Understanding Risk in Modern IT Infrastructure
Infrastructure risk is the likelihood that failures, misconfigurations, security gaps, or capacity constraints will disrupt the availability, performance, or integrity of the systems your business depends on. In modern environments—spanning on-premises, cloud, and edge—risk increases as complexity rises, and small issues can cascade into outages or exposures.
How Scale Computing Helps Manage Infrastructure Risk
When implementing a new IT infrastructure, there are always risks. These risks include under-provisioning or over-provisioning, hardware incompatibility, software incompatibility, network issues and outages, migration issues, downtime, disaster recovery, vendor reliability, and unexpected costs. These risks can be inflated when ripping and replacing an entire infrastructure, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions like Scale Computing Platform™ can reduce or even eliminate risks that have become common with traditional virtualization infrastructure.
Downtime Risks in Traditional Virtualization
Unplanned and Planned Downtime
Downtime can be extremely costly for organizations, and as business becomes 24/7/365, it is critical to avoid it. Scale Computing has built-in high availability into every aspect of the infrastructure to help customers avoid downtime.
Unplanned Downtime Risks
Beginning with some hardware best practices, such as providing redundant components in the hardware build, we are able to achieve impressive levels of fault tolerance in our clustering with wide striping of data across the entire cluster and high availability of VMs between cluster nodes. If a node fails, VMs are automatically failed over to other nodes in the cluster. Additionally, our built-in disaster recovery options, including failover and failback, minimize downtime even for site disasters and failures.
Planned Downtime and Maintenance Windows
Unplanned downtime is the most impactful on business, but even planned downtime is undesirable. Planned downtime for infrastructure is often used to update firmware and hypervisors, with an administrator spending hours on the process. With Scale Computing, these updates are automated and can be performed without any cluster workload downtime. Workloads are automatically moved between cluster nodes without taking any node offline to update it. The process has no manual steps other than initiation. Similarly, adding a new node to a cluster requires no downtime and only a few user steps. Most of the process is automated to improve usability.
Data Protection and Business Continuity Risks
Disaster Recovery and Resilience
Implementing disaster recovery is often yet another vendor solution that must be integrated and tested for compatibility. Scale Computing has built disaster recovery into SC//Platform and also provides disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). The built-in capabilities include continuous replication, failover, failback, and recovery.
When combined with the Scale Computing Support services, disaster recovery planning is documented within a runbook to ensure critical VMs are up and running quickly in the event of a disaster. With replication occurring as often as every 5 minutes, sending only changed data, and compressed and secured via SSH encryption, VMs can be protected between clusters or appliances across any distance. Replication is configured on a per-VM basis, so you can protect some or all of your VMs, depending on your DR needs. In the event of failure or disaster, VMs can be failed over to the remote cluster or appliance within minutes. When the primary site is recovered, VMs and data can be restored and failed back, also with only a minute of downtime.
For customers who do not have, or do not want to host, a DR site of their own, they can use our DRaaS option to replicate VMs directly to our secure, hosted facility. The same built-in capabilities simply direct VM replication to the DRaaS facility. Whatever DR strategy you use, our ScaleCare engineers will always be on hand to help you through your disaster to get you back up and running as quickly as possible.
Operational and Vendor Risks
Vendor Reliability and Lock-In
Scale Computing has built a reputation for its focus on providing solutions. A look at our customer success stories reveals a consistent theme of customer satisfaction driven by our ongoing commitment to customer support.
SC//Platform was designed to provide highly available, scalable compute and storage services while maintaining operational simplicity through intelligent software automation and simplified architecture. Scale Computing tightly controls, reviews, and maintains all third-party and open-source software used within Scale Computing HyperCore™; common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) are monitored and patched as needed at the source-code level by Scale Computing employees (with no dependencies on outside third parties), and no root or privileged access is granted to end-users or other outside representatives.
Scale Computing has complete ownership and control over SC//Platform’s design, the components included, and the updates applied to our products. Trusted Scale Computing engineers manage all software - not unreliable third-party entities or outsourced engineering teams. No root or privileged access is available to general users or outside vendors.
Some hyperconverged solutions leave hooks to plug in your own hypervisor and related management tools. This can be a complex and dangerous combination, especially concerning security management.
SC//Platform does not open the system to external parties. First, the hypervisor and management tools are included in SC//HyperCore™ and locked behind the software and a built-in firewall. More critically, the entire virtualization layer is completely embedded into the system itself. No “controller” VM or VSA is required to access or manage the cluster.
Unexpected Costs and Licensing Exposure
SC//Platform’s primary design strategy is simplicity. It is this simplicity that helps reduce many of the additional costs associated with traditional infrastructure. These costs may include training, consulting, testing, and troubleshooting.
Simply reducing the number of vendors involved in the infrastructure can significantly reduce the runaround you typically encounter with infrastructure supported by multiple vendors. There is no finger-pointing. With Scale Computing, we find solutions and resolve issues as quickly as possible. Many customers underestimate the hidden costs of vendor runaround until they face a serious issue exacerbated by vendor finger-pointing.
SC//Platform is so easy to deploy and manage that we do not require any training for our users. We walk them through the process of racking, stacking, and configuring a cluster, which can be completed in under an hour. The infrastructure enables many customers to reduce management hours from days to minutes. When it comes to SC//Platform, it is easier to discuss unexpected savings than unexpected costs.
Summary: A Practical Framework for IT Infrastructure Risk Management
The risks of moving from one infrastructure to another often stem from legacy approaches that rely on disparate components from multiple vendors, creating complexity, integration gaps, and operational inconsistencies. As organizations modernize, solutions like hyperconvergence are designed to simplify day-to-day management and reduce the points at which failures and misconfigurations occur—explore how Scale Computing reduces infrastructure risk as part of that shift. We are at the forefront of hyperconvergence, eliminating the complexity that creates the risks our customers work so hard to avoid.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the biggest risks in traditional IT infrastructure?
The biggest risks are complexity from multi-vendor stacks, misconfigurations, slow troubleshooting, and downtime exposure caused by brittle integrations and siloed tools.
How does hyperconverged infrastructure reduce infrastructure risk?
HCI reduces risk by consolidating compute, storage, and virtualization into one platform, shrinking integration points and simplifying management, patching, and support.
How does Scale Computing minimize downtime during migration?
Scale Computing supports multiple migration approaches (from DIY to fully managed) and includes capabilities that help keep operations steady during cutover, including advanced migration options and built-in resilience features.
What role does vendor control play in infrastructure risk management?
When core components come from many vendors, troubleshooting can turn into “finger-pointing” and longer outages; a single-vendor stack can simplify accountability and speed issue resolution.
Additional Resources
Disaster Recovery Strategies with Scale Computing
Scale Computing’s disaster recovery capabilities allow you to recover quickly from disasters. SC//HyperCore minimizes downtime and data loss.
How SC//Platform Lowers the Total Cost of Ownership
This white paper discusses the total cost of ownership of SC//Platform, a more affordable IT infrastructure solution for businesses of any size.
Essential Guide to Backup Disaster Recovery and Preparation
This white paper will guide on how to best prepare for IT business resilience with best practices and current technologies that help you handle future threats.