Impatient, demanding customers can make life challenging.
When those customers also happen to be your colleagues, the challenge is even greater. For most IT departments, this is their reality. Businesses users have, in sense, become spoiled by the ubiquity of mobile cloud technology in their personal lives, and expect the same levels of convenience, speed, and flexibility at work.
The trouble is that IT departments aren’t start-ups with deep capital funding or mega-corporations with massive private clouds. Their existing technology is often siloed, their budgets are flat or shrinking, and about 70 percent of it is spent on maintaining the hardware and software they already have.
In the midst of these challenges, however, is real opportunity. IT departments are no longer being tasked with simply supporting the business but helping to differentiate it through the innovative and efficient use of technology such as virtualization, mobility, and the cloud. Nowhere is that change more evident than in hardware. In the past, IT departments spent a lot of time evaluating, integrating, and updating hardware and software to support a myriad of business functions.
As a result, data centers became massive, sprawling environments of multivendor technologies: an ERP system from one vendor, a storage system from another, a server platform from a third, and so on.
Then came virtualization, converged infrastructure, and the cloud. Suddenly, IT infrastructure got smaller, less expensive, and more flexible. Hardware moved from servers to racks and, later, blocks of computer, networking, and storage capacity, all in an effort to meet the dynamic nature of next-generation business applications. Today, a third type of hardware is emerging to help IT departments deliver exceptional customer service: scalable appliances. Together with racks and blocks, scalable appliances represent the core of the next-generation IT landscape.
Blocks are great when you need flexibility; you can scale out networking or storage independent of each other as application demands change. Racks are ideal for when you need scales of efficiency for large environments. Scalable appliances fill an important need in between: you can scale them up or down and manage them collectively without adding another network management layer. There are a lot of situations where scalable appliances represent an ideal fit:
- Companies with multiple manufacturing or distribution centers that need to locally deploy and centrally manage their IT resources;
- Healthcare networks that require on-site infrastructure with maximum security and minimal latency;
- Geographic deployments of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions.
In cases like these, scalable appliances give enterprises a flexible alternative to moving all of their IT into large data centers. Connecting regional offices through a hybrid cloud or creating data lakes can be challenging with shared infrastructure, even in a virtualized environment. Scalable appliances offer the ability to localize infrastructure without isolating it through fractured management layers, so that enterprises can apply the same policies to applications or data across multiple regions and manage it as easily as if it were located in a single data center.
Finally, appliances help IT organizations ease into the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) revolution, which is slowly redefining the industry. Compute and storage virtualization technologies help pool resources to ease administration and drive simplicity while setting the foundation for integration with higher-order automation tools that enable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). This cloud functionality can ultimately help IT respond quicker, with more agility and more flexibility, enabling error-free application delivery, complete asset-lifecycle management, and DevOps functionality.
You’ll see more of scalable appliances throughout 2016, beginning with the launch of VCE’s VxRail appliances. VCE sees a strong future for scalable appliances, particularly given the large customer install base of VMware, which is naturally embedded in the VxRail appliances to deliver a seamless management interface. VxRail appliances will be available in a variety of sizes (from small to large) and feature both all-Flash and hybrid storage configurations for different workloads.
To learn more about VxRail and the future of scalable appliances, talk to Rolta AdvizeX or schedule a visit to our Centers of Excellence for a live demonstration. ▪