The average lifespan of a server is about three to five years. It’s not a hard and fast rule, of course, but it is a kind of law—specifically, Moore’s Law, which states that the number of components on a circuit doubles every year. In other words, processors and memory cards get appreciably faster and cheaper every five years, enough so to justify the re-investment in new hardware.
But Moore’s Law isn’t the only innovation taking place in the hardware space over the last 10 years. Converged infrastructurenotably introduced a unique building-block approach to data centers. Instead of buying servers, storage, and networking equipment from different vendors and integrating them—a costly and time-consuming process—converged systems bundled those requirements into a single appliance comprised of pre-integrated, dedicated blocks of storage, networking and computing. In other words, one solution from one vendor that scaled simply and worked out of the box.
Converged systems reduced risk, cost and complexity, but they weren’t designed to leverage the efficiencies of cloud computing. And so hyperconverged infrastructure emerged: software-defined, cloud-ready blocks (or nodes) that combined storage, processing and networking capabilities in a single node. One of the major distinctions between converged and hyperconverged systems is the manner in which they scale. Converged systems scale up—that is, if you want more storage, you need to increase the capacity of the storage block. Hyperconverged systems scale out: if you need more storage, processing or networking capacity, you simply add more nodes.
A hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has inherent advantages over other architectural choices, particularly in applications where scalability and flexibility are important. Companies building a private cloud in their data center, for example, would want to seriously consider HCI. Virtualization desktop initiatives (VDI) are another popular application for HCI because of the need to dynamically shift storage and processing capacity over time (for example, increasing the processing capacity at 8:30 am when everyone logs into the system, and shifting to more storage when nightly backups occur).
Use cases are one thing, of course, and hard numbers another. As an authorized reseller of HPE SimpliVity, we can tell you that the numbers behind HPE’s HCI solution are truly impressive:
- 10:1 reduction in the number of data center devices
- 40:1 reduction in the amount of storage data
- 50% increase in staff productivity
- 73% decrease in total cost of ownership
While HPE SimpliVity is not the only HCI solution on the market, it is the only one to feature unique data compression technologies that can reduce 40TB of storage into a single terabyte yet still restore a one terabyte virtual machine in less than 60 seconds. That kind of agility, combined with HPE’s legendary reputation for reliability and security, make it an ideal choice for hospitals, banks, manufacturers and other business that need to consolidate their data centers without sacrificing performance.
If you want to get beyond the hype of hyperconverged infrastructure to understand how it can help your business, talk to us. We can show you how SimpliVity fits into your broader cloud strategy, provide installation services and even manage your cloud platform for you—kind of an all-in-one source for your next all-in-one platform.
