Empowering effortless scalability for your business
Scalability is a major priority for modern organizations. As companies embrace digital transformation, they consider using more services and applications from the public cloud for the dynamic elasticity of compute, networking, and storage resources that the public cloud provides. Whether it’s to meet sales demands during seasonal peaks, accommodate quarterly reporting workloads, test new products or markets, or scale back between these spikes, organizations need agility to meet resource demands during the peaks and valleys.
There are real costs involved if you can’t extend your IT infrastructure when needed. Organizations can lose actual revenue from lost sales (think a global e-tailer whose website goes down during holidays), but other costs can come in the form of dissatisfied customers, bad word of mouth, service outages due to excessive demand, or negative impacts to brand reputation, which can significantly affect business.
In addition to meeting peak demands, organizations need simple, fast scalability in some other key situations:
- Disaster recovery (DR) – After a data breach, natural disaster, or other event that causes data loss, you need to have scalability to get your applications and data up and applications up and running quickly, as defined by your organization’s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) service level agreements.
- Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) – Quickly and efficiently providing access into existing infrastructure, applications, and data to large groups of new employees requires on-demand scalability.
- Unexpected supply chain issues – Waiting for on-premises datacenter infrastructure to be deployed to support a new business initiative could result in not being first-to-market and losing the advantage. Alternatively, you can temporarily scale into the public cloud within a few hours to get a service up and running and then move the applications and data back to on-premises infrastructure when the delayed equipment arrives.
The cloud simplified scalability—but how can you leverage that?
One of the primary selling points for the public cloud, especially in its early days, was its immense scalability. Long accustomed to the limitations of on-premises storage capacity—and the frustrations and costs of extending that capacity—organizations across every industry looked to the public cloud as a must-have alternative.
Newer architectures such as hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and public cloud have simplified scalability in many ways. No longer does corporate IT have to estimate their on-premises project resource needs for a three- to five-year lifespan and purchase the infrastructure ahead of time to prepare for those needs. Overprovisioning to accommodate potential future demand is expensive, environmentally unsustainable, and adds to the IT management burden. HCI and public cloud make it possible for organizations to add resources as needed, quickly and efficiently.
But scaling in the cloud comes with its own challenges. It’s not simply a matter of a few mouse clicks and the costs can add up. As IT infrastructure has become more complex, so have the needed skills, toolsets, and processes to manage all the resources, networking, security, data, and more.
Incompatibility between on-premises and cloud infrastructure silos is another challenge. Scaling can get complicated when these disparate systems don’t play well together. And as today’s organizations adopt the hybrid multicloud operating model with multiple public cloud providers, infrastructure silos and complexity just increases.
Interruptions to services or lack of performance can also be difficult. One example of this is migrating complex on-premises applications to the public cloud. If a front-end web application requires a database to operate and there is an expectation of low latency between the application and the database, then moving the application to the cloud might not work so well with increased latency if the database remains on-premises.
Another challenge in scaling in the public cloud is that it’s easy to create new virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud as resource needs expand; however, when those peaks in demand subside and the extra resource is no longer needed, the VMs are all too often forgotten. VMs left up and running, even if now redundant, still cost the organization. With the number of VMs running into the many thousands for large enterprises, maintaining effective utilization of cloud resources and avoiding VM sprawl will help to avoid escalating costs.
If you do it right, cloud enables agility and flexibility
Leveraging public cloud for scalability provides organizations with the agility and flexibility they need to keep their operations efficient and infrastructure productive. It helps to save project costs by not overprovisioning on-premises hardware up-front and enables organizations to easily pivot along with market fluctuations and evolving customer needs.
Cloud scalability also gives organizations freedom of choice. For instance, they can reduce their dependence on secondary disaster recovery (DR) sites or co-location facilities by moving some or all of their BCDR solution to the public cloud. An on-demand scalable DR site for applications that can tolerate a recovery time objective (RTO) of hours or a couple of days can provide an innovative solution that aligns DR capabilities to the tier of application recovery required. In turn, this can free up on-premises infrastructure and reduce DR solution costs.
All this agility, flexibility, and freedom of choice depends heavily, of course, on an automated cloud platform that helps organizations overcome scalability challenges while also removing complexity across the entire hybrid multicloud spectrum.
Look to Nutanix for cloud scalability success
Nutanix makes cloud scalability truly simple by providing a single reliable, consistent Nutanix software layer that spans your entire ecosystem, from on-premises datacenters to multiple public clouds. This consistent software layer enables consistent management, networking, and security constructs with the same skills, toolsets, and IT processes across the hybrid multicloud environment.
With Nutanix, you can store an entire environment supporting a seasonal application, hibernated in the cloud in long-term object storage. This can be much less expensive than storing the application and its data all on-premises with the occupied infrastructure sitting idle waiting to be used only infrequently. Even stored in the public cloud, customers using Nutanix solutions have an opportunity to avoid paying for the cloud’s compute bare-metal nodes until they activate the environment.
Moreover, Nutanix’s license portability feature simplifies how organizations can easily leverage resources in the public cloud. Move your applications and data from on-premises datacenters to the cloud and back again, or between public clouds as needed—and apply your existing licenses where you need them.
With the simplified cloud scalability provided by Nutanix, you get the agility, flexibility, and freedom of choice to make hybrid multicloud—and your organization in general—more efficient and successful.
Visit our website for more information about how Nutanix can help your organization thrive with hybrid multicloud and application mobility.