In this data decade, organisations are looking to get the most out of their data, developing new breakthroughs in technology that everyone will experience in some way. The more effectively an organisation can harness the power of this data, the better – to ensure it can adapt to fast-changing markets and customer dynamics.
By Tony Bartlett, director: data centre compute solutions at Dell Technologies South Africa
To enable this, organisations must simplify and automate their IT infrastructure while consolidating systems and services into holistic solutions that enable more control and clarity. The digital leaders of the future can’t be built on the technology approaches of the past – IT needs to evolve to provide a technology foundation that accelerates digital innovation.
Hyperconverged infrastructure is proving to be an excellent fit for today’s data centre challenges
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has emerged as a solution to the slow deployment and complex management of IT in the traditional economy. A Research and Markets report states that the global HCI systems market is expected to reach $42.1 billion, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.1%, by 2028.
This striking growth rate is happening because a large and growing number of companies are deploying HCI solutions to run a mix of workloads, including those that are deemed mission critical.
With the advent of the Internet economy and industrial Internet, HCI has evolved and upgraded from the ‘old three layers’ (compute, networking and storage) to the ‘new three layers’ (cross-architecture, hybrid multi-cloud and application innovation). While HCI was initially aimed at fast deployment, simplified management and improved IT responsiveness, it has advanced to meet the needs of digital transformation, delivering efficient modern industrial Internet applications while enabling staff empowerment, global collaboration and clustering across industries.
The new hyperconverged platform not only integrates the three layers of traditional IT architecture but also provides prior configuration and optimisation according to user requirements. As a result, this enables rapid deployment of IT as well as simplified IT operations and maintenance management procedures and costs.
As organisations arm their on-premises clouds to support and optimise IT infrastructures for multiple cloud types, they are looking for solutions that provide optimal performance, flexibility and, ultimately, management consolidations and simplification – all of which HCI offers. We expect to see more organisations turning to HCI as operational hubs for multi-cloud approaches, prompted by the need to ensure that data and workloads are stored and managed in environments to suit the changing needs of the business.
Additionally, the rapid implementation of 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is spurring data growth at an incredible rate and changing the data game in terms of speed and accessibility. This growth, however, comes at a cost as it is expensive and cumbersome to bring the entirety of this data on-premises.
Organisations should instead adopt a ‘hub-and-spoke approach’, where they take in data at edge locations, glean insights and take only those insights back to the core hub to act on them. As HCI is easily scalable, it enables users to put the appropriate amount of compute power analysis at those edge locations.
The modern HCI systems available today represent a new phase of data centre convergence that is fundamentally different from these early iterations and drives new levels of business value benefits. Broadly speaking, hyperconverged infrastructure deployments can help drive lower capital costs, increased operational efficiency, reduced risk and reduced data centre facilities costs.
As more businesses look to modernise their infrastructure, generating IT efficiencies and reducing IT costs, it’s no surprise that HCI continues to gain traction. What was once a solution targeted at remote offices and branch locations is now being deployed across core, cloud and edge because of its simplified operating model and ability to address almost any workload.
The simplicity, scalability and agility of HCI continues to be a catalyst for data centre modernisation and helping businesses transform their IT operations.