Organisations in all sectors seek the most effective infrastructure. As business data explodes, IT decision-makers face additional challenges.

Choosing weak storage solutions can have devastating consequences for businesses. Therefore, it’s paramount for organisations to invest in an efficient IT solution that brings together all the required infrastructure components.

Businesses need something that will reduce costs and boost workplace productivity. Luckily, the perfect solution exists, and that is hyperconverged infrastructure. It provides ease of management, simplicity of deployment and uniform scaling. Due to these features, HCI is very beneficial for operational efficiency

Let’s further discuss the concept of hyperconverged infrastructure and its benefits.

Understanding Hyperconverged Infrastructure

HCI or hyperconverged infrastructure is an IT framework that combines networking, computing and storage into a single platform. Its two significant benefits are increased scalability and reduced data centre complexity.

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As opposed to conventional enterprise storage infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure has a significant advantage – you can customise it to be flexible and managed effortlessly. Hyperconverged infrastructure provides reliability, scalability, data protection and much more.

And yet, it’s not for everyone. For instance, it doesn’t benefit applications that require low latency. On the contrary, it is helpful for applications that have the right workload, as it decreases costs and simplifies IT. 

HCI has become an appropriate platform for private cloud, enterprise applications, databases and edge computing deployments. Namely, smaller enterprises which need more reliable and quicker storage solutions can benefit from a hyperconverged infrastructure system.

The technology landscape is growing faster than ever, and more and more companies are shifting to the cloud. The workload requirements progress and companies realise the impending need to include nodes in their systems.

And they can only achieve this through a complete software-defined storage solution. For this reason, companies need an HCI system as it provides essential solutions and prevents the need to utilise separate management tools. 

Businesses should learn the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure to make a well-informed decision. 

Benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Businesses

Scalability

Scalability is a top reason for organisations to choose hyperconverged infrastructure. Each HCI appliance is a self-contained unit built from the ground up and allows the extension of data centre capacity by attaching another unit. 

An HCI cluster consists of nodes – preconfigured building blocks. Since these self-contained units can be pre-optimized, admins can add them effortlessly without struggling with integration issues.

Simple and Flexible Design

Even if HCI isn’t cloud-based, this doesn’t mean it isn’t suitable for the cloud era. Hyperconverged infrastructure’s framework has a simple and flexible design, eliminating silos and other obstacles that slow down progress.

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This is beneficial for organisations as they can complete tasks more rapidly – and being able to act promptly is critical in today’s fast-paced world

Workload Consolidation

Hyperconverged systems assemble core storage, compute functionality and networking into a unique, highly virtualized solution. HCI’s ability to reinforce several IT functions like deduplication and backup into one platform is beneficial for organisations. 

Hyperconverged infrastructure makes it easy to migrate virtual machines between data centres and several appliances. 

Reliability

Hyperconverged infrastructure has a built-in multi-node architecture, thus providing a reliable system. An HCI platform has an inbuild disaster recovery and fault tolerance, so other nodes can fix the issue if one node fails to function correctly. 

Also, this aspect involves self-healing capabilities that recognize and address issues immediately. Admins won’t experience any workload disruption while adding or replacing nodes. 

Streamlined Management

For traditional systems, companies need experts to manage each distinctive element: computing, networking and storage. Fortunately, a hyperconverged infrastructure makes a significant difference in management, simplifying the issue. Thanks to it, consultants and the general tech staff can oversee the whole setup. 

With these HCI solutions, businesses can streamline their management processes. Administrators can utilise a single platform that reinforces administrative tasks, and thus, they can remove the management silos of the conventional infrastructure. Moreover, it provides additional time for the IT staff, and they get to focus on other crucial tasks, like developing new initiatives. 

Enhanced Performance

Hyperconverged infrastructure has another significant benefit: it improves workload performance. And this applies even when it’s running several application types. 

It even meets the performance requirement of diverse workloads. Plus, it accommodates varying performance demands without reconfiguring the whole hardware. 

Reduced Costs

Lowering costs of workloads is one common reason why companies adopt hyperconverged infrastructure. It can solidify hardware resources and magnify their use. Plus, it remarkably reduces the need to use more servers and diminishes the power and cooling demands.

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Since it’s possible to build hyperconverged infrastructure using commodity hardware, enterprises can cut costs as they no longer have to deploy specialised servers, network components, or storage. HCI utilises direct-attached storage, helping organisations avoid significant expenses that come with implementing and managing a storage area network. Using reference architecture, they can buy hyperconverged infrastructure software and develop an HCI platform.

Adequate Data Protection and Storage

Since HCI includes data storage and protection in its infrastructure, it can make the processes more effective and clear-cut. It also provides data protection functionalities like snapshots and data duplication. Plus, it makes disaster recovery and prevention much more effortless. 

HCI is software-centred, allowing organisations to regularly back up their data through public cloud storage. Distributing data across several nodes, HCI ensures the business remains intact when just a single piece of hardware declines.

Automated Infrastructure

Many IT infrastructures are complex and diverse, thus, making automation difficult to achieve. But in HCI storage, everything is virtualized, including support services and servers. This means it is possible to automate routine operations when implementing centralised management tools like scheduling. 

The software allows administrators to deploy cloud infrastructure effortlessly and rapidly, eliminating time-consuming tasks, such as provisioning storage, that would otherwise be performed manually. It also automates complex processes, like patching and upgrading. Implementing hardware from various product lines or manufacturers is no longer a concern in IT – there’s a single unified environment that includes everything. 

The Bottom Line

Companies must adopt hyperconverged infrastructure if they want to decrease the complexity of network management. They can start by reviewing their current infrastructure and establish what they want to achieve by shifting to hyperconverged infrastructure. This will help them clarify their needs and determine what features they need to focus on the proper vendor offerings.