Today, work doesn’t just happen at the office. To stay competitive and increase productivity, enterprises around the globe are looking to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) with VM support to provide increased flexibility compared to conventional hardware-defined infrastructure.
The most effective HCI solutions provide management simplicity, cloud options, efficiency, increased availability, fast backup and restore, in addition to the consolidation of the data-center footprint.
HPE SimpliVity, a leader in HCI solutions, provides all of the above and more.
The benefits of HCI
As a solution, HCI relies on virtualization for compute, storage and network. Underlying storage and compute hardware are abstracted from software-defined controls and functionality.
This is in direct contrast to traditional hardware-defined infrastructure, or converged infrastructure (CI). HCI tends to be less complex and costly to mange due to being software-defined.
An HCI system also typically includes a hypervisor for virtual machines (VMs), a virtual storage area network (SAN), and software-defined networking. As an additional bonus, HCI instances can run on commercial “off-the-shelf” server hardware.
Considerations when selecting an HCI solution
When selecting an HCI solution, there are three aspects that should be considered above all else: simplicity, manageability, and efficiency.
As previously stated, when compared to CI solutions, HCI is typically less complex to manage. HPE SimpliVity offers increased management simplicity through components such as HPE InfoSight, which makes use of telemetry and machine learning. Together, these simplify the experience with predictive resource planning to anticipate and correct infrastructure problems.
When compared to similar solutions, HPE SimpliVity offers enterprises an all-in-one solution that is easy to manage and scale, reducing the management burden on IT, and increasing their productivity.
Additionally, HCI solutions should drive efficiency across the enterprise. By having all of the infrastructure running on a software-defined basis, applications are both faster and more highly available. In terms of data efficiency, HPE SimpliVity’s always-on inline deduplication and compression guarantees 90 percent capacity savings across primary storage and backup saving costs.
The freedom provided by VM solutions
Enterprises are increasingly looking for flexible solutions that offer additional productivity and facilitate communication regardless of where users may be. HPE SimpliVity supports this by allowing remote workers to access data and applications from anywhere via VM connectivity.
In fact, HPE guarantees that SimpliVity’s built-in backup capability can complete a local backup or local restore of a 1 TB VM in less than one minute, on average. Additionally, from the HPE SimpliVity interface, which is fully integrated with the hypervisor, it only takes three clicks to back up, restore and move, or clone a VM, all from a single console.
The user interface, from a central location, can also be used to create or update backup policies for thousands of VMs, across dozens of sites, in only minutes.
Additionally, adding or replacing HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged systems will not create downtime for local or remote sites, will not disrupt local or remote HPE SimpliVity backups, require reconfiguration of SimpliVity, or backup policies for local or remote sites.
IT can also make use of HPE InfoSight for additional visibility into VM neighbors, and insights into VM storage utilization, to allow IT to identify high consuming VMs and implement corrective actions.
All of this combined means that users experience a smooth and uninterrupted VM solution that is as easy for them to use as it is for IT to manage.
Ready for a new kind of HCI solution?
HPE SimpliVity brings cloud agility, scalability, and simplicity to the enterprise data center. It streamlines IT operations for a fast, simplified, and efficient hyperconverged platform that combines IT infrastructure and data services into a single, integrated solution. Enterprises searching for a VM solution will discover the increased productivity and flexibility that HPE SimpliVity offers, as well as uninterrupted access at all levels of the enterprise. All at a fraction of the cost of traditional CI solutions. If you’re ready to make the change now, contact WEI to begin building a custom solution for your business.
