How the Cloud Changed Everything
It wasn’t long ago that IT departments were the sole gatekeepers of technology. Not anymore. Today, line-of-business (LOB) leaders and application developers can (and do) purchase “instant infrastructure” from a variety of external cloud providers. And as more business apps move into the cloud, IT departments are feeling left out in the cold.
Wish as they might, IT departments can’t put the cloud genie back in the bottle. But they can bottle what the cloud has to offer, through hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). HCI provides a pre-validated, pre-integrated IT infrastructure that can be quickly configured, deployed, scaled and managed in minutes—not days or weeks. Sound familiar? It should. HCI is the same underlying technology that the big cloud providers use to power their massive data centers.
Re-Imagine Your Data Center
Building a virtual data center is a significant achievement, but it’s not the end of the journey. Machine virtualization is an important first step towards the real goal of a software-defined data center (SDDC). Virtual machines (VMs) reduce costs, improve flexibility and increase resource utilization. They won’t, however, make your data center as fast and simple to use as one of those big-name cloud providers. For that, you need automation and orchestration.
Think of your data center transformation as a continuum:
- In phase one, infrastructure shifted from standalone hardware and software to pre-validated, best-of-breed solutions based on a specific vendor’s (or group of vendors’) reference architecture.
- In phase two, converged infrastructure appeared. Led by companies like VCE, converged infrastructure delivered pre-validated and pre-integrated racks of compute, network and storage blocks. These blocks were faster to deploy and easier to scale, but they were still managed by separate compute, network and storage teams.
- We’re now entering phase three, hyper-converged infrastructure. With HCI, compute and storage capacity is sold in bricks with a single toolset for complete management and administration. There’s no need to buy dedicated blocks anymore, and no need for individual teams to maintain them.
