Organizations need to respond quickly and reliably to changes, whether they’re related to customers, market changes, natural disasters or employees’ needs. And AI innovations often hold the key to growing the business, but only with quick action. At the same time, they need reliable and faster performance while staying within budget.
Without the tools to make fast deployments and scale the business appropriately, companies miss opportunities, lose customers and lag behind competitors. The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) found that 81% of organizations feel that their current cloud infrastructure requires improvement to fully support cloud native applications and containers.
Organizations are turning to Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) to meet the increasing demands on their infrastructure.
Put simply, HCI is an IT architecture that tightly integrates computing, storage and networking resources into one single appliance. These systems use innovative software to combine standard data center hardware via locally attached storage resources to create a streamlined, agile solution. The goal is to replace legacy infrastructure with consolidated, scalable, software-defined infrastructure.
Organizations using HCI see a range of benefits, including fast deployment, turnkey infrastructure, superior performance, unmatched resilience, compatibility and flexibility. However, real-time applications that demand low latency and high IOPS don’t typically gel with hyperconverged infrastructure.
HCI is best suited to workloads that scale in a linear manner. In these instances, required computing resources such as CPU, RAM, storage and networking grow at similar rates. HCI scales by adding new nodes, each of which are comprised of full computing, storage and networking hardware. If a workload requires just one of these components, it can only be provisioned by adding all of them. And, that is wasted resources.
Nutanix recently announced that its Nutanix AOS with built-in hypervisor for virtualization allows running from a public cloud. IT teams can now control multiple infrastructures by making them all look the same and run the same environments. With this new capability, HCI platforms no longer must be tied to an on-premise datacenter and can now be based only from a public cloud.
The quintessential hyperconvergence infrastructure workload is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. VDI environments scale predictably, and each node can host a set number of virtual desktops (VDs). And, since each node houses the same hardware, IT teams can quickly and easily determine the number of nodes required to host the desired amount of VDs.
DiabetesTeam, a topic-specific social network, switched to VDI using HCI to help better serve over 350,000 people living with type 2 diabetes. Before VDI, every new hire required hours of setup that included installing apps, resolving permission issues and synchronizing systems, which slowed down onboarding and frustrated both the hire and the organization’s IT team. After implementing VDI, the team set up virtual desktops in less than two hours instead of shipping laptops or managing endless device variations. Within the first month, DiabetesTeam saw a 63% decrease in IT support tickets and reduced the average onboarding time from five to two days.
“This allowed us to scale our content and community teams faster, particularly in locations with significant member growth. Whether someone joined from Kansas or Idaho, they logged into the same secure, consistent environment,” says Tomas Melian, senior VP at DiabetesTeam. “That increased trust and saved us from a lot of back and forth. VDI did more than just fix IT; it allowed us to move faster while maintaining privacy and quality.”
With HCI, an organization’s data can be consolidated in a central location and then accessed by employees in their local office, on the go or at home. What’s more, there’s no need to hire an IT professional for each ROBO location. Instead, IT administrators at the company’s main office can maintain, monitor and manage the IT infrastructure as if they were right there onsite.
When FNCB Bank needed to quickly move its workforce remotely in 2020, they were able to do it within days due to their use of HCI. Because of the ability for IT to set up the infrastructure for each employee, the bank was operating its business as usual within a few days. The bank was also able to improve capacity planning, making it easy to expand remote locations.
“We wanted to make broader-scale change and not just swap out parts — actually make a meaningful change in strategy going forward,” says Kirk S. Borchert, vice president and technology services officer at FNCB Bank.
Applications that are critical to business operations are another ideal candidate for HCI. Why? Because HCI delivers the high level of availability organizations need for essential workloads. Vendors offer extra layers of redundancy too, including the capability to mirror nodes and clusters.
At SmartSites, an award-winning digital marketing agency, Tier 1 workloads aren’t just a tech label — they power the backend for every campaign, content push and real-time SEO adjustment. Brandy Hastings, project manager and SEO strategist at SmartSites, says that before switching to HCI, their team constantly hit snags during bulk updates and technical audits. She says that HCI gave them the stability and speed to roll out across large properties, which used to require staggering to avoid crashing the system.
“Our SEO, development and analytics teams began to collaborate much more closely as a result of HCI's shared, always-on environment. I've seen our turnaround time for technical issues cut in half — what used to take days now takes hours,” says Hastings. “Adding new client sites or launching staging environments used to feel like a balancing act. Now, onboarding a big enterprise account doesn't trigger infrastructure anxiety — we know the system can flex with us.”
Each HCI system contains computing, networking and storage components that can be segregated from production and other facilities. This makes them ideal for application development and testing. What’s more, HCI offers fast and precise deployment — teams can select the exact number of nodes (even as little as two or three, if needed) required.
When Your Doctors Online, a telehealth platform that connects users with physicians, was creating its symptom checker, they could not afford a slow or clunky development process to help their patients — many use the system at 2 am while in pain. By using HCI, the Your Doctors Online team reduced test cycles by nearly 40% during the rollout, making it possible to launch earlier, assist more patients and respond faster when needed to push fixes.
“We were able to use HCI to clone live settings, test on anonymized real-world data and identify key edge cases, such as symptoms that showed differently across age groups or genders,” says Raihan Masroor, founder and CEO of Your Doctors Online. “Without HCI, we would have spent weeks manually setting it up and most likely missed key insights.”
Organizations are also using HCI to manage both VMs and cloud native (Kubernetes) applications, making it possible to manage apps and data across on-premise datacenters, public cloud services and edge computing locations. Nutanix Cloud Platform allows IT teams to manage virtualized (HCI) systems and use Kubernetes to orchestrate containerized applications. Teams can then manage older and new apps using one platform (interface) that helps manage resources and governance (updates and policies), as well as scale to meet new needs, which often include AI-based apps.
With HCI, IT administrators can apply sophisticated data protection and disaster recovery systems across an entire organization’s infrastructure even if it’s geographically dispersed. After FNCB Bank moved to HCI, they also improved their disaster recovery. Previously, the connection between primary and backup data centers required running a hot/cold environment.
“By moving to Nutanix, with the synchronization that’s taking place, if we lost our primary site, we would come up on Nutanix within a few minutes,” said Borchert.
HCI also makes it possible to easily connect and manage external storage from any location. HCI provides software-defined-infrastructure management of hardware (servers) with integrated compute, storage and networking in one server blade. This design makes it possible for employees to access storage across other HCI-powered hardware through Nutanix Cloud Platform.
While future trends and direction of technology are constantly changing, organizations need reliability, scalability and affordability to be poised to make strategic decisions. HCI provides businesses the infrastructure needed as the foundation for key use cases and new business challenges arising in the future.
This is an updated version of the article originally published on July 9, 2020.
Michael Brenner has written hundreds of articles on sites such as Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, and The Guardian and he speaks at dozens of leadership conferences each year covering topics such as marketing, leadership, technology and business strategy. Follow him @BrennerMichael.
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