Although cloud computing continues to gain momentum, most organizations are hesitant to move sensitive data and mission-critical workloads to the cloud. In-house IT infrastructure is not going away anytime soon — although it is being transformed by the realities of business demands.
Today’s sprawling IT environments come with high capital and operational costs and limited flexibility. As organizations add more computing power, storage, devices and users, density and complexity rapidly increase. The traditionally siloed approach to data center management and maintenance further complicates matters.
Converged infrastructure solutions have emerged to relieve these challenges. Converged infrastructure combines compute, storage, networking and virtualization in one preconfigured, pretested solution. Sometimes called “data center in a box,” converged infrastructure can be deployed quickly and managed centrally. This is in stark contrast to a more traditional best-of-breed approach that requires significant IT resources for installation, integration, configuration, implementation, testing and maintenance.
Converged infrastructure is not new — VCE pioneered the concept more than five years ago with its Vblock Infrastructure Packages, and maintains a leadership position in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems.” Now virtually every major vendor offers a converged infrastructure solutions, including EMC, Cisco, HP, VMware and Oracle, either individually or through alliances.
The “visionaries” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant include Simplivity and Nutanix, which offer so-called hyper-converged infrastructure solutions. Hyper-convergence takes converged infrastructure several steps further by more tightly integrating fundamental data center hardware and software. These solutions also add valuable functionality such as de-duplication, compression, WAN optimization, data backup and disaster recovery, enabling organizations to further reduce complexity by collapsing more of the technology stack onto a single, scalable platform.
As with converged infrastructure, the entire hyper-converged system is preconfigured and delivered in a single box by the vendor, which reduces risk and speeds deployment. Hyper-convergence also reduces total cost of ownership by streamlining cabling, reducing power and cooling costs, and shrinking the data center footprint.
A hyper-converged system is modular and engineered to seamlessly scale by adding modules, which are aware of each other and share resources. Grid software automatically discovers and adds nodes to the system to provide additional resources. Performance and capacity improve as modules are added. With a simplified hyper-converged infrastructure comes simplified administration through a single pane of glass as opposed to managing each data center component individually.
Technologent has a long history of delivering converged infrastructure solutions through its longstanding partnership with VCE. As hyper-convergence began gaining momentum, we partnered with visionaries in this emerging space. With awareness growing and the market becoming more crowded with additional solutions, Technologent can help you select the right converged infrastructure and hyper-convergence technologies to reduce TCO and management complexity by bringing all IT infrastructure functionality into a single platform.
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