To balance the seemingly incompatible needs of “keeping the lights on” and investing in the future, IT leaders are driving changes in how their organizations consume IT. They are demanding solutions that not only meet the requirements of growing businesses for performance, provisioning and rapid scaling, but ensure efficiency and resource optimization via automation, ease of use and deployment.
Hyper-converged infrastructure is one highly promising response to these demands. By collapsing core compute, storage, management and networking functions into a single appliance, vendors are able to drive the era of virtualization and software-defined everything. EMC is in this market with VSPEX BLUE, an appliance powered by VMware EVO:RAIL software, and our own software and hardware.
What are the advantages of hyper-converged infrastructure?
- Agility. By eliminating hundreds of separate processes, reducing the time required to deploy and simplifying operation and management, IT departments can focus on driving strategic initiatives, rather than constant planning and maintenance. For example, a customer can take VSPEX BLUE from power on to provisioning VMs in <15 minutes.
- Scalability. Advanced planning ceases to be a requirement with hyper-converged infrastructure. A customer can start with a single appliance and grow as needed. Using VSPEX BLUE again – adding a new appliance is just a matter of launching the initial appliance. Everything is automated and fast.
- Trust. We look at trust in two major ways: 1) One of the problems with some hyper-converged offerings is support. Since these appliances and solutions pull pieces together from multiple vendors, who does the customer call if something goes wrong? With VSPEX BLUE, there is single point of contact global 24/7 service. 2) We build data protection and security right into the appliance along with instant access to EMC software titles directly from the VSPEX BLUE Market.
IDC estimates that sales of hyper-converged solutions will grow at triple digit rates (and did, in fact, grow by 150% in 2014, compared to overall IT spending growth rate of 3-4%).
Customers and partners are crying out for simplicity and hyper-converged solutions can help them break out of the squeeze.
