Hyper-converged Infrastructure helps companies to improve performance: MD, Arrow PC Network

By: Editor, TheDataDriver

Gurpreet Singh

Managing Director at Arrow PC Network
TheDataDriver.com has an interaction with Gurpreet Singh, managing director at Arrow PC Network to understand how the company is increasing its footprint in the country and how HCI is helping organizations to improve performance and bring cost efficiency. Here are the excerpts:

What is the difference between HCIS and converged infrastructure? 

The core difference between both is converged infrastructure (CI) brings compute, storage, networking and server virtualization into a single chassis. On the other hand, HCI is software defined and adds tighter integration between more components. Being software-centric, HCI helps IT companies to improve performance for production environments while cost-effectively addressing the capacity and performance challenges of business.

We can’t deny the fact that HCIs are taking over CI.  Companies are increasingly embracing hyper-converged infrastructure as a go-to technology platform to address security, productivity and other concerns. HCI not only delivers the performance companies are looking for, but also brings a host of other benefits, including less networking, storage or physical equipment. Lower IT costs, accelerates speed to market and reduce complexity related to the IT environment and the business as a whole.

There is plethora of benefits HCI offers like scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency than CI because one can add/remove blocks of computing and storage as per their need. The costs associated with CI vary depending on a variety of factors. Many organizations realize significant savings by adopting HCI, as the storage controller is the software service, which eliminates the need for costly hardware. The choice is yours, depending on your overall goal and how important role cost factor plays in the organization.


How does HCIS help organizations? How can they save on costs and resources?
Organizations have started realizing the limitations of hardware-centric infrastructures, and are heading towards HCI— software-centric, to keep up with the rapid pace of digital transformation. With software based solutions, IT can improve performance for production environments while cost-effectively addressing the capacity and performance challenges of business.

HCIs have become the demand of data centers. The features like scale out architecture with all-flash storage, compute, cloud offershigh scalability & price-performance match, making it more demanding in today’s competitive market. Apart from being software-centric, it also offers data protection, data recovery and backup. Another factor that is driving the need for HCIs is Hybrid cloud. With HCIS as the backbone, we are witnessing a huge potential in the area of VDI.  HCIS provide almost 30% lower TCO in a period of 5 years.

Listing a few more benefits of HCIs:

> Supports mixed architecture, i.e., Legacy and HCIS.
> Easy scalability is the key to data center
> Provides portability and supports transfer of data between HCIS and non-HCIS systems
> Reduces downtime exponentially with automated failover mechanisms to ensure continuous availability

How has Arrow developed HCIS capabilities? Can you shed light on the tie-ups to strengthen your portfolio?

We started our journey as IT solution distributor, and today we have transformed to IT specialist & consultant for our customer base. We always keep an eye on the latest trends and aligned our expertise accordingly. We can’t deny the fact that HCIs are the future of data centers. It eliminates major challenges and help IT professionals to keep up with the rapid pace of digital business. Resulting in big gains—performance, agility and scalability—all at a lower cost.

Working on the same line, we partnered with Dell EMC and Vmware to make organisations aware of the various benefits of Hyper Convergence infrastructures and distribute VxRail. It is the jointly engineered system from Dell and VMware. It offers the industry’s only HCI appliances powered by VMware vSAN. VxRail is a complete package with data protection, disaster recovery and data backup solutions inbuilt with lowest bandwidth utilization.

In comparison to the solutions available in the market, this solution is completely software-defined with lowest over-heads. Additionally, it offers flexibility in terms of CPU, storage or drive options, feature 40% more CPU performance , increases flexibility and scalability with more configurations,
all-flash nodes equipped with double the storage capacity and a new 3-node entry point that is more than 25% less expensive.

What is your market strategy to increase market footprint/market share?

It’s been quite some time that we are in the IT industry. To create awareness and helping all sizes of enterprises, we are doing a lot of solution events, digital campaigns and conferences/webinars on the latest trends.

We have big plans with our OEM partners and we are aggressively looking at top & bottom line growth. We shall be focussing on projects where we are able to add value to our customer’s business and earn his trust. In the upcoming years, we wish to excel with growing verticals like E commerce, IT/ITES, Retail and Healthcare with strength in designing and deploying their IT infrastructure.

We will be working towards adding more and more clients in our customer base and spreading footprints across geography. In the coming months, our strategy will be around seizing new business opportunities and tap untapped zones and verticals in India.