March 21, 2016
At times, we in the solutions business wish things would just stop evolving so quickly, allowing us to sell the same things, the same way, year after year. But we realize that the only constant in Information Technology is change.
One innovation creating a lot of hype today is hyper-convergence. Everyone from Lenovo and Nutanix to Dell and EMC is attempting to cash in on this hot new trend. But what is it actually? Here’s a definition from techtarget.com:
Hyper-converged storage is a software-defined approach to storage management that combines storage, computing, networking and virtualization technologies in one physical unit that is managed as a single system.
According to Simplivity.com, “Hyper-convergence handles data by de-duplicating, compressing and optimizing data inline in real-time. This saves IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) by eliminating duplicate writes, ensuring that business applications get the IOPS they need. Storing less data lowers capacity requirements—and costs—for disk and bandwidth.”
Current offerings in the hyper-converged market are simple, self-contained computing systems sold by a single vendor, and typically branded by that vendor or an integrator. They include everything needed to create a computing infrastructure, including hardware, software, management functionality and comprehensive support.
The legacy IT players have been slow to promote hyper-converged solutions, as their platforms often provide similar features with greater scalability, so new players have entered the market. Their solutions, however, may or may not play well with the existing infrastructure in your datacenter. Many companies benefit from using specific platforms for different workloads, in which case hyper-convergence infrastructure could be limiting. Conversely, hyper-converged infrastructure is a good fit for companies with branch locations or collocated facilities, as well as small organizations with single-platform infrastructure requirements.
Hyper-converged infrastructure will be an important part of many datacenters in the future, and that future is not far off. Moving to hyper-converged technology is not a simple task, however. It will require assistance from trusted IT advisors like ITS, Inc.
As IT leaders, we continually strive to provide exceptional value to our client organizations, and that entails seriously addressing technology trends. We maintain up-to-the minute certifications in all the latest software, so our trained and experienced engineers are fully prepared to advise you and answer your questions on hyper-convergence.
If you’re wondering when your company should embrace hyper-convergence, contact us. We’ll get behind the hype and provide you honest advice on the optimal solution and timing for your bottom line.
Thanks for reading,
Rob Connary, President - COO
