As more businesses move to the cloud, enterprises leave traditional data Centers behind and seek help from the hci vendors. Many companies are choosing to consolidate their hardware into one location or move away from physical data centers altogether. One of the top solutions to address this issue is Hyperconvergence Infrastructure (HCI).
With good reason, Big Data has become the new buzzword in the Information Technology (IT) field. Big Data presents immense business value if you can make sense of it, turning mountains of data into helpful analytics that offer competitive advantages to your company. Most IT environments aren’t up to standards to handle Big Data workloads well, leading to inefficiencies. That’s where Hyper-Convergence Infrastructure (HCI) comes in—providing cost savings and streamlining processes at every level.
1. HCIs Help Reduce the Number of Servers and Associated Hardware for Operations
By consolidating server, storage, and networking resources into a single appliance, HCI can help reduce the number of physical servers an organization needs to maintain and operate. By reducing the number of disparate systems you need to manage separately, HCI can further help simplify data center management.
For example, while hypervisors have traditionally helped to create virtual machines running on bare metal hardware, HCIs use shared compute and storage resources instead. As a result, IT teams no longer need to purchase or maintain large amounts of traditional server hardware. Instead, hci vendors can help them run all their applications in virtual machines atop the HCI itself without needing any additional infrastructure for supporting traditional workloads in separate areas of the data center.
2. Reduces Data Center Power and Cooling Costs
HCI also reduces data center power and cooling costs. As more virtual machines run on fewer physical servers, a single server can manage more workloads, reducing overhead from maintenance windows and fewer idle servers. Fewer servers also mean less power and cooling are required to maintain a certain temperature level within a data center. That results in significant savings from both these factors, which directly translate into lower costs for each server deployed with HCI technology.
Sangfor Technologies has identified three areas of improvement in traditional IT infrastructures: power consumption, data center space consumption, and operational efficiency. HCI addresses all three concerns by eliminating the reliance on substantial hardware investments and reducing the total number of servers, simplifying management tasks, and improving agility through automation. The result is a solution that improves performance while lowering operating expenses.
3. HCI Helps Improve Server Utilization and Reduces Wasted Data Capacity
By consolidating storage resources, HCI helps eliminate redundancies that would otherwise exist across different storage platforms. It also allows organizations to keep data where they need it while still having the flexibility to move it when needed. For example, suppose an organization needs extra space for backup or archive purposes. In that case, they have all their storage options available without buying new equipment or reconfiguring existing infrastructure components.
By consolidating storage and compute resources, HCI can help improve utilization and reduce waste. However, hci vendors provide solutions with multiple different price points. Companies can choose a solution that suits their budget and requirements. Options range from turnkey software solutions to free and open source software DIY approaches.
4. Maintains a High Availability of Mission Critical Applications
The entire system is always online with HCI, meaning there’s no downtime due to component failure. By running multiple copies of an application on different nodes, HCI can ensure that there is always a working version available. It’s important to note that with virtualization, you can quickly activate other servers to take their place if a server fails.
Sangfor Technologies HCI solutions feature pre-integrated hypervisors and management software that enable automated recovery and quicker restarts in case of failure. Consequently, you don’t have to troubleshoot or set up new virtualization software. Instead, you use what is already available to get back up and running as soon as possible.
5. Enables Quick Transition from Legacy Hardware Infrastructures to Modern Architectures
HCIs improve data center inefficiencies by making it possible to transition from legacy hardware infrastructures to modern architectures. The current data analytics demands of today’s businesses demand a more agile infrastructure with less complicated management, which is what HCI offers. Reliable hci vendors provide different types of products with varying degrees of functionalities that address specific customer needs.
The specific benefits of an HCI solution include scalability, simplified management, and reduced operating costs. HCI solutions enable customers to adopt new technologies faster and simplify management complexity for the entire IT infrastructure stack. With a flexible architecture that supports virtualized and non-virtualized workloads, organizations can significantly reduce operating costs while delivering innovation and agility to their IT environments.
6. HCI Solution Makes It Easier for Businesses to Scale Up or Down as Needed
HCI vendors can help you reduce data center inefficiencies by simplifying the IT infrastructure. It can help improve scalability and flexibility, allowing businesses to invest in the right resources. When you implement an HCI, the physical servers act as compute nodes. That way, you can connect through an all-to-all network switch. Instead of installing an operating system on every physical server, you establish a hypervisor on every node and create virtual machines on top of them.
All the virtual machines share a standard set of physical resources with each other, so they don’t compete for system resources and can seamlessly scale when needed. The flexibility of HCI is one of its most significant benefits—it makes it easier to scale up or down as needed. It also gives businesses options for future capacity planning and resource investments.
Sangfor Technologies offers an excellent example of how this technology delivers true convergence. With built-in GPU processing and power efficiency, it provides outstanding performance for cloud computing, big data analytics, and converged storage workloads.
7. Provides a Wide Range of Applications and Workloads
Today’s data centers need to support a wide range of applications and workloads across hybrid environments that include: multiple cloud providers, private clouds, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), unified communications and collaboration platforms, next-generation data analytics, mobile apps, and BYOD initiatives. Although HCIs significantly improve data center operations, including lowering TCO by 50 percent in most cases, they also deliver greater business agility.
8. Helps Optimize Resource Allocations and Use Across All Levels of IT Stack
HCI systems take a design that helps optimize the allocation and use of resources across all layers of the IT stack, including compute, storage, networking, and security. The result is a system architecture with far greater flexibility, agility, scalability, and efficiency than traditional data center architectures. HCI solutions are designed to be easily deployed and rapidly scaled as enterprise needs change in response to evolving business requirements or emerging technologies.
Reliable hci vendors offer guarantees about service levels for availability, performance, and disaster recovery. They have up-to-date expertise on best practices for operations staff to minimize outages caused by human error or unpredictable events like earthquakes.
Conclusion
HCI can help improve data center inefficiencies by reducing the need for separate storage, networking, and compute resources and improving data center performance by consolidating these resources into a single platform. Additionally, HCI can help reduce the amount of power and cooling required by the data center. By simplifying the data center infrastructure, HCI can also help reduce the time and money needed to manage and maintain it. You can contact Sangfor Technologies to learn more about how hyper-convergence can help you with your specific data center needs.
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