Is Hyperconverged Infrastructure worth the hype?

In a data-driven world, data creation is rampant.  And as the depth of data increases and technology advances, a cost-effective, scalable solution is key for businesses in order to remain relevant and competitive.  This is part of the reason why interest in Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is growing. As businesses of all sizes seek to simplify, increase protection and improve productivity of their organization, they are beginning to realize the benefits HCI has to offer.  

But before jumping to a quick decision and launching a data center transformation with HCI, it’s important to understand what exactly HCI is and how it can benefit your business.  

Hyperconverged Infrastructure is an IT framework that combines storage, computing and networking into a single system in an effort to reduce data center complexity and increase scalability. Hyperconverged platforms include a hypervisor for virtualized computing, software-defined storage and virtualized networking, and they typically run on standard, off-the-shelf servers.  

Lower Cost: Hyperconvergence uses an economic model, something similar to that of public cloud providers. It allows your business to avoid large up-front costs and infrastructure purchases every few years. This is due to the fact that HCI uses low-cost commodity hardware by scaling the datacenter in small, easy-to-manage steps.  

Increased Data Protection: Hyperconvergence is designed to anticipate and handle the fact that hardware will eventually fail. The use of commodity hardware ensures that customers get the benefits of failure avoidance options without breaking the bank. In a traditional designed data center, comprehensive data protection can be expensive and complex. To provide the data protection your business needs, you would have to make many decisions and purchases. With HCI, backup, recovery and disaster recovery are all built in.  

Simplicity & Improved Performance: Hyperconvergence allows businesses to deploy several kinds of applications in a single shared resource without worrying about reduced performance. Hyperconverged systems contain a mix of both solid-state storage and spinning-disk storage. This combination enables systems to handle both random and sequential workloads easily.  

Small to medium-sized businesses will most likely benefit from the simplified network design of HCI. Take, for example, a start-up which is growing, and needs to roll-out an infrastructure to keep up, however, they lack funds and expertise. With the ability HCI has to scale little at a time, it will be a cost effective and simpler solution for the start-up. 

The flexibility and scalability of HCI has some benefits for larger businesses as well. Large businesses that are growing or potentially want to set up new branches or remote offices will be able to scale as they need without the large cost and complexity of buying traditional infrastructure.  

Now you know all the benefits HCI has to offer, but is HCI the answer in every situation? How can you know whether HCI is the right solution for your business? Like most solutions, the correct answer is often determined on a case-by-case basis and through business analysis. However, if your business is involved in certain activities then HCI is probably worth the consider. Some of these activities include remote site management, comprehensive disaster recovery, equipment updates and VDI deployment, to name a few.

Think HCI might be right for your business? Plow Networks can help you find out. Contact us today.  

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