Today's IT is under considerable pressure to remain agile, responsive and scalable to meet the changing needs of business. IT infrastructure can't become a bottleneck, it must be the enabler. But as new paradigms, such as DevOps, are adopted, data center complexity increases and infrastructure constraints can block the ability to achieve these goals.
In response to these demands, hyper-converged technologies have emerged to replace hardware-defined data center amalgamations that have become overly complicated, expensive and difficult to manage. This next-generation, software-defined infrastructure technology combines storage, compute, virtualization and networking capabilities all into one appliance. Here, commodity servers provide virtualized building blocks of computing power and storage, an efficient and flexible way to deploy clusters of highly available infrastructure. The bonus? They can be managed from anywhere, offering ease of setup, improved performance and above all, simplicity.
Hyper-converged infrastructure offers management controls from a streamlined, central management interface. By providing a unique ability to deploy discrete pods of infrastructure, IT organizations can quickly build their own cloud just by installing new appliances. This is especially valuable for remote locations or branch offices that lack a dedicated support staff. The entire infrastructure can be managed by a centralized IT staff from anywhere in the world.
Some hyper-converged solutions have upped the ante with additional functionality built into the solution including WAN optimization, deduplication, disaster recovery, backup and inline compression/deduplication. This further simplifies the management of what were once separate operational tasks.
Is it time to adopt hyper-convergence? Even with the promise of powerful benefits including increased agility, responsiveness and scalability, it can be a significant decision to move to a hyper-converged infrastructure. How can you know if the benefits will deliver value? Consider these six reasons it may be time to make the case:
1. You're deploying greenfield infrastructure
Hyper-convergence's very nature makes it an excellent choice for organizations who need to rapidly spin up a data center from scratch. The ability to create template-driven deployments based on application requirements means fast access to functional virtual infrastructure.
2. You have multiple branch offices or remote locations
Hyper-convergence is a very powerful tool for organizations with multiple data centers, remote locations or branch offices. Rather than manage at each co-location, hyper-convergence allows for the sharing of resources across multiple physical locations, all managed from a single, centralized interface.
3. You're launching Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
In environments with a fixed relationship between requirements for compute, memory and storage, choosing a hyper-converged infrastructure can be a solid approach to tackling VDI.
4. You need a dedicated development environment
By offering rapid deployment in an undifferentiated virtual infrastructure, this approach is perfect for bringing up a dedicated development environment, anywhere, hassle-free.
5. You're consolidating servers and data centers
For those organizations looking to update or expand data centers, hyper-converged solutions allow for a controlled implementation of new infrastructure. With it, you can phase in new architecture while you phase out the old, expanding as the IT budget allows. There is no need to make excessive upfront financial investments with a hyper-converged solution, waiting years on a return.
6. You need simplified procurement
By choosing to work with a single vendor, support and purchasing options are streamlined into a one-stop shopping approach, thus simplifying your buying strategy.
If it's time to boost your infrastructure with virtualized, software-based technology and break the chains of your hardware-defined infrastructure, a hyper-converged solution may be the right choice. It can deliver new efficiencies to quickly spin up new infrastructure, build out development environments, support remote locations and branch offices or deploy virtual desktop infrastructure.