Boost SMB agility with next-gen hyperconverged infrastructure solutions

[ComputeExperts]

HCI solutions are evolving to meet today’s hybrid and microservice-oriented environments. Understand how these next-generation solutions can help your business realize big gains.

By Compute Experts guest blogger Jim Rapoza, VP & Principal Analyst at Aberdeen

Hyperconverged infrastructures have had a huge impact on businesses in their journey to modernize and transform their compute, storage, and networking capabilities. By unifying all the key elements of a data center in a software-defined environment, hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) enable organizations to be more agile and innovative.

Research from Aberdeen has found that organizations with HCI realize serious gains, and these benefits have an even greater impact on small to midsized businesses. They see faster performance, higher availability, and increased data storage scalability.

However, many still think of HCI as a new, emerging technology, even though it has existed for around 10 years. In other words, if HCI was a smartphone, you would definitely be planning to upgrade.

An HCI Evolution

Leading solution providers are innovating and working to evolve HCI into a new generation, with capabilities and features designed for the needs of today’s hybrid and microservice-oriented environments. And when these new solutions are deployed within SMBs, they can revolutionize their infrastructures.

Think about where data centers and IT infrastructures were just a few years ago. Hybrid cloud was still bleeding edge technology, container-based applications were just coming onto the scene, and AI-enabled IT systems were extremely rare. Those first generation HCI systems weren’t built for these technologies and, when used today, can limit the ability of a small-to-midsized business to effectively take advantage of emerging trends.

So of course, it makes sense that HCI solutions would evolve to meet these new technology demands and requirements. And this is exactly what Aberdeen is seeing in the market now, with next-generation HCI systems.

Next-Generation HCI Systems

Among the key features of these next-generation HCI systems are improved intelligence and automation, which speed management, analytics, and the predictive capabilities of the infrastructure. And since these solutions are built for a hybrid cloud world, they take advantage of these environments for increased scalability, faster deployment, and high business continuity. In fact, Aberdeen research has found that SMBs with a next-generation HCI are 75% more likely to see improvements in business continuity.

When you think of the challenges that SMBs face today in their IT infrastructure, the last thing they need is legacy systems that make them less agile and innovative. These SMBs need to be more efficient and lower costs, they need less complexity in their IT operations, they need the highest levels of reliability, and they need solutions that enable them to beat their competitors in agility and innovation.

Unless you’re attending some kind of retro mobile computing event, you wouldn’t be showing off your 10-year-old smartphone. And the same is true of the vital technology running the infrastructure of an SMB.

To become more agile, innovative, and effective, leading SMBs need to continue to evolve and innovate. And to do that, they need to ensure that vital systems like HCI are evolving as well, meeting the needs of 2021—not 2011.

Learn more about HPE's next-generation HCI 2.0.  

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Meet our Compute Experts guest blogger Jim Rapoza, VP and Principal Analyst at Aberdeen. 

For over 25 years Jim Rapoza has been using, testing, and writing about the newest technologies in software, enterprise hardware, and the Internet. He previously served as the director of an award-winning technology testing lab based in Massachusetts and California. Rapoza is also the winner of five awards of excellence in technology journalism and co-chaired a summit on technology industry security practices. He is a frequent speaker at technology conferences and expositions and has been regularly interviewed as a technology expert by national and local media outlets including CNN, ABC, NPR, and the Associated Press.

Compute Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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