A centralized solution eliminates the need for multiple hardware components. This reduces human resources involved in maintenance and enables you to save on power and cooling costs.
HCI also offers a scale-out architecture that allows you to stack appliances, called nodes, for greater resource utilization and better performance. This simplifies IT provisioning and helps you budget for the future.
Scalability
Scalability is the ability to quickly and seamlessly handle changes in workloads and user demand. It’s essential for businesses because it enables them to grow without investing in new resources or changing their business model. It allows them to continue generating profits and growing their customer base.
Hyperconverged infrastructure offers scalability through its integrated architecture, consolidating storage, network, and computing resources into one box. It also helps organizations save on CapEx and OpEx costs by combining hardware for data center infrastructure solutions into a single system.
The hardware used in HCI consists of stock components, which makes it possible to use a wide range of server manufacturers and models for greater flexibility and cost savings. It also allows administrators to scale up or down by adding or removing nodes in the cluster, which increases availability and reduces complexity. As a result, hyper-converged infrastructure is more accessible for troubleshooting and support. It’s also simpler to migrate workloads between tiers as needed, so users experience less disruption during migrations and expansions. Moving virtual disks between nodes in the cluster is also more efficient, which isn’t possible with traditional SAN-based systems.
Security
The centralized architecture of hyperconverged storage makes it easier to maintain and ensure data security. It also simplifies operations for backup and recovery, which is essential if you want to provide the best MSP services. With unified systems, you can streamline disaster recovery processes to meet RTO and RPO goals, reducing the time your team needs to spend on maintenance.
A hyper-converged infrastructure system uses a physical SAN or NAS array for the storage tier, switches for the networking tier, and servers with hypervisors for the compute tier. Although it requires less maintenance than traditional data center solutions, it can still require an extensive amount of time and effort from IT staff.
Similarly, converged infrastructure systems can suffer from poor performance, particularly for high-performance computing and generative AI tasks. Hyperconverged storage offers better performance than a SAN, but it may need help to meet the needs of every workload. Luckily, hyperconverged infrastructure solutions can work with a wide range of hardware so you can find the right fit for your business. Reliability
A hyper-converged solution provides a high level of reliability by eliminating the need for hardware optimized to run a specific application. This reduces costs, prevents performance bottlenecks, and increases resiliency, resulting in fewer hardware failures.
By virtualizing storage and other resources, hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies troubleshooting issues by simply shifting workloads between appliances in a cluster. Additionally, removing unnecessary hardware from the data center reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) by cutting hardware maintenance and software licensing costs.
Nutanix HCI software runs on each node in a cluster, and the platform is hardware-agnostic, so you can deploy off-the-shelf servers from any vendor or use your preexisting hardware to realize significant CapEx and OpEx savings. This freedom of choice allows you to scale up granularly and remove capacity equally quickly when not needed, so you only pay for what you use. In addition, the unified architecture delivers superior performance and resilience with a highly available, self-healing system. This is a massive advantage over traditional storage, which can suffer from performance bottlenecks.
Flexibility
Hyperconverged infrastructure lets your team focus on workloads that add value to your clients. Whether your business needs to run VMs, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), backup and disaster recovery, or a combination, HCI can be integrated into the IT infrastructure to improve performance, simplify management, and reduce costs.
As a software-focused solution, HCI can provide greater agility through virtualization and automated processes, reducing IT operational expenses and allowing admins to focus on innovation. Additionally, HCI eliminates hardware dependencies by combining storage, networking, and computing into one system. This makes it easier to upgrade and patch, resulting in less downtime.
A hyper-converged infrastructure can offer better data protection and integration with backups and disaster recovery through a unified system architecture. This enables your team to scale storage resources and respond to sudden requirements quickly by adding or subtracting nodes in a granular fashion, unlike traditional hardware-based systems, which require more costly equipment to scale storage tiers. This streamlined approach also provides excellent reliability, which can help increase your client’s trust in your IT services.
Ease of Management
Hyperconverged hardware, unlike traditional infrastructure, uses a single management console for all components. The software executes all storage-level functionalities such as auto-tiering, I/O caching, thin provisioning, snapshots, deduplication, erasure coding, QoS, and data migrations. This eliminates the need for multiple SAN environments, making it more straightforward to manage your IT systems. A solution that includes the hardware, operating system, and hypervisor in one package also saves IT teams time through quicker deployment, less testing and maintenance, and simplified patching and upgrading.
Lastly, hyper-converged storage’s inherent adaptability makes it an excellent choice for clients with business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) needs. A unified system architecture makes achieving RTO and RPO goals easier, providing your clients with the high-performance services they need while elevating your value proposition. The scalability of HCI also means that you can adjust to changing client requirements without investing in costly upgrades or overhauls. This adaptability makes you a more valuable MSP partner to your clients by enabling you to stay ahead of the curve.
