Enterprises of all sizes are relying on converged infrastructure to enable business agility and flexibility while reducing IT complexity and cost.
Converged infrastructure integrates two or more data center components (such as storage, network, servers, virtual environments, and cloud automation) into a single packaged solution. Converged systems make it easier for businesses, organizations, and enterprises to deploy and deliver modern IT infrastructures and services that benefit their employees and customers. The results are faster decisions and actions, better management of data center and network systems, and more efficient and strategic use of internal IT resources.
For those enterprises seeking even greater levels of data center efficiency and agility, hyper-convergence is a logical and obvious choice. While traditional converged infrastructures integrate two or more infrastructure components into a rack system or solution, hyper-converged systems combine several IT infrastructure elements into a consolidated x86-based appliance. Hyper-converged systems allow additional appliance nodes to be automatically added to a cluster as they are detected, thus making scaling a data center fast and inexpensive. Additionally, hyper-converged appliances typically include built-in features such as storage compression, deduplication, backup and disaster recovery, as well as single pane of glass management.
That last benefit of hyper-converged data centers – performance – is huge given the continued exponential growth of data in the digital economy and the competitive imperative facing enterprises to manage and extract value from their data.
Making the move to a hyper-converged data center, however, requires careful planning and a willingness to commit to a single-vendor solution. An experienced third-party services provider can help guide this process by determining which solution best meets an enterprise’s specific needs.
The first step enterprise IT leaders should take in choosing the best hyper-converged system is to determine current and future workload requirements as well as budget constraints.
As an experienced IT services vendor, we also help enterprises determine their node requirements. This is important because some hyper-converged systems vendors require a minimum number of clustered node. Since a single node can cost more than a traditional infrastructure in terms of unified software licenses and hardware, enterprises should work with a services partner to choose the nodal architecture that best supports required levels of performance and availability, while right-sizing the environment and maximizing economies of scale.
A quality IT services vendor can guide enterprises through assessments of existing storage, server, networking and virtualization infrastructure needs in order to select the right hyper-converged data center vendor. From there, a services provider can work with enterprises to plan, design, integrate and implement the new system with existing IT infrastructure.
Data center decision makers should consult with vendors or third-party support professionals like us, to determine their best hyper-convergence options.
