One of the IT trends that has resulted from the adoption of edge computing has been the emergence of converged IT devices. These devices help meet the challenges of skills shortages for integration as well as making technology performance more predictable.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure is now being used by many companies to support data centre consolidation efforts.
HCI is the logical extension of converged infrastructure, where all server, storage and networking components are delivered in a single enclosure – complete with hypervisor and management software.
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Here are five reasons why hyperconverged IT supports increased simplicity, efficiency and agility:
- Research firm IDC predicts that by 2025 there will be 55.7B connected devices worldwide, 75% of which will be connected to an Internet-of-Things (IoT) platform. IDC estimates data generated from connected IoT devices to be 73.1 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025, growing from 18.3 ZB in 2019. As the IoT phenomenon accelerates, organisations will have to contend with massive influx of data that needs to be processed. Companies will increasingly rely on hyperconverged infrastructure to deal with the massive amounts of data they will generate and collect.
- One of the most impactful HCI benefits is the ability to provision, test, and deploy IT dramatically faster with a major reduction of time/resources needed to manage and maintain the infrastructure once operational. With HCI, organisations gain the flexibility to quickly roll out a secure, modern infrastructure and establish the solid foundation they need to scale rapidly as their business grows.
- HCI blends traditional three-tier architecture (compute, storage, and networking) into a single software-defined solution. It greatly simplifies configuration and achieves high performance.
- The rise of edge data centres is another factor contributing to the resurgence of interest in HCI. According to Gartner, more than 30% of HCI systems will be deployed at Edge locations by 2025, a substantial increase from fewer than 15% in 2020. Data centres will need to become more agile and cost-effective to keep pace with migration to the Edge. This is where hyperconverged IT infrastructure can leverage integrated physical infrastructure in the form of micro data centres.
- As self-contained systems, HCIs are easy to transport. That can be critical after a merger or acquisition, or when it’s time to move to a new site.
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There’s no question that the IoT era presents exciting opportunities for businesses to extract value from data like never before – this is of course predicated on organisations having the appropriate IT infrastructure in place to be able to store, sift through and analyse this data.
Hyper converged IT infrastructure delivers a sound answer for organisations of almost any size, providing the sort of agility and effectiveness the IoT era demands.
HCI offers an ideal edge solution when you have power. But when you lose power, everything goes down. To substantially reduce risk, you need a hyperconverged platform with built-in data protection, and preferably one that provides software-orchestrated disaster recovery failover, so you don’t have to rely on human intervention or a redundant physical infrastructure.
Better yet, you should consider deploying an intelligent solution that can anticipate problems and head them off before they happen.
