5 Reasons Why Hyper-Converged Is a No Brainer for Your Organisation

Published on 10 October 2018

The IT department has successfully graduated itself from a support role in enterprises to a more strategic one. With the inevitable digital transformation taking the organizations into the future, it is the IT department that is giving them the competitive edge. They need to differentiate themselves from the clutter and enjoy a competitive advantage in the market.

Adoption of cutting-edge, disruptive technologies before the competition catches up has become the key driver for many businesses to generate sustainable revenues.

One such disruptive technology that is experiencing explosive growth and becoming an entire industry on its own is hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). HCI is expected to become a $4 billion market as soon as 2020, riding on an impressive growth rate in excess of 60% CAGR. A bulk of this growth will be powered by small and medium scale enterprises. The primary reason for the tremendous success of HCI technology is its ability to allow businesses to take advantage of, what Skip Bacon, Vice President at VMWare, aptly put as “disruption without disrupting”.

Hyperconvergence offers a multitude of benefits for small and fast growing organizations, who have their own unique needs that are vastly different from those of large enterprises. These benefits make HCI adoption virtually a no brainer for SMEs. Here’s how.

1. Software Defined Architecture

At the core of HCI technology is the software-defined architecture. This approach aggregates all the storage devices and integrates them into one seamless cluster with multiple redundancies. So, if one of the nodes or hard drives fails, then the data is not lost. What’s more, the workloads that were utilizing the data on the failed nodes will continue their operation without interruption by using a redundant copy of the data.

As one can imagine, such an approach ensures a dramatically high availability of virtualized applications running on HCI platforms.

2. Agility

HCI platforms provide organizations centralized control over all of their digital infrastructure. A single umbrella console can be used to supervise, assign, and handle all the workloads on the hyperconverged platforms. This makes it easier to migrate the workloads from one location to another effortlessly. In fact, the software-defined architecture is so streamlined that it can be used to integrate cloud and on-premises infrastructure at the software level, and distribute the workloads as per predefined rules or protocols. The data as well as the workloads can be seamlessly migrated between the cloud and the on-premises infrastructure, as per the needs of the organization.

3. Data Security and Protection

HCI platforms allow the organizations to take advantage of the cloud technology without exposing themselves to the risk of hosting their data and applications on public cloud servers. Hosting their data and applications on HCI platforms allows them to deploy the best security systems and protocols to suit their needs. Not to mention the fact that HCI features built-in redundancies for data storage. So, whenever a node fails or the data on a particular node is wiped out for any of the reasons, it is easily restored using the redundant copies of the data. That dramatically enhances the reliability of the data.

4. Scalability

A hyperconverged data centre is just stacks of multiple hyperconverged hardware appliances. The node architecture allows organizations to scale up their infrastructure simply by adding new HCI nodes to their data centres. Configuring and deploying the new nodes takes minutes, which is a huge improvement over the traditional infrastructure.

5. Reduce Complexity and Total Costs of Ownership (TCO)

HCI has witnessed the highest penetration among the small and medium enterprises. The reason for this is simple – a tremendous reduction in complexity.

SMEs are typically comprised of small teams and are strapped for cash. On the other hand, dedicated IT talent for managing traditional digital infrastructure and workloads on them is expensive in the market. HCI eliminates the need to hire dedicated, highly skilled talent. For one, less equipment is required to manage HCI appliances. Secondly, HCI requires very little human supervision. In one swell swoop, HCI technology reduces the cost involved in hardware purchase, hiring dedicated and skilled IT talent, and operating the digital infrastructure. Naturally, businesses are discarding storage area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) approaches in favour of the HCI model.

Hyperconverged technology is rapidly evolving to become one of the preferred choices of digital transformation model for small and medium enterprises. At the heart of this market is VMware’s vSAN, the industry-leading hyperconverged infrastructure. vSAN and its cloud offering vSphere are revolutionizing the industry by offer cutting-edge digital capabilities for businesses. With these technologies, organizations can not only meet their current demands cost-effectively, but also scale up effortlessly in a matter of minutes with their changing demand and complexity of the applications.

Tags: HCI, Hyperconverge, Hyperconvergence, VMware,

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