As organisations across the world continue to navigate the new normal brought by the COVID-19 crisis, it is becoming increasingly evident that technology plays a key role in achieving business resilience.
Analysts frame COVID-19 as an opportunity for enterprises to rethink their strategies and to build resilience. They also predict that in the short to medium term non-essential projects are likely to be paused or cancelled. Instead, investments will concentrate on supporting remote work and customer interactions, risk mitigation, cloud services, app development and ecommerce.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, modern enterprises are constantly facing enormous complexity, brought by growing internal and external environments. This is mirrored at the level of IT systems, where leaders are expected to increase productivity and agility, accelerate time to market and simplify operations – all while contending with infrastructure complexity, siloed resource management and the transition from specialist to generalist staff to manage their virtual and physical resources.
Overcoming IT complexities
Over the past two decades, organisations have been constantly on their guard about the changing IT and business landscapes and on high alert to change direction if necessary. They needed to ensure that business processes and systems are flexible enough to cope, hence the pressure for them to accelerate their digital transformation journeys and to constantly innovate.
According to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), one of the key innovations that it has seen organisations increasingly embrace in the recent past is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).
Many businesses have adopted HCI as it makes managing virtual desktops, apps and data remotely easier. The promise was that HCI would make it easy to scale both infrastructure performance and storage capacity to meet organisational needs without wasting any resources all while ensuring that the whole process is cheaper, simpler and more efficient.
However, the reality is that the first generation of HCI often forces an unacceptable trade-off between performance and simplicity. While HCI is well suited to virtual desktops and lower-tier workloads, it lacks power and efficiencies to support mission-critical applications. This often results in businesses finding themselves on a tightrope, trying to balance performance, availability and cost. What’s more is that the smooth, cloud-like experience promised is not delivered.
So, why not just add a node to address this?
The answer is, there is no such thing as just adding a node. For most traditional HCI solutions, it requires a lot of time and expertise to install VMware vCenter Server, manually add servers, install VMware, add a cluster, add a data centre, create data stores and then align them to the hosts. Subsequently, with other vendors there are often hidden costs of not utilising your whole investment when you buy aggregated compute and storage, just to upgrade your storage.
“Intelligent HCI can provide organisations with the capabilities to accelerate innovation and time to market by driving resilience, agility, and workload consolidation from IT.”
A new dawn for HCI
Today, HCI has evolved to enable enterprises to maximise their investments and no resources are wasted.
The second generation of HCI from HPE (HCI 2.0) significantly reduces downtime because it ensures that there are no bottlenecks in network traffic and no lags in performance. In addition, more demanding apps and mixed workloads can be consolidated, delivering better outcomes. It achieves a lower TCO by scaling compute and storage independently. What’s more is that HCI 2.0 enables disaggregated scaling, which means efficiency with no more costly overprovisioning for organisations. Disaggregated HCI also means that enterprises no longer need to add unnecessary hardware to achieve resilience, since it fully utilises the resources they already have.
Furthermore, HPE HCI 2.0 guarantees 99.9999% uptime[1], ensuring Tier 1 workloads run seamlessly. Its AI-powered intelligent monitoring helps enterprise data centres to run faster and more reliably, predicting issues and fixing them before they become problems.
Enabling business recovery through innovation
When the pandemic struck in early 2020, many organisations had to quickly adapt and shift their operations to a remote or hybrid model. What became clear, however, is that technology is pivotal in enabling business recovery as organisations seek to restore revenue.
Experts agree that recovery will come in distinct stages, but each stage will be linked to innovation. Typically these stages are linked to recovery, resilience and regearing for a better future. Going forward emerging technologies will be transformative and will drive innovation, along with strategy, process and leadership. Over the past year, one of the key innovations that HPE has seen its customers embracing is HCI that’s not only quick and simple to deploy but also more cost-effective.
SEE ALSO: 4 ways AI-driven HCI can drive your business
HCI 2.0 is emerging as a central element for data centres globally. This is because an intelligent HCI can provide organisations with the capabilities to accelerate innovation and time to market by driving resilience, agility, and workload consolidation from IT.
HPE’s Thomas Goepel has said that HCI 2.0 enables what technology-powered businesses want and have asked for: built-in intelligence, automation, flexible economic models, enhanced security and accelerated opportunity to market.
“HCI has gone through a really big transformation in the last few years. When I look at how it originally started, it was literally people looking for a better way of building virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions. They wanted to combine servers and storage in a single device and make it easier to operate,” Goepel explained.
Now, HCI is becoming a core element in data centres around the world and the use cases have significantly expanded. It may have started with VDI, but HCI is now being used for many other business applications, including critical databases like SAP HANA.
HCI’s rapid growth over the years has been driven by its ease of use but it also came with limitations, especially when it came to mixed and unpredictable workloads. HCI 2.0 addresses these limitations.
With HPE HCI 2.0 enterprises can achieve greater efficiencies through seamless and reliable IT processes, enabling them to derive more meaningful business value and focus on innovation that will propel them to the future.
To find out more about how HPE HCI 2.0 can accelerate your business, click here.
