What to Consider When Moving To Hyperconverged Infrastructure

IT decision makers have been tasked with the challenge of not only expanding the technical capabilities of their infrastructures, but also with providing high availability, scalability, simplicity and security. Digitalization has transformed the way businesses operate and boost revenue. To that end, Gartner has recently estimated worldwide IT spending will reach $3.5 trillion in 2017.

Moving to a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) offers significant benefits for large organizations, as software-defined datacenters (SDDC) reduce the complexity of managing multiple hardware and software platforms, and lower operational costs by using hardware as a single pool of resources shared across multiple applications. IT decision makers often have to present these two main benefits when facing the board of directors, but the decision-making process should also consider business continuity and the ability to quickly meet new demands.

Scalability
Hyperconverged integrated systems and infrastructures let organizations quickly deploy new services and applications without the cost of new hardware or upgrades. Because the SDDC revolves around the use of commodity hardware, the software layer is actually designed to manage aggregated resources across multiple individual nodes, focusing on mass centralization and integration. Reliance on vendor-specific hardware becomes obsolete, allowing more flexibility and efficiency.

Data Availability and Mobility
Agnostic components ranging from hardware to hypervisors and other technologies allow data to move fluidly between services and applications, meeting SLA requirements. Hyperconverged infrastructures allow different storage tiers - solid-state storage and spinning-disk – and see beyond the input/output blender by optimizing storage resources based on the individual profile or requirements of each VM.  Resource pools also allow for resource islands that serve the requirements of specific applications, allowing administrators to focus on applications instead of allocating resources.

Agility and Automation
Because software-defined datacenters place all physical resources under a unified administrative umbrella, IT departments can migrate workloads a lot faster than in legacy systems. This means they can also focus more on scripting and activity scheduling, without worrying about compatibility with vendor-specific hardware and products. Having everything in a single environment that can support VMs and policy management across the entire infrastructure makes the SDDC a highly agile environment.

Bottom Line
HCI and SDDC can help businesses decrease their total cost of ownership while rapidly delivering applications. Because the infrastructure stack is highly simplified and abstracted, businesses and organizations can focus on application mobility. While from a CAPEX perspective hardware acquisition is somewhat similar to legacy datacenters, from an OPEX perspective, costs can be significantly reduced.