Is Your Data Center Holding You Back? It’s Time to Move to Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Liz Alton

Is outdated infrastructure holding you back? For many organizations, moving toward cloud architecture or adopting emerging technologies reveals a distressing reality: aging infrastructure is slowing down IT delivery. With new year planning underway, organizations are turning their attention to IT investments. According to the Spiceworks 2019 State of IT survey, IT budgets are increasing—and for many firms, updating outdated infrastructure is this year’s top priority.

As a result, the speed and security of data centers are in the spotlight. Let’s take a closer look at why organizations are making the move toward hyperconverged infrastructure and how this approach to technology can help overcome some of today’s most common IT challenges.

The Shift to Hyperconverged Infrastructure

As IT demands become more sophisticated, the way organizations look at infrastructure architecture is shifting. Traditional data centers have had a difficult time keeping pace with today’s challenges and fast-evolving technological innovation. Historically, data center designs have been modular, following a legacy approach that silos each key area of technology. Storage, computing, and networking have required different devices, workflows, and even team members to manage. This adds significant costs and means that a major focus for IT teams is ensuring that each stream of the IT platform synchronizes and works together to achieve the company’s larger goals.

As technology has continued to develop, hyperconvergence has emerged as a more efficient model for a modern data center strategy. With hyperconverged infrastructure, essential IT features such as storage, networking, and computing are brought together into a single device. The day-to-day management is vastly simplified and can often be streamlined further with the assistance of software tools. Every aspect of the IT process works together in a tightly integrated fashion for faster and better overall results.

The Benefits of Hyperconvergence

For many organizations, the transition to hyperconverged infrastructure is easier than they ever imagined. No matter where you are in your technology lifecycle, there’s a solution that can be customized and deployed to your needs—whether you’re upgrading your entire IT suite or searching for a solution that integrates some legacy infrastructure. Moving toward a hyperconverged infrastructure helps organizations capture benefits such as:

  • Hyperconvergence architectural efficiencies—For many IT teams, their introduction to convergence means building two or more features into a rack system. Hyperconvergence goes a step further—and combines several IT features into a single consolidated appliance. Bringing these different capabilities together, into a single device, consolidates the hardware that you need to purchase, house, and maintain.
  • Consolidated workflows—Centralized management software controls all the workflows on the hyperconverged infrastructure. As IT Pro notes, “The ability to consolidate multiple IT functions such as backup, deduplication and WAN optimization into the same platform is the most appealing reason to use hyperconverged infrastructure…” Consolidated workflows means better performance and less onerous management.
  • Agility and scalability—Hyperconverged infrastructure is closely aligned with the idea of the software-defined data center. As described above, management of data center resources is controlled largely at the software level. As a result, resources are deployed as needed in a virtualized environment. This provides the ability for businesses to easily scale their data centers and the flexibility to reallocate or redirect resources as IT priorities and needs change. Data centers can continually adapt to your changing needs, without demanding massive investments to make the shifts possible.
  • Stronger security—Security is paramount, and as hackers become more sophisticated, organizations need holistic security plans that can protect their data. When information is flowing between a variety of devices that may have different security standards, and on equipment made by different vendors, there is a real and ever-present risk of gaps to your security stack. Hyperconvergence allows your team to develop a holistic solution that works across the data center—identifying issues, seamlessly managing user-based problems, and using policies to enforce standards.
  • Streamlined costs—By its very nature, hyperconverged infrastructure helps streamline costs. For businesses that need to upgrade pieces of their IT infrastructure, hyperconvergence integrates different equipment into a single device. Over time, hyperconverged equipment lowers expenses for both maintenance and team oversight.
  • Simplified IT team needs—Investing in hyperconverged infrastructure can help update your IT team strategy as well. TechTarget notes, “The biggest change in IT admin roles with hyper-convergence comes down to specialization: There is a lot less of it. A hyper-converged infrastructure architecture often eliminates the need for distinct storage, server, virtualization and, sometimes, network specialists.”

If 2019 is the year that your organization is ready to update outdated infrastructure, it’s time to explore hyperconvergence. From the benefits of cost savings, to streamlined management and future scalability, hyperconverged infrastructure is an investment that will help lay the foundation for future growth and IT performance.

Liz Alton is a B2B technology and digital marketing writer and content strategist. She has worked with a variety of brands including Google, Twitter, Adobe, Oracle, and HP, and written for publications including Forbes. She is a regular contributor to Connected, Connection’s official blog.

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