seems to be something of a fait accompli. The question is how they can get there in a way that modernizes capabilities and services while also minimizing costs.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has emerged as an important component on the path to cloud. Often referred to as “a data center in a box,” it combines the computing, networking and storage elements of a data center in one system. When properly implemented, HCI lowers costs, reduces complexity and provides for near- instant scalability of available compute power.
HCI is a relatively new technology, and many agencies don’t fully grasp what’s involved in going to the cloud or the benefits of making the move, according to
Nat Montha, systems engineer manager at Nutanix. Comparing the costs of going completely to the public cloud versus keeping all of an agency’s workload on- premises, however, illustrates hybrid cloud’s clear advantages.
“The public cloud is ideal for meeting seasonal needs where there are massive and sudden increases in workload capacity for short periods of time,” Montha says. “But the primary applications for doing business,
where everyone in the agency would use them every day, can be kept on-premises” and under close control.
The bottom line is that HCI offers flexibility at a price that is more advantageous than the cost of keeping everything on-premises.
The cost-benefit analysis of HCI is most favorable when solution and problem are a snug fit, but that caveat of “when properly implemented” is an important one. Nutanix provides the basic data center technologies for HCI, Montha says, but a complete solution requires other technological components and services. In order to provide a comprehensive solution, Nutanix has teamed with CDW·G, a longtime provider of IT solutions and products to government.
“Agencies will come to us to understand what the requirements are for bringing the solution together,” Montha says, “and there’s usually a lot of things other than HCI that are needed.”
As an example, he described an agency within the Department of Justice that needed a complete set of solutions, among them a project headed by CDW·G
that included Nutanix. The companies looked at the technologies the DoJ agency already had, explained what HCI could do for the agency, and explained what ancillary services, such as backup, would be needed to integrate with the proposed HCI solution.
CDW·G was one of the first providers in the IT marketplace to realize that Nutanix HCI solutions fit the consolidation needs agencies have for their data centers, says William Frank, a CDW·G field solution architect.
“We’re a company [that] agencies already have a lot of confidence in because of the products and solutions we’ve provided for them,” he says, “so they were
PRODUCED BY: SPONSORED BY: