By: Mohamad Rizk, Manager System Engineers, Middle East at Veeam
Converged infrastructures are a very appealing prospect for large and midsize businesses alike. They offer a quick and simple solution to two of the most persistent challenges in enterprise IT — managing data centre sprawl and keeping complexity under control. But that's just the start.
Because they pull every part of the enterprise IT puzzle together into a single integrated stack where every component has been selected to work together seamlessly. They offer a turnkey solution to many of the issues that commonly keep data centre managers and administrators up at night.
Converged infrastructures are designed to help enterprises:
Keep costs low by reducing management workloads, and rationalizing the volume of tech and components taking up space in the data centre
Simplify processes such as patching and updating by providing a set of components that can be patched in unison, without fear of conflicts or compatibility issues
Improve manageability by cutting the volume of technology you need to manage, and providing simple, integrated tools to streamline many common management tasks
Increase efficiency by delivering a fully-integrated IT stack where every component has been selected to get the most from each other
Modernize their entire IT environment with a single, out-of-the-box solution
From convergence to hyper-convergence
Over the past few years, traditional hardware-focused converged infrastructures have set the standard for enterprise IT convergence. Today, that convergence — and all the benefits that come with it — is being pushed to the next level by a new generation of hyper-converged infrastructure solutions.
Hyper-converged infrastructures go beyond the hardware, delivering a soft-ware-centric architecture that pulls together compute, storage, network, and virtualization resources in a single stack. And because components such as networking are software-defined within a hyperconverged infrastructure, they can offer even greater manageability and simplicity than their converged counterparts.
It comes as no surprise then that industry analyst Gartner states the market for hyper-converged integrated systems (HCIS) will grow 79 percent to reach almost $2 billion in 2016 — propelling them towards mainstream adoption in 2017 and beyond.
The missing piece of the hyperconverged puzzle
With an ever-growing number of businesses adopting integrated systems and hyper-converged infrastructures, it's important to note one significant issue with both. While they appear to contain everything an enterprise needs for simple, successful IT, one critical component is missing — fully-integrated Hyper-Availability solutions.
Many vendors will tell you that their integrated systems and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions include Availability solutions and capabilities as part of their complete, integrated offerings. But the truth is that few offer anything beyond very basic Availability.
Achieving true convergence through Hyper-Availability
One of the biggest selling points of con-verged and hyperconverged infrastructures is that the seamless integration of components lays the foundation for digital transformation. When every part of a system is designed to work together, it provides the perfect platform for new initiatives that rely on the availability and movement of valuable business data.
However, without the right Hyper-Availability solution supporting the converged infrastructure, there's no guarantee it will be able to support those kinds of workloads effectively.
A dedicated Hyper-Availability solution that's completely integrated with your chosen converged infrastructure is the final piece in the puzzle, and it's what you need to deliver the kind of Hyper-Availability modern workloads and apps demand.
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