Alan Browning, Hyperconverged Solutions Leader, Data Centre Group, Lenovo META, explains how hyperconvergence is the answer to simplified, faster architecture.
Organisations around the world are continuously demanding technologies and systems that can enhance productivity and increase scalability, while also being cost-efficient. Hyperconvergence offers just that, taking away the complexity of managing the high-end systems from the internal IT operations team and performing the job by making data handling less complex.
Hyperconvergence is an innovative IT framework that combines storage, computing and networking into a single system, simplifying data interpretation and enhancing productivity. By implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in data centres, businesses – small and large - will be able to reap many benefits that will allow them to be more efficient.
According to Gartner Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is the fastest-growing segment in data centre technology. The research firm predicts that by 2020, 20 percent of business-critical applications currently deployed on three-tier IT infrastructure will transition to hyperconverged infrastructure.
In 2017, the HCI market value touched US$4bn, and analysts are predicting it to exceed US$10bn by 2021.
Some of the benefits of hyperconvergence include:
Implementing HCI means operational costs dramatically decrease. This is because the work can be executed during normal office hours, eradicating overtime hours from the equation.
In simple words, hyperconvergence by way of design allows enterprise customers to break the cycles of procuring hardware platforms and allows IT departments to focus on delivering services to the business rather than operational issues.
The greatest challenge hyperconvergence solves is that it breaks down the silos within organisations. Now the virtualisation administrator becomes the storage guy, the network guy and the compute guy, all rolled up into one, allowing him to provide multiple services at the same rate as public cloud providers provide their services.
An example of how hyperconvergence is beneficial for the function and productivity of a business, is its ability to impressively reduce the turnaround time for the delivery of products and systems to customers by scaling the environment with a new node via an IP address, allowing IT departments to forecast their immediate requirements more accurately.
A public cloud is a great fit for any decision that does not need to be made in real-time and can afford latency, providing purpose solution and potentially a cost-effective and scalable route.
However, when dealing with solutions that cannot tolerate latency and require “real-time” decisions, such as self-driving cars or pilotless flying aeroplanes, the cloud simply won’t suffice as no technology today can tolerate uploading 10GB of data to a public cloud every 30 seconds, which would be the case of a self-driving car that has over 128 sensors.
Often the truest things are said in jest and in this case, it could be said that “when microseconds matter, the public cloud is only 88 milliseconds away”.
This is how artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT) are driving mass adoption of HCI technologies to be deployed “at the edge”.
As technology evolves, hyperconvergence continues to be the simplest and most sophisticated way towards the new data centre. It proves that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
In conclusion, seeing the way hyperconvergence addresses business challenges, it is by far a superior solution when compared to the old, converged way of managing and deploying infrastructure. The complexity of managing the solution is reduced, allowing the business to react to the speeds required by the customers, and ultimately, making your IT organisation operate at a higher level in the value chain.
