Hardware-centric infrastructure is stuck in the past—and that’s a big problem in today’s fast-paced business world. Its siloed architecture keeps teams divided, slows provisioning, and limits visibility across organizations. Without the flexibility or speed to keep up with user needs and market demands, your business could fall behind.
Virtualization has helped many organizations begin to break down these barriers—but more fundamental change involves infrastructure. A software-centric solution called hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) can enable flexibility, speed, and security, all while lowering costs. That’s why HCI is more than just a trend—it’s a key building block for the data center of the future.
What is HCI?
HCI allows the convergence of compute, storage, and management onto industry-standard x86 servers, enabling a building-block approach with scale-out capabilities. With HCI, all key data center functions run as software on the hypervisor in a tightly integrated software layer.
Traditional infrastructure vs. Hyper-converged infrastructure
How does HCI stack up against traditional infrastructure when it comes to key functions? Let’s take a quick look.
| Capability | Traditional Infrastructure | Hyper-Converged Infrastructure |
| Data protection and disaster recovery | Remediating disasters was a time- consuming process that often involved downtime. | Built-in failure tolerance, asynchronous long-distance replication, and stretched clusters ensure high levels of protection and minimal to no downtime. |
| Provisioning storage | Provisioning storage was an error-prone manual task that required dedicated knowledge of storage silos. | Provisioning happens automatically during virtual machine creation. |
| Provisioning VMs | Created dependency between storage and VM admins, requiring a complicated selection process and long wait times. | Delivers storage that’s built into the virtual machine creation process. |
| Monitoring | Required multiple tools and teams to achieve subpar visibility. | A single tool provides end-to-end visibility into storage and networking. |
| App/data migration | Complex and often involved, expensive professional help and third-party tools. | Built-in tools can move data or replace hardware as needed. |
| Adjusting app resources | Required requesting more storage from the admin before changing resources. | Automated storage provisioning and auto discovery of resources to save time. |
| Performance tuning | Manual intervention and ongoing load balancing was required to ensure high performance. | Delivers high performance with an all-flash optimization to eliminate load balancing and tuning for hotspots. |
| Scaling | Required an expensive initial investment in hardware, and ongoing expenses due to price hikes. | A new model is priced based on $/CPU instead of $/TB—and adding more storage capacity incurs no additional software costs. |
| Time spent on innovative and new projects | Silos make it difficult for teams to communicate, resulting in duplicate work and inefficient processes. | No silos means teams can freely collaborate, sharing information across organization boundaries. |
These are just a few of the differences, and they all add up to massive time savings – of up to 20 hours per week. The eBook Side-By-Side Comparison: Traditional Infrastructure Vs. Hyper-Converged Infrastructure breaks down the time and cost savings in detail.
Read the eBook Side-By-Side Comparison: Traditional Infrastructure Vs. Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
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