Monday, July 25, 2016

The Top 10 Characteristics and Benefits of Hyper-convergence

By: Chris West   Categories:Virtualization and Converged

The Top 10 Characteristics and Benefits of Hyper-convergence

In our last blog, (The Next Wave of Virtualization: Why Does Hyper-convergence Matter?), we introduced the concept of hyper-convergence and how it evolved. We touched on the beginnings of Server Virtualization and that typically everyone thought of VMware in that respect. 

Today’s business requirements and IT challenges are urging IT leaders to take a deeper look at their investments that will fuel growth, innovation, agility and competitive advantage.  Hyper-converged solutions offer a way to offer greater flexibility, scalability and ease of management with on-premise systems.

In this blog, I’d like to focus on the main benefits and characteristics of a hyper-converged solution. I recently came across a great article that summarizes the top 10 characteristics and benefits of hyper-convergence which I will outline below along with my views on the primary ones you should investigate further if you need more flexibility and agility in your IT environment. (You can read the full story, here.)

The top 10 characteristics and benefits of hyper-convergence:

- It’s Software Focused
- Uses Commodity X86 Hardware
- Provides Centralized Systems and Management
- Provides Enhanced IT Agility
- Offers improved Scalability and Efficiency
- Provides Lower Cost of ownership over time
- Provides Easy Automation
- Focused on VMS
- Exploits Shared Resources
- Improves Data Protection

To evaluate if this can have a positive impact on your IT environment, we’ll focus on the following characteristics:

Hyper-convergence Provides Enhanced IT Agility
Improving data agility and dealing with the pace of IT change is a major priority for CIO’s today. IT environments within organizations continue to change rapidly, with timelines shrinking, projects multiplying, and tasks becoming more complex.  With IT department’s not keeping pace with expectations, hyper-convergence can enable IT to achieve positive outcomes much faster.

Agility should provide the ability to not only create virtualized systems to support new workloads, but provide the flexibility to grow, shrink and move workloads as needed. In a hyper-converged environment, all your resources (CPU, Memory, Disk and Networking) reside under a single administrative umbrella. New server creation and workload migration in this type of environment is a piece of cake, particularly with a solution that enables consistent deduplication as a core part of its offering. It’s far easier to work with less data and delivery from your IT department will be a lot faster.

Improved Scalability and Efficiency
The building-block approach offered by hyper-converged systems lets you simply expand by adding modular, commodity hardware systems. This translates into quick and simple deployments, with virtual machines up and running within 15 minutes, according to some vendors. In a hyper-converged environment, units can be retired over time from a cluster as new ones are added, providing a continuous upgrade path. The building-block approach enables efficient use of resources and up-front costs and more manageable.

Lower Cost of ownership over time 
While hyper-converged systems have additional up front hardware and software costs, longer term costs of management, administration and customization can be much lower than traditional IT systems.

Easy Automation
Automation is one of the key components of the SDDC (software defined data centre) and aligns well with the principles of hyper-convergence.

When all resources are completely combined (everything is encapsulated in one nice, neat environment), and when centralized management tools are in place, the automation of regular systems management and administration becomes an “out of the box” capability of most hyper-converged systems.

Here is another good resource from IDC illustrating implications to your business with Nutanix hyper-converged solution.

IDC Analyst Report
IDC Compares TCO & ROI of Nutanix vs. Traditional Infrastructure
Download your copy of the report here.

At Sentia, we see the great possibilities with this new virtualization platform. It is simple and innovative while integrating infrastructure, software-defined storage and software-defined intelligence so you can deploy VMs at cloud speed, simplify your IT operations and reduce costs.

Feel free to contact us to explore how hyper-converged systems can fit into your environment.

Chris West
Chris West

Chris West

Chris has always taken a “customer-first” approach in building productive relationships with customers, partners and colleagues. With over 18 years of experience in a variety of sales, business development and customer facing roles, including IBM Canada and Lenovo, Chris brings extensive knowledge and experience to Sentia.

Other posts by Chris West
Contact author Full biography

Full biography

Chris has always taken a “customer-first” approach in building productive relationships with customers, partners and colleagues. With over 18 years of experience in a variety of sales, business development and customer facing roles, including IBM Canada and Lenovo, Chris brings extensive knowledge and experience to Sentia. Chris holds a BA in Administration with a speciality in Accounting and Human Resources from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and an Accounting and Finance diploma from Seneca College in Toronto.

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