Is hyper-converged infrastructure the right solution for your business?

Jaco Erasmus

Hardware essentially becomes a commodity supporting a host of software-based services and solutions. This offers a number of benefits, including faster provisioning time, improved agility and flexibility and simplified deployment. However, despite these benefits, converting to a hyper-converged infrastructure can be a costly exercise. It is, therefore, advisable to engage with an expert consultancy before any projects begin to determine the most cost-effective approach to maximise return on investment.

Cost and complexity

One of the biggest challenges currently faced by IT is the need to deliver essential business applications and services quickly, with a reduced total cost of ownership. However, the cost and complexity of traditional infrastructure such as data centres does not support this goal, and legacy infrastructure hinders flexibility. Cloud-based systems offer a solution to this dilemma, however for many businesses a public cloud offering is far from ideal, and private cloud solutions can prove to be too complex.

Hyper-converged infrastructure offers these organisations a different solution, providing next-generation data centre infrastructure with the agility and economic benefits of the cloud combined with the security and reliability of an on-premise solution. Essentially, hyper-converged infrastructure brings together compute and storage capability into a single server unit that can be deployed in scale-out clusters. Not only does this significantly reduce complexity and physical space required, it also offers a highly scalable architecture that is able to grow with a business to meet changing market needs.

What to consider before migrating

Generally speaking, the biggest benefit of a hyper-converged infrastructure is the ability to centrally manage all of the components of IT, which dramatically simplifies scaling and provisioning. However, there are several important considerations that must be taken into account before migrating to this type of solution.

Firstly, the entire infrastructure needs to be virtualised to leverage hyper-convergence. If an organisation is unable to achieve this, or even virtualise the basics, then this approach will not be suitable. In addition, certain legacy applications do not run well in a virtualised environment and thus will not be able to be included in a hyper-converged infrastructure. If these applications are core to the business, this is problematic.

Secondly, the cost implications can be significant. As hyper-converged infrastructure is essentially appliance-based, it is typically necessary to do a complete 'rip and replace' of all legacy hardware. The underlying hardware and software on top of this must also be compatible with this turnkey solution.

Getting help from an expert consultant

Engaging with an expert consultancy service in this regard can be highly beneficial. A consultant will be able to examine your existing infrastructure to identify what is running, and also to understand what it is the business is trying to achieve with a converged infrastructure. This will then determine what existing architecture and hardware can be re-utilised, and what needs to be replaced. This method is a far more balanced approach to simply replacing everything, and will help to determine the most cost-effective means to ensure maximum return on investment.

In addition, a consultant will be able to determine whether your business will fully benefit from the advantages of hyper-converged infrastructure by leveraging scale out capabilities and extra management layers. Ultimately, not all businesses will find hyper-convergence to be a cost-effective solution, however for the large enterprise with the need for scale-out architecture and simplified management, it can deliver significant advantages. An expert consultant will help to ensure your business obtains the optimal solution to meet your needs now and into the future.