The increasing complexity of data centers has created numerous challenges for IT professionals trying to monitor and manage networks, servers, mobile traffic, cloud deployments, data storage, virtual machines, and other components of the modern digital enterprise. The latest in technological tools offer unprecedented business agility, flexibility, and scalability to enterprises – if they’re effectively leveraged. The problem is that IT departments frequently are bogged down just trying to keep their networks running 24 x 7. Juggling balls and putting out brush fires leaves IT pros little time to focus on enabling strategic business goals.
That’s why a growing number of IT decision makers are investing in hyper-converged data centers that streamline network and systems management while providing the functionality and interoperability necessary to support the business. By combining multiple infrastructure components in a single, modular appliance, hyper-converged data centers confer a number of significant competitive and operational advantages to enterprises. Here are just a few:
1. New levels of agility and flexibility: The data-driven digital enterprise lives and dies by its ability to adapt and execute quickly. Traditional IT infrastructures are woefully inadequate to this task because of siloed data and apps, as well as lack of interoperability. Hyper-converged systems enable IT professionals to view and manage all of the enterprise’s data center resources in a unified interface. This makes it easy to manage and move workloads as fast as the business requires.
2. Unlimited scalability: The building-block of hyper-converged data centers allows IT pros to add new appliances to a cluster, making it relatively simple to scale data center functions and build out the IT infrastructure without costly and time-consuming integration.
3. Easier management: Traditional IT infrastructures, with their disparate components, require a lot of staff time just for monitoring, maintenance, and provisioning. Hyper-converged data centers not only provide centralized consoles that make it simpler for IT administrators to manage infrastructure systems, they automate many routine functions. The end result is a more efficient data center and more staff time devoted to special projects and furthering business strategy, rather than routine, non-business-critical tasks.
4. Greater user satisfaction: Because hyper-convergence makes data centers vastly more efficient, flexible, and agile than traditional IT infrastructures, enterprises users are able to get information faster, collaborate more easily, and access IT resources as needed. These hyper-convergence performance benefits also extend to partners and customers.
5. Lower TCO: Between automation, centralized management, and consolidation of infrastructure components, hyper-converged data centers save enterprises money in the long run by reducing hardware expenditures and ongoing management and maintenance costs. A single-vendor hyper-converged data center in particular offers the greatest level of component interoperability, cost-savings, and full service and support. IT leaders should consult with vendors or third-party support professionals to determine their best hyper-convergence options.
