Today’s IT leaders are at a crossroads. Behind them, there’s a long legacy of hardware and software deployment decisions that have served the business well for years. But new business requirements and application development methods have begun to test the status quo, and as they seek to modernize, they will face several difficult decisions. IT leaders can either commit to the cloud, go all in with on-premises infrastructure or evaluate something entirely new.
Despite the growing popularity of cloud-based workloads, many companies’ own enterprise data centers keep thriving and growing. Among these on-going investments is the need to upgrade or replace an organization’s current enterprise storage. Often considered the central cog in a data center network, enterprise storage plays a key custodial role in housing many organizations’ mission-critical data assets.
Did you know that 34% of IT Decision Makers reported they are concerned with adopting containers due to a lack of full visibility?1
One of the biggest struggles with managing an enterprise data center is the need for various tools with multiple interfaces to manage the different systems associated with IT. This struggle is compounded with the fact that each of these data center systems do not talk to each out of the box, and complex integrations begin to take over. HPE Synergy addresses this challenge by delivering an infrastructure that can manage the technical, as well as the organizational side by combining storage, compute, and network equipment into one.
Containers are best known for their role in simplifying application development, providing a disposable, reusable unit to modularize delivery, and bring consistency to virtually every development stage. They have demonstrated an ability to move DevOps forward by transforming the way development and infrastructure teams operate, and they have helped these teams move ever closer to continuous delivery. However, managing containers presents an entirely new challenge for most organizations. Containers, by their very nature, rely on shared resources. These may range from operating systems and application files to hosting resources including memory and CPU. When left unchecked, container use can lead to sprawl and may result in resource drain. With hooks into so many different areas, there is a strong incentive to know precisely what these containers are doing, what resources they are consuming, and how they are utilizing the network.
Despite the growing popularity of cloud-based storage, many enterprises have seen that their data centers keep thriving and growing. Companies that seek increased governance, security and protection of their data continue to invest in their own on-prem data center environments, especially when it comes to storage.
Containers are the next level of virtualization and they are here to stay. There are many reasons enterprises adopt containers. The top three reasons include:
If you are considering the idea of a Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solution for your enterprise, consider this, VMware debuted as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for HCI in 2018. It’s solution is also the fastest growing HCI solution in the world today. This should all come as no surprise for those familiar with the company behind the industry’s leading virtualization platform. VMware has paired the hypervisor that transformed data centers across the globe with their software defined storage solution, vSAN. Combined with their unified management solution, vCenter, VMware has created an HCI solution that accounted for 33% of HCI market revenue in the first half of 2017, making it the largest software vendor in the market.
The truth is that data center management has never been more challenging, and it’s only getting harder. Increased data center complexity produces an alarming rate of challenging problems. Complex infrastructure issues are impossible to effectively manage with traditional analytics and support methods. Conventional tools aren’t smart enough to recognize why complex problems occur and how to resolve them. Data centers are unable to run at optimal levels with excessive manual tuning and guesswork. Fortunately, there is a new tool for the data center.
Last week we began a discussion on the steps you need to take to prepare your enterprise for containerization; now we continue the conversation with the rest of the actions you need to take before you can deploy a containerized approach.
