Businesses are constantly on the lookout for new technologies and concepts that can give them a competitive advantage. IT departments need to balance the benefits of those new technologies, though, with the complexity of installing and maintaining them. The best technologies enable new opportunities and overcome established obstacles. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is on the verge of being one of those technologies enabling what Skip Bacon, VMware’s Vice President for Partner Development, Storage and Availability, insightfully called, “disruption without disrupting.”
The digitization of business is making investments in software-defined IT resources a no-brainer, particularly as the expectations of technology become increasingly incongruent with reality. As businesses generate and consume more data, few feel they can afford to wait or pay more for results. If a resource is digitized, the expectation is that it should be fast and easy to access and use. The reality, however, is that 73 percent of enterprises are reporting poor app performance, and wait time for storage deployment is averaging five weeks. In a digital world, these are unacceptable norms. Software-defined IT resources can improve those stats, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to business benefits.
Business Benefits of HCI
Higher expectations around scalability, responsiveness, manageability, automation, and cost-effectiveness are the new IT metrics in a software-defined business environment where demands are always on and can come from anywhere. To thrive in this taxing business reality, HCI can help IT departments reach and exceed expectations while limiting the hassles of installation, preparing for future demand, and improving cost effectiveness.
HCI solutions can come in a single server stack—including storage, compute, and management—to ease installation. Additionally, more capacity can be easily scaled up by adding HCI nodes, allowing businesses and IT departments to adjust to dynamic business demands. In business terms, HCI can lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by 50 percent and reduce application launch times to five seconds, all while simplifying operations through a single-policy drive and automated interface.
With demand for IT resources on the rise, legacy technology not meeting the current (let alone future) demand, and an easy-to-install, future-proof solution in HCI, the only question is, On which side of disruption do you want your IT department and company to be?
Explore this infographic to learn more about what HCI can do for your business. For additional industry insight on trends in hyper-converged storage, view the IDC whitepaper.
Source of the news: http://www.vmware.com/radius/hci-infographic/