Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has become mainstream over the last few years. Increasingly, it has progressed to being the infrastructure of choice for organisations that seek to stay competitive amid an ever-evolving technology landscape.
Today, the HCI market is growing fast. Industry experts predict that in the next two years, most global businesses, irrespective of size or industry, will be running some form of hyperconverged infrastructure. Moreover, as HCI grows in popularity, big cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google are providing support for on-premises HCI solutions to enable hybrid deployment and management.
However, despite HCI’s popularity, there are still myths around the technology that lead to misconceptions and confusion. Here we’ve outlined—and debunked—four of the most prevalent myths about HCI:
Myth 1: HCI is too expensive
The acquisition price of an HCI solution varies from one vendor to another as well as on the brand of hypervisor used in the solution. While it may be true that purchasing the individual components needed to build your own virtualisation infrastructure might be less expensive than purchasing an HCI solution, that is only one part of the total cost of investment.
HCI’s value goes beyond the initial purchase. Enterprises can expect a better total cost of ownership with HCI as it prevents overprovisioning.
Total savings may differ for every organisation. However, the ease of use, simplicity and scalability that HCI offers make it more pocket-friendly over time than typical DIY virtualisation solutions.
Myth 2: HCI requires organisations to replace their current IT teams
Another common myth is that HCI will give rise to the need for specialised skills or even force IT managers to replace some members of their team. By embracing HCI, organisations are not only able to condense their traditionally siloed workloads, but they can also streamline IT operations by automating time-consuming and resource-heavy processes.
HCI also enables organisations to manage systems in a unified platform, which requires less integration. This allows IT teams to put their focus on developing innovations that will drive the business.
Myth 3: HCI doesn’t fit cloud models
HCI is an ideal steppingstone and offers a solid foundation in the journey towards the cloud. More than that, it also helps link on-premises infrastructure and cloud-based services. As a robust virtualisation platform, HCI can be implemented together with other infrastructure solutions as well as integrated with cloud tools. HCI allows organisations to embrace a modern and agile architecture, paving the way for seamless mobility between on-premises and cloud environments.
Myth 4: Choosing a single vendor for HCI is a bad idea
Some organisations do not like the idea of having their entire infrastructure stack come from a single vendor. They might want to diversify their infrastructure portfolio by leveraging tools from various vendors due to concerns of a single provider not living up to its promises. These concerns are valid and leveraging single or multiple vendors is every organisation’s prerogative. However, they also need to realise that having a single vendor offers massive value.
A huge benefit of leveraging tools from a single vendor is increased integration and automation capabilities. It also makes the whole stack simpler and easier to maintain and expand. In addition, it helps prevent finger-pointing between vendors whenever a problem arises, giving customers better support experiences.
Do more with HCI 2.0
HCI presents numerous benefits to enterprises that are looking to modernise their IT infrastructure and meet today’s increasingly digital demands. But while the first generation of hyperconverged infrastructure delivers simplicity, it has limitations—it cannot always meet the high availability needs of mission-critical apps, and scaling compute and storage in tandem can lead to overprovisioning and waste.
The technology has now evolved to become a more intelligent and agile platform, simplifying IT management to enable organisations to focus on innovation.
By disaggregating compute and storage, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s next-generation hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI 2.0) allows enterprises to maximise their resources. Powered with HPE InfoSight, HCI 2.0 provides organisations with fast app performance and robust support for demanding workloads, enabling them to achieve the efficiency and resilience that they need to accelerate their business.
Click here to find out more about the benefits of HCI.
