What If You Could Get 54 Minutes Back on Every Hour?

[LWhitehouse]

In all corners of the world, people are looking for ways to spend more time on what’s important to them. Businesses are responding with efficient, consolidated services and devices. Online superstores provide one-stop shopping, dinner-in-a-box services deliver meal prep kits for the entire week, and smart watches deliver a GPS locator with a fitness tracker that links to your phone. The trend toward consolidation and convergence is giving people much more than multi-functional solutions – it’s giving them time back.

Imagine incorporating that kind of consolidation in the data center. Think how much more an IT organization could accomplish with technology so efficient, it gives hours of time back every day. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) can do that.

The Vicious Cycle of Inefficiency

Inefficiency often stems from complexity. Data center infrastructure can include a dozen siloed components from almost as many vendors. Each device and software product has its own management interface, compatibility issues, and upgrade schedule. Administrators must manage capacity on secondary storage, perform upgrades on WAN optimization devices, and set policies for workloads regarding backup and recovery. Whenever a workload is moved or a new component is added to the mix, policies and devices across the environment need to be upgraded or modified. With nearly a dozen devices all aging at different rates, this process can turn into a seemingly endless maintenance cycle.

Legacy infrastructures were never meant to support the volume or diversity of today’s workloads. Aging, siloed components can slow down the entire environment, straining IT resources and taking IT managers away from more productive work or, worse, making them give up nights and weekends to keep the infrastructure functional.

HCI Transforms Data Centers

Organizations today are transforming their IT departments, replacing inefficient systems with more cost-effective, intelligent solutions. Operational efficiency is a key reason for the rapid adoption of HCI. The efficiency comes from the integration of multiple IT components into a compact, software-defined platform that is simple enough to be managed without specialized training. Because it’s software-defined, dozens of mundane tasks can be automated in an HCI environment. Hyperconvergence can provide enormous time savings – if it is the right hyperconverged infrastructure.

In a recent study, IDC underscores that fact: Although converging servers and storage into a single compact device makes every hyperconverged solution more space efficient compared to traditional infrastructure, it is the software-defined technology and built-in data services that determine overall operational efficiency. According to the study,organizations that use HPE SimpliVity, powered by Intel®, gain back as much as 91 percent of their time. In other words, an organization that currently spends an hour on a particular task in a traditional environment could accomplish that same task in less than 6 minutes with HPE SimpliVity. 

A biomedical research institution interviewed in the study decided to move to HCI because they were “…overworked and understaffed, so how can we find a way for the staff to get more done? I see HCI as a way to do that. [HPE] SimpliVity is driving real operational simplicity.”

Another organization in the report operates more than 10 resorts and supports 25 different business applications. The hospitality company was similarly won over by the operational simplicity and centralized VM-centric management. One executive said, “We will soon be at a point where the data in our datacenter will strictly be on [HPE] SimpliVity.”

With HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure, IT administrators can complete complex tasks that used to take hours or days in minutes, giving them time – and possibly their weekends – back. The hyper-efficient solution includes built-in backup and disaster recovery, WAN optimization, dedupe, and compression. VM-centric, policy-based management and mobility further simplify the infrastructure, giving additional time back to the IT organization for strategic activities.

To see the full results of the HCI study and learn more about the operational efficiencies that customers experienced, read the IDC report.  For more information on hyperconvergence, download the Dummies Guide to HCI.

Lauren Whitehouse
Marketing Director, HPE Software-Defined and Cloud Group,
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

 @lauwhitehouse
 linkedin.com/in/lwhitehouse/

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