t cht lk
TECH TALK
And HCI is far more resilient than standalone
legacy systems. The scale-out model
depends on data being spread across
multiple nodes across the data centre, and
sometimes even between data centres
that are situated in various, disparate
geographical areas. In this way, should an
appliance go down, there is no impact on
availability or performance.
Ricky Pereira, Dell Enterprise Business Unit
Manager at Pinnacle
One of HCI’s most compelling benefits,
is its flexibility and ability to scale. Due
to the fact that it is based on software,
it can provide infinitely better levels of
flexibility and agility than its legacy
counterparts could. It works on a modular
approach, where each HCI appliance is
a separate, self-contained unit, which
has been designed to include all the
necessary elements to boot compatibility.
In this way, should the data centre need
more capacity, an extra unit or two can
be added on, removing the need for the
business to have to specifically provision,
configure and deploy additional compute
or storage capacity.
Another benefit is the improved efficiency
HCI offers. HCI lowers costs, both data and
operational, without sacrificing features
or capacity, and without any disruption to
business operations. Compared to legacy
infrastructure and integrated systems,
hyper-converged infrastructure is far more
affordable, and the price tag will drop as the
market matures too.
With HCI, a significantly smaller amount of
equipment is needed, and it is far more cost
effective to maintain and support, as it is
software-based. As new features are added,
they can be easily updated, without the
need to replace any components, and the
over-provisioning associated with complex
legacy infrastructure is removed.
68
INTELLIGENTCIO
Improved protection is a benefit too, as
with hyper-converged infrastructure, data
protection, and features such as data
deduplication and snapshotting are built in
as standard. In this way, disaster recovery is
simplified and far easier. This is of growing
importance in our increasingly stringent
regulatory environment, where GDPR and
POPIA are forcing businesses across the
board to rethink data privacy and security.
Having backup and disaster recovery
built into the infrastructure, makes data
protection more efficient and cost effective.
Then there’s automated infrastructure.
With old, complex and rigid legacy
infrastructures, automation was near
impossible. However, with hyper-converged
infrastructure, everything is virtualised,
including storage, servers and supporting
services, meaning that the automation
of routine operations is totally doable
when centralised management tools,
such as scheduling, are employed. And
we all know that automation equals far
greater efficiency, allowing resources to be
allocated to crucial business functions as
well as innovation, meaning organisations
“
VXRAIL BRINGS
COMPUTE,
STORAGE, AND
VIRTUALISATION,
AND AUTOMATED
LIFECYCLE
MANAGEMENT
TOGETHER.
remain nimble and ahead of their
competitors. This is especially vital in an
era of Azure, AWS and Google, where
companies are looking for a competitive
advantage by harnessing the flexibility of
public cloud services.
Finally, businesses can reap the benefits of
workload consolidation, as HCI unites storage,
networking and compute functionality into
one, fully virtualised solution. Being able
to consolidate a plethora of IT functions,
including backup, deduplication and WAN
optimisation into one platform, can only
benefit the business on multiple levels.
Workloads become consolidated, making it far
www.intelligentcio.com