In the IT world, hyperconvergence solutions are nowadays considered as mature and essential technologies. A formidable lever for IT performance, hyperconverged infrastructure meets the challenges of agility and cost control in particular.
Recent studies on the subject have shown that by 2020 “more than 30% of companies will have upgraded their IT infrastructure to more flexible and economical solutions such as hyperconvergence”. Let’s discover together in this new article what a hyper-converged infrastructure is and the major assets that will seduce your CIO and/or your CEO.
What is a hyperconverged infrastructure?
Hyperconverged IT infrastructure can be defined very naturally in opposition to traditional IT infrastructure which is built in silos with compartmentalized and watertight resources. Hyperconvergence allows IT resources to be centralized and evolve in an agile and clustered manner.
Resource silos have long been a barrier to the efficient evolution of IT infrastructures because companies could only evolve them in pieces (storage, computing power and network). In this sense, hyperconvergence is a real answer to the challenges of IT and digital performance. So what are the 3 main strengths of hyperconvergence for a company?
Hyperconverged Infrastructure or simplified IT management
Hyperconvergence greatly simplifies the management of your IT by grouping all the components of your infrastructure (servers, storage, network, virtualization, software) within a single application. This pool of shared resources creates a global and optimized infrastructure solution, all managed by a unified management platform. This is of particular benefit if you want to have a good control of your internal technological landscape and need to efficiently manage the IT of your remote sites.
The virtualization and automation tools embedded in hyperconvergence solutions allow the different components of the infrastructure to communicate with its management platform, for maximum control and agility. Given the growing complexity of corporate IT systems, centralizing the management of these resources and simplifying their management is becoming a huge challenge.
Hyperconvergence as a lever for performance and agility
To meet the challenge of the digital transformation, companies’ IT systems must be more agile and efficient than ever before. Hyperconvergence allows the capabilities of the IT infrastructure to be mobilized just when the business needs it, without the bottleneck and management complexity of a traditional infrastructure.
Scalable IT is IT that serves the business and its business needs. You can start with small resources and then have the luxury of being able to easily absorb a seasonal acceleration in your business, for example, without redesigning your overall architecture.
With the advent of digital, the digital and technological perimeter of companies is very clearly placed at the heart of their strategy. Hyper-convergence is totally in line with this by guaranteeing XXL scalability of IT and record reliability that meets both the new uses of business teams and the needs of external customers. It is precisely in this context that a hyper-converged IT infrastructure becomes an essential digital performance lever.
Financial gains from a hyper-converged infrastructure
The first gain is quite immediate when we talk about hyperconvergence. A hyperconverged solution installs and goes live in your IT infrastructure faster than a virtual server solution because there is less equipment to configure. In fact, this savings at the time of deployment was already a key argument a few years ago when the first converged infrastructure solutions appeared.
This is all the more true and the gain is all the more real in small companies that do not have the human resources to allow them to mobilize their technical teams on these often complex and always time-consuming subjects. Beware however, faster does not mean easier, it is necessary to be accompanied by experts to build a perennial hyper-converged infrastructure.
Also, hyperconvergence makes it possible to considerably purify your infrastructure and thus logically reduce your material investments. In addition to this gain at the time of acquisition, your operating costs (including updates and maintenance) are also impacted downward.
The overall cost of your hyperconverged infrastructure is therefore much reduced thanks to the reduction of its material framework and the associated recurring management costs.
In short, by grouping the different building blocks of your IT infrastructure in a centralized resource pool, hyperconvergence offers better control of your IT costs.
Here are a few concrete examples of the savings that can be achieved:
- Qualified IT manpower
- Software licenses
- Operating costs (updates, maintenance)
- Energy (electricity)
- Space in your Datacenter
- Management & administrative fees
The promise of hyperconvergence solutions is to put IT back at the heart of your business, evolving at the pace of your business needs. As you can see, agility, simplicity, performance and cost reduction are the key arguments that make hyperconverged IT infrastructure a winning choice for your business.