The digital economy is putting pressure on IT to deliver apps and services fast. The problem is, many IT environments aren’t equipped to deliver the responsiveness that business demands. That’s because traditional infrastructure is often siloed, requiring multiple resources to manage effectively. With hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), organisations can achieve greater agility, reduce TCO and build a future-ready foundation for whatever lies ahead.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

With HCI, compute, storage, and networking are tightly integrated on industry-standard x86 servers, enabling a building-block approach to a modern, software-defined data centre (SDDC). All key data centre functions run as software on the hypervisor in a tightly integrated software layer.

Three main components make up a complete HCI solution:

• Compute virtualisation enables consolidation and better utilisation of the underlying infrastructure while simplifying management, increasing agility and minimising downtime. This results in a reduction in both CapEx and OpEx.
• Storage virtualisation reduces storage hardware costs and delivers a dynamic, agile, and automated approach to storage that aligns to business and application needs.
• Network virtualisation transforms the network operational model by attaching network and security services to the workload, bringing flexibility and automation to the network layer.

HCI can be implemented as an all-in-one solution. But it doesn’t have to happen all at once. Depending on business needs and budget constraints, you can virtualise compute and storage first and then virtualise networking later.

In addition, intelligent operations management helps maximise the return on HCI investments. It delivers proactive performance monitoring and troubleshooting, insight into costs as well as workload placement, capacity management and planning across infrastructure and applications.

HCI Provides a Path to a Modern Infrastructure

With hyper-converged infrastructure, you can reduce or eliminate the use of traditional, hardware-centric approaches to compute, storage, and networking. Unified operations management across all three data centre functions streamlines operations, accelerates decision making and maximises uptime and utilisation.

And once all key data centre functions are running in software, you can achieve the speed you need to get and stay ahead in the fast-paced digital economy of today and tomorrow.

Boost agility

• Deliver IT services and SLAs efficiently, reliably, and on-demand
• Simplify operations and lifecycle management
• Converge processes, teams and tools

Reduce Total Cost of Ownership

• Reduce acquisition, as well as ongoing scaling and maintenance costs by shifting to simplified hardware architectures and server economics
• Leverage existing skill sets and tools while getting the most out of existing hardware and software infrastructure investments
• Minimise disruption and avoid custom integration costs by seamlessly integrating with third-party services, solutions, and vendors of choice

Evolve with Less Risk

• Run and manage apps across clouds while effectively managing the availability, security, and performance of IT services across multi-cloud environments
• Future-proof your infrastructure for next-gen apps and hardware advancements
• Maintain flexibility in the future with a vendor that provides access to a broad ecosystem of solutions

So for businesses to remain competitive, IT needs a modern infrastructure that leverages the power and efficiency of virtualisation across all components of the data centre – compute, storage, and networking – with common management across all three. We partner with VMWare to help organisations establish a software-defined environment of natively integrated compute, storage, and network virtualisation technologies with automation and management, to support any workload from traditional enterprise applications to modern cloud-native applications.

‘The Future is Hyper-Converged’ excerpts taken from the VMWare trend brief ‘Boost Agility and Innovation with a Modernised Infrastructure’