Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) is set to blaze a path through 2018 as it outgrows the current traditional Converged Infrastructure footprint and offers unprecedented streamlining of sizable technology roll-outs. But will it blaze its way straight to you and your environment? Here are five reasons why perhaps it should:
- You want more out of your datacenter resources.
Doesn’t everyone? You have pressed every last capability out of your current equipment after virtualizing, and the possibility of integrating another set of costly boxes is daunting. But what if you were able to dig deeper and spread wider within your current racks with greater abstraction and a less siloed approach? A software-defined environment in your datacenter may not mean you can use every appliance you currently have, but it very well may mean you are able to use many of them more strategically. - You need seamless scaling.
Gone are the days of unwieldy and time-costly integration periods when you laid awake at night wondering if your switches were adequately configured to carry the new burden placed upon them or if the team had missed anything in learning the operating system for the new storage appliances. With all components housed under the same hardware roof, scaling suddenly becomes a simple question of adding another cluster of nodes. Predictability of what resources you need suddenly becomes gloriously simple.
- You want centralized management of storage, compute, and network components.
It is as straightforward as that: rather than maintaining separate management systems, and possibly multiple of those, for storage, compute, and network elements, HCI boils down your management platform into a single central hub from which you are able to administrate every aspect of your environment. This means that, if you go on vacation, monitoring and onsite management from the team makes personnel gaps a non-issue.
- You want the behavior and advantages of cloud computing on premises.
The appeal of cloud computing is largely the ability to deal with data in a more organized, more abstract manner and to avoid the pitfalls of being bound to the capabilities of your current physical infrastructure. There are data sets you don’t want in the datacenter, but that possibility has been tantalizing because on premises looks unwieldy next to a converged infrastructure model. With hyperconvergence, your racks can stay on campus yet give you the depth and density that drove the success of the cloud to begin with.
- Your mission-critical applications are appliance agnostic.
Hyperconvergence, as it functions in most of the current offerings on the market, does come with the possible limitations of your mission-critical applications. You likely have your preferred appliances for more traditional enterprise softwares such as Oracle and SAP, and moving to a turnkey appliance with an HCI provider may be impractical. But if your applications are flexible, and you are not daunted by a migration and are instead wooed by the promise of almost limitless scaling possibilities afterward with less hassle and fewer man hours, your environment may be a prime candidate for hyperconvergence.
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