In recent years, the popularity of hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, has grown at explosive rates.
Primarily, customers have loved the simplicity of deployment, the ease of management, and the readily available, uniform scale. Traditional HCI makes Day 0 and Day 1 much easier—but for Day 2 operations and beyond, there are headaches and complexities that persist. IT admins continue to fight fires, make performance trade-offs, and generally maintain a reactive attitude toward infrastructure. With artificial intelligence, that’s about to change.
What if your HCI platform went from software-defined to AI-driven?
To date, HCI has provided efficiency and automated processes—as well as an on-demand paradigm—that’s made things easier. But HCI isn’t immune to unexpected disruptions and delays to your applications and it’s not predictive or self-optimizing; while it’s much easier to manage resources than hardware-confined infrastructure, it’s not autonomous. Here’s where we have an opportunity to evolve the concept of what HCI can be—by moving from a software-defined experience to an AI-driven one.
Artificial intelligence is very much the buzz-worthy concept in IT today. AI-driven operations and insights can transform IT’s approach to infrastructure management, moving from a reactive to a predictive model. HPE InfoSight, the industry’s most advanced AI for infrastructure, has led this transformation through cloud-based machine learning and deep telemetry that provide global intelligence across our installed base. HPE InfoSight not only enables infrastructure to be self-managing, self-optimizing, and self-healing. Its predictive analytics have saved customers over 1.5 million hours of lost productivity in the last decade. That’s a lot of Day 2 challenges that didn’t impact businesses.
In order to evolve to a new model of intelligent HCI, we’ve enabled HPE InfoSight in our HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged offering. You can now enjoy the power of HPE InfoSight—with its predictive resource planning, global visibility and analytics, and support case automation—and let HPE InfoSight take the work out of managing infrastructure.
For each job, you need the right tool
But we’re not yet finished completely re-imagining HCI. The other half of this new concept of what HCI can be involves examining how HCI should be leveraged for your workloads. Often overlooked in customers’ delight with the HCI experience is an assessment of the architecture and its suitability for the growing number of workloads that IT teams need to support. Having had great results using HCI for general-purpose apps, edge deployments, and ROBO environments, organizations now want that HCI experience for larger scale consolidation and on more demanding workloads. That will work in some cases. But in others, the performance and scaling demands of the application will call for external storage.
We choose our tools based on the job we need to do, and with workloads it’s much the same. What has conventionally defined HCI is ideal for workloads with predictable rates of storage and compute growth. But for disaggregated scaling and business-critical apps requiring high IO performance and six-nines availability, you look to a three-tiered infrastructure first. A single hammer can’t do it all and trying to run all your apps solely on HCI is risky—and will inevitably leave admins reacting to service interruptions and potentially compromising on SLAs.
Given these considerations, IT leaders clearly need to be asking what provides the right architectural solution. Many organizations enjoying HCI but needing the flexibility to grow compute and storage independently and support demanding workloads have opted to run critical apps on segregated three-tier architectures. But in doing so, they’ve introduced siloed workloads and unwanted complexity into their IT management. There’s a better way.
What if you had the hyperconverged experience for every VM?
HPE delivers the most efficient all-in-one hyperconverged infrastructure in the industry with HPE SimpliVity. With a simple, scale-out architecture, HPE SimpliVity has helped thousands of customers simplify and eliminate waste. The architecture intelligently self-manages efficiency, performance, and resiliency without the need for manual tuning or configuration tradeoffs, and it’s hyper-efficient and cloud-connected.
But here’s what’s new: Earlier this year HPE introduced a fresh take on hyperconverged infrastructure that we call disaggregated HCI, or dHCI. The beauty of HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is that it delivers the simple HCI experience that organizations know and love—in an architecture with flexible scaling that’s fully capable of handling Tier 1 workloads. This is disaggregated infrastructure that doesn’t require a storage admin and doesn’t introduce the complexity of silos, but does deliver six-nines of availability and the sub-ms latency and high performance that business-critical apps demand.
Combine HPE SimpliVity with HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, and you’ve got complementary products that can power every VM with a hyperconverged experience that’s optimized to the needs of the workload.
The evolution of HCI is now
We are helping our customers reimagine HCI, going beyond software-defined to AI-driven. Our portfolio brings the hyperconverged experience to every VM and workload—from edge/ROBO to general-purpose to business-critical and larger-scale consolidation—with two workload-optimized architectures. Above this infrastructure, a unified hyperconverged control plane provides fluid, software-defined resources, accelerated app delivery via automation, and VM-centric management and data services. And above that, the global intelligence of HPE InfoSight powers autonomous IT operations across your HCI environment, so you can focus on driving the business.
HPE SimpliVity and HPE Nimble Storage dHCI: they’re the industry’s most complete and intelligent hyperconverged systems.
Learn more about hyperconverged infrastructure
Read:
- Press release: Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduces AI-driven hyperconverged infrastructure
- Related blog: Take a look at me now – HPE SimpliVity with AI
- Solution brief: Powerhouse hyperconverged infrastructure with HPE SimpliVity
- IDC white paper: HPE Introduces a New Disaggregated HCI Architecture with HPE Nimble Storage dHCI
David Wang
Director, Product Marketing, HPE Storage
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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David-Wang
Director, Product Marketing, HPE Storage Creator, storyteller, showing the world how intelligence changes everything
