Unlocking Simplicity: Why Turnkey IT Solutions Matter
The Shift to Distributed IT Infrastructure
This guide is all about simplification. You likely have lots of infrastructure in your data center, even if you’re a small-to-midsize business. It includes hardware and software, from servers to switches to routers to databases to firewalls to applications to …
Well, you get the idea. Essentially, there’s a lot of “stuff” involved. The more “stuff” you have, the more complicated everything becomes—from deployment to management, monitoring, securing, and everything in between. In traditional or legacy computing, these elements each have their own little fiefdoms—they’re all managed separately. We refer to that as being “siloed.”
Silos are highly inefficient to manage. They slow you down and reduce your admins' productivity. This cumbersome setup led to the emergence of hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI. The aim of HCI is to dismantle those silos, optimizing every aspect of your operations.
In other words, everything is made simple or “turnkey”—just “turn the key,” and it’s done for you. If you believe this concept is merely marketing hype and typical overpromising, then you should read this paper right away. It will demonstrate why the hype is valid, and the promised simplification isn’t a “piecrust promise”—easily made, easily broken.
So, if you’re ready to learn how to do more with less and make your operations as simple as turning a key, read on for more.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure: A True Turnkey IT Solution
Eliminating operational complexity is a top priority for many IT departments. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) makes things easier and reduces the administrative burden of providing IT infrastructure.
What Is HCI? A Brief Definition
HCI is an IT architecture based on virtualization that allows for seamless integration between previously separate hardware components such as computing, storage, and networking, along with virtualized elements. It can be implemented directly through software or with the aid of a dedicated appliance.
Broadly speaking, HCI is a result of the development and adoption of virtualization, taking the concepts to their logical conclusion. It is also, in part, a response to the popularity of cloud computing, providing distributed enterprises that require or desire an on-premises data center the option to do so without facing excessive complexity.
How HCI is Transforming IT Efficiency
HCI has evolved from a cutting-edge concept into an appealing and widely adopted paradigm in a short time due to its numerous potential advantages. By virtualizing nearly all functions across the hardware layer—including SAN, storage, compute, and virtualized networking—on top of commonly used components and centered on the hypervisor, management is significantly simplified. With software as the primary feature, overall efficiency surpasses that of most traditional configurations.
How HCI Fits in Traditional Data Center Approaches
In addition to its inherent advantages as a more modern approach to data center architecture, HCI also offers an experience and environment that, for both end users and IT operations, is, in many ways, cloud-like and familiar for modern IT staff. This alignment makes it a suitable choice for companies that have transitioned or anticipate transitioning more work to the cloud.
Moreover, because it’s simple to configure, it’s ideal for companies that might expand organically or through acquisition. It allows underlying resources to be viewed and treated more like commodities than ever before. It incorporates both automation and orchestration.
Automation in IT means, in general, the same thing as in any other field: routine and necessary tasks can be set up to occur with little or no staff involvement. This is increasingly critical as the number of staff available for time-intensive manual processes continues to shrink or is reallocated. Instead, more are (or should be) focusing on strategic or game-changing tasks that can improve the organization.
Orchestration, a closely related concept, represents much of the value-add traditionally provided by a sizable, skilled IT staff able to get the most from large, distributed enterprise systems by implementing load balancing among resources and anticipating the stresses and strains that can occur in the face of competing needs.
In the best of times, accomplishing all this was more art than science, not unlike managing distributed virtual environments, which includes integrating and scheduling tasks. That’s why orchestration technologies have developed—to modernize these practices, speeding up and simplifying the operations of different workloads and systems.
Together, automation and orchestration can provide seamless and efficient operations that are rarely achievable by humans alone.
Relief for Overburdened IT Departments—the Evolution from Art to Science
IT operations management can no longer be treated as an “art”—it has to be an exact science. Automation and orchestration are key to making IT predictable, repeatable, manageable, and adaptable. In fact, for many IT leaders, automation and orchestration are becoming non-negotiable (as opposed to simply nice-to-have).
From a practical standpoint, automation and orchestration are the most effective methods to achieve a lighter staff workload with fewer “surprises,” enabling more consistent operations and long-term planning. A well-designed hyperconvergence platform incorporates this functionality throughout.
Why Organizations Are Choosing HCI Over Legacy Systems
Technology makes automation and orchestration both necessary and feasible. With IT teams burdened by the need to often manage thousands of applications alongside a multitude of servers and other resources, the complexity has become overwhelming.
An organization that needs to operate at breakneck speed makes it impossible for humans to do it alone. Furthermore, the pace and complexity of operations mean that most human interventions would be too little, too late, or even potentially do more harm than good.
Conversely, modern computing power and smarter software can be configured to handle most challenges with little human input. That’s why orchestration and automation have become mandatory for most organizations and why well-designed HCI platforms are so compelling. HCI platforms can deliver dynamic scaling with high availability, excellent application performance, and bullet-proof reliability while spanning multiple platforms across multiple clouds and wide-ranging physical geography.
HCI for Backup, Recovery & Business Continuity
The other side of HCI is its role in backup and recovery. Data remains at the core of digitalization and nearly every automated system. Protecting that data and reliably making it accessible when needed is a must-have capability, more critical now than ever before.
A robust HCI solution natively incorporates backup and recovery, enabling disaster recovery (DR) implementations in situations where establishing a comprehensive DR solution was previously economically challenging.
Rather than taking a siloed approach, HCI integrates backup and recovery into the infrastructure, making it less expensive, more robust, and easier to manage. It becomes an inherent system element rather than something that must be addressed and managed separately.
Load Balancing and Best Overall Operating Characteristics
HCI is a direct path to handling load-balancing issues. By aggregating all resources, HCI creates a flexible and highly elastic computing environment that can deliver nearly ideal operating conditions for all applications and functions. With convergence—just as with server virtualization—utilization can be maintained at a higher level, and changes can be made on the fly to adjust to shifting needs.
Through built-in orchestration and load balancing, HCI effectively delivers better application performance and network speed. Furthermore, this can be accomplished with less direct staff involvement, helping to multiply savings.
Adapt to Changing Business Needs
Agility is no longer just a buzzword or distant goal—it has become a necessity. IT must be capable of adapting quickly, reallocating resources, implementing new capabilities, or managing sudden spikes in traffic loads.
HCI provides a core strength for rationalizing existing and often fragmented resources and adding and integrating new capabilities whenever needed.
Edge Computing with Easy Implementation and Support
It’s a data-driven world, but the data often originates from remote locations and even from sensors far removed from traditional IT. Edge computing aims to initially capture that data and preprocess it so it can be efficiently transmitted to either an on-premises or cloud data center. However, this data may reach places where resources are already stretched thin and where staff is unprepared to adapt further.
HCI gives organizations the power to support edge computing more readily and absorb new and unexpected data flows, establish data repositories, and implement analytics and machine learning to extract value from the edge.
The HCI Opportunity vs. Legacy Thinking
Above all, HCI supports the flexibility and ease of configuration required by organizations embracing the edge. No other approach can so readily adapt to the hundreds or thousands of new data sources that edge introduces and that then need to be managed.
The infrastructure of the data center is the core of the data-driven organization—and because of its critical importance, change has been embraced cautiously.
The virtualization revolution, led by companies such as VMware, left a long shadow that still dominates the IT community's thinking about what new technologies should be embraced and how.
Some virtualization pioneers have been slow to move beyond the “classic” approach, leaving it to new vendors with more efficient approaches to deliver next-generation virtualization in the form of HCI. They continue to advance the state of the art, while VMware and others have taken smaller, fitful steps forward.
Vendors such as Scale Computing are introducing second and third-generation HCI, leaving traditional virtualization vendors behind. Enthusiastic users are proving that HCI is here and broadly adopted. HCI does all that across a range of use cases, making it a perfect fit for what organizations are doing now and in the future.
HCI Enables What Business Leaders Are Asking For
IT leaders are concerned about the rapid pace of change. They aim to deliver services faster without compromising resiliency, compliance, cybersecurity, and more. However, to keep up with this pace, they must also ensure they are obtaining the best possible return on their investments.
Key Priorities for IT Decision-Makers: Cost, Scalability & Simplicity
There are four top concerns and technologies in focus for IT decision-makers. Each has a connection to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). They are:
- Faster, seamless disaster recovery (DR)
- Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
- Edge computing
- Futureproofing the environment
Let’s take a closer look at each of these categories.
DR is no longer an exotic, “once in a blue moon” concern. It needs to be built in, ready, and responsive. Downtime is unacceptable and extremely expensive. Every minute you are down costs you revenue and business, and the costs are not only financial.
For example, even a brief outage can damage your company’s reputation. No one likes to be inconvenienced, and an outage immediately leads customers or clients to question the capabilities and strength of an organization. Once that seed of doubt is planted, any subsequent minor glitch, real or perceived, can easily add to a growing negative perception.
Of course, if that glitch impacts the customer in a more substantive way—causing a shipment to miss a deadline, for example—the effect is certainly going to be more severe. If downtime or data loss leads to customer defection—a very likely outcome—the costs to your organization rise substantially, given the large investments made to win those customers in the first place.
The fallout from both downtime and data loss can also draw scrutiny from regulators, potentially impacting the ability to fulfill regulatory requirements in a timely manner.
We also live in an always-connected global economy. This means 24/7/365 operations, and that availability is dependent mainly on fast, reliable recovery.
However, the threat of ransomware is a major obstacle to keeping those operations going. This scourge has become one of today’s most significant cybersecurity challenges and continues to grow in scope and impact. For example:
- An attack on US healthcare provider Change Healthcare reportedly cost that company more than $22 million in ransomware payments.
- A ransomware attack on a critical supplier of pathology services to UK NHS hospitals, Synnovis, resulted in thousands of operations and appointments being canceled over the summer months of 2024.
- Many high-profile data breaches in 2024 were believed to have been caused by the Snowflake compromise, which began in April. This included a data breach of Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation, which impacted as many as 560 million of the company’s customers.
Since so many different methods of installing ransomware have been utilized, no single defense strategy seems likely to alter the frequency or severity of attacks. This makes it imperative that organizations implement rapid, robust, and reliable recovery.
Doing so protects a company from the catastrophic damage caused by ransomware. It gives them the confidence to ignore the maliciously encrypted data and reinstall comprehensive, accurate backup data.
To support the general pace of business, better, more aggressive Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) goals are being demanded. IT has learned from experience that investments in quicker RTO and RPO objectives truly do pay off.
Those requirements have led to the wide adoption of HCI and its many benefits. In the area of backup and DR, HCI provides the most flexible and cost-effective means of supporting a modern solution.
For instance, HCI often includes built-in capabilities to manage scheduled snapshots and remote replication, as well as application-aware protection and recovery of selected files or even full VMs.
HCI is for more than just backup and DR. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a way to give end users a desktop-like experience, keeping them happy while improving manageability and security. Along with those advantages, though, traditional VDI has real challenges, including:
- The complexity and cost of building a virtual infrastructure using traditional virtualization architectures
- Creating costly, highly available virtualization clusters with shared storage and the capacity to run hundreds of desktops, as well as scale out as needed
- The cost of licensing traditional VDI solutions which are stacked on top of the infrastructure cost
Collectively, these challenges can render legacy VDI solutions too expensive for many organizations. Organizations need to provide infrastructure that supports high VM density and allows for growth in that density over time.
HCI provides a simple, turnkey solution that properly balances the VDI cost/benefit equation. It scales out easily, and saves on deployment and management. In addition, it is highly reliable and resilient, which are quickly becoming non-negotiable characteristics. As you can see, HCI is a game-changer for VDI, making it possible to deliver cost-effective infrastructure support.
The type of HCI you use affects VDI efficacy, as that environment tends to be more resource-hungry. Appliance-based HCI integrates all components, including compute, storage, and hypervisor. Since it is built to work together, the whole experience is smooth and seamless from both an admin and end-user perspective.
Another less-obvious advantage is a single source of support—one “throat to choke,” which means the elimination of the rotating finger of blame so frustratingly common with less integrated solutions.
When it comes time to scale, this integration lends itself to clustering. HCI clustering not only eliminates single points of failure, it also offers scalability and strong performance. HCI grows as your VDI needs to grow without a lot of complexity or drama.
It is important to understand that HCI is not necessarily the lowest-cost solution regarding initial capital investment. On the other hand, operational savings add up to such a degree that, over time, HCI can achieve more than 50% savings over traditional approaches. HCI allows you to buy only what you need and offers clear, immediate overall savings.
Edge Computing and the Internet of Things
As computing has moved beyond the strict confines of on-premises operations, HCI has moved with it. That includes edge computing, which supports decentralized data gathering and IT operations outside the data center.
And like everything else in IT, it comes with both huge opportunities and substantial challenges. The opportunities exist in almost every industry. Whether it is monitoring moisture, sunlight, and soil chemistry in a farmer’s field; instrumenting a retail environment to understand personal and crowd dynamics and assess marketing and product presentation strategies; or operating a manufacturing facility, where process data is central to ensuring productivity, the opportunities for Internet of Things (IoT) data gathering are limitless.
While IoT data systems can produce almost limitless quantities of data, moving all that data is cost-prohibitive and, even under the best of circumstances, too slow. Edge computing enables immediate data processing, which can directly inform actions at the edge and better support centralized decision-making. Edge computing provides more and better data analysis, less need to send all data to a central data center, and the potential for real-time processing to support controls and operations directly at the edge in near real-time.
Creating or supporting compute at the edge with traditional virtualization technologies is typically cost-prohibitive and complex, often driving organizations to simply avoid edge solutions or deploy ill-suited desktop machines and standalone servers instead. Direct-to-cloud is also an option, but usually comes with the same transport and bandwidth challenges as simply remaining data center-centric. Something better has long been needed.
HCI is that something better. It allows you to maximize the value of existing edge investments and minimize the cost of enhancing edge capability through widespread efficiencies. An appliance-based HCI, in particular, can provide high levels of computing capability with comparative simplicity, lower cost, and ease of management.
With HCI, sophisticated processing or preprocessing at the edge can deliver on the promise of the edge—turning all that raw data into valuable, actionable information for long- and short-term decision-making, and for new or enhanced data applications at the edge.
Scaling for the Future: Turnkey IT with HCI & Edge Computing
Recent events underscore how difficult it can be to plan organizational needs. The nature of the workloads evolves, and the volume and intensity of compute requirements is also subject to change.
This is a reflection of the fact that HCI can help reduce architectural complexity. In fact, HCI can be more cost-effective than almost any other approach, providing speed, minimal latency, high utilization, and so forth. HCI helps minimize sprawl and ensure maximum utilization (to avoid high levels of spending), which is a sound basis for any future information technology investments.
Finally, HCI is highly adaptable and inherently future-proof, meaning it can readily incorporate or support future needs and developments such as AI and machine learning.
In many organizations, however, decisions like adopting new technologies like HCI often come down to dollars and cents.
How Scale Computing Delivers Turnkey HCI Solutions
Do much more with less. Like it or not, that’s been the IT mantra for decades, and it isn’t going to change. Fortunately, adopting Scale Computing-based HCI allows you to ensure that future capacity won’t be an issue. You can reduce downtime and the workload on IT staff, all within the same budget or perhaps less. It’s a technology that’s leading edge but not bleeding edge—built on the steady advancements in virtualization and the specific breakthroughs pioneered by Scale Computing.
1. How Turnkey IT Solutions Cut Costs & Complexity
Operational simplicity isn’t just a matter of giving IT professionals an easier, consumer-like experience. It’s part of the march toward ubiquity for IT, with powerful compute capabilities available anywhere and anytime.
A. Powerful Computing That’s Also Easy
Scale Computing Platform is built to be simple enough that nearly anyone with some basic IT experience can run it successfully. Unlike many cloud-based or traditionally complex on-premises options, SC//Platform relies heavily on common sense, a simplified structure, and intuitive controls.
That means it’s no longer necessary to go through the “fire drill” of finding someone with the time, energy, and inclination to spend days or weeks in training and then mastering multi-level certifications, just so you can get started.
Because of its intuitive approach, your existing staff can grasp the basics almost immediately and increase their comprehension as they become more comfortable with SC//Platform. This also means there’s no need to hire anyone with exotic or high-priced skills. In short, if you like your IT department, you can keep your IT department.
Your IT team will appreciate SC//Platform for its innovative features, such as the Autonomous Infrastructure Management Engine (AIME) technology. AIME enables Scale Computing HyperCore to self-heal, automatically detecting and resolving issues that can lead to downtime. This allows your IT personnel to concentrate on proactive initiatives instead of merely responding to the latest disruption that impacts productivity.
B. Upgrades Without Pain
Similarly, when upgrades come along, you don’t have to face them with dread. Instead, it’s the proverbial “easy button:” Upgrades are, by design and by definition, non-disruptive. How is this possible?
SC//HyperCore gets its updates directly from a web interface from which they can be applied automatically. For example, unlike some HCI, a single click can update everything, including the hypervisor, storage system, firmware, and every other part of the system, as a single tested unit. There’s no chasing after resources and making sure they’re updated. The automated process relocates VMs among nodes to free them up one at a time for updating. The configuration then reverts once updates are completed.
C. High Availability
Increased uptime results in less disruption to an organization and loss of productivity.
When Downtime Isn’t an Option
Doing more with less isn’t the only mantra embedded in IT these days. Organizations, even mom-and-pop shops, need to have systems available most of the time, ideally 24/7/365. This is a proposition that was almost unattainable not that many years ago, requiring massive investments in specialized hardware and software.
But, of course, all that has changed. Virtualization on its own essentially puts all your eggs in one basket (and doesn’t make the basket any better). So, the need for ensuring resiliency in storage, and capabilities such as failover to other servers, made existing IT resources much more failure-resistant, and hyperconvergence takes the trend even further by managing practically every potential failure point for high availability.
A particular feature of SC//Platform-enabled high availability is that it can apply to the data center itself, as well as to remote locations. This is possible because Scale Computing relies on a hypervisor-embedded storage architecture.
What that means is that there’s no need for a virtual storage appliance at every node. In fact, the whole system stack typically consumes only about 4GB of RAM per node, a fraction of what most HCI systems require. That was part of the design thinking: make infrastructure so efficient that the focus can be on delivering results, not creating overhead.
That’s another example of the innovation that drives Scale Computing solutions, innovations that free up valuable staff resources and make your IT team more productive.
D. Investments Gain Value
Beyond traditional virtualization solutions, HCI can efficiently pool server resources like storage, RAM, and CPU to optimize utilization across clusters of virtual host appliances. Fewer resources are left sitting underutilized for long periods of time, helping return value on the investment made in them. High availability of resources on the virtual platform and down to the hardware level obviates concerns about data loss and performance issues.
Downtime can be one of the biggest costs to organizations. The inherent high availability of the HCI platform delivers greatly increased uptime, resulting in much less actual or potential disruption to operations. Averting even a single downtime event can provide an immediate return on investment, all but eliminating the costs of loss of productivity so long associated with more fragile IT systems.
2. Maximizing ROI: The Cost Benefits of Turnkey Infrastructure
The advantage of HCI is not only availability, but also that, with its own hypervisor and embedded storage, it can deliver these benefits at a remarkably low cost.
HCI turns out to be a good fit for the challenges facing businesses today, helping them to become more agile and adaptable while using financial and human resources more effectively. This has been true for SMBs, as well. They, after all, face most of the same challenges of larger enterprises, but often must address them with more limited resources. In some instances, their challenges may be greater, particularly when it comes to the availability of on-staff expertise.
Those factors make SC//Platform particularly compelling. With all the elements of a robust data center melded into one, the power smaller organizations need is there while the complexities are gone.
3. Seamless Growth: Scaling Your IT Infrastructure with HCI
Scalability is inherent in Scale Computing Platform, and that’s a very good thing.
A. A Whole That’s Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
Scale Computing HCI is a happy coalescence of hardware and software that integrates compute, networking, and storage with an integrated hypervisor. It also greatly reduces the complexities usually involved in IT scalability.
HCI implementations can work well for almost any combination of workloads but are considered especially well adapted for both analytic and big data functions.
This is in part because HCI can flexibly deliver both data resources and compute resources while keeping necessary data movements to a minimum.
That kind of “smart” operational sense contributes to making HCI particularly scalable. HCI provides a particular boost in IT scalability to applications designed for edge computing or distributed systems. Take time to consider your current range of applications and review their suitability for HCI. Most will get a boost from the HCI choice.
B. Look to the Bottom Line
From a business standpoint, HCI is a big winner because there’s no requirement to purchase capacity far in advance of actual need, as with old style “just in case” annual budgeting. This means minimizing or avoiding CapEx costs, which can free up funds for other needs. The mirror image of this is that under-purchasing isn’t an issue, either, both because of the inherent efficiency of HCI, which tends to cut requirements overall, and the ease with which capacity can be added when needed.
This translates into scalability with flexibility. For example, HCI provides innate support for mixing node configurations. Rather than configuring only once for tasks or groups of tasks, HCI can reconfigure on the fly to meet sudden or evolving needs.
Viewed through the important lens of licensing costs, HCI scalability again delivers big benefits because it isn’t tightly linked to those licensing costs. For example, with SC//Platform a built-in HyperCore™ operating system and KVM-based hypervisor eliminates the need for any additional licensing costs.
Similarly, appliance nodes can be configured to function in a storage-only mode. That prevents the system from running VMs on the node, often eliminating the need to license an application or OS for that node.
HCI is also designed to require a minimum of resources. This means, for example, fewer inefficient protocols and other overhead that, in some IT arrangements, ends up consuming a substantial portion of the investment without conferring matching benefits.
4. Turnkey IT: Balancing Cost & Performance for Maximum Efficiency
With simplicity, high availability, and scalability, it’s perhaps not surprising that HCI also scores high in affordability.
Balanced Attributes
That’s because simplicity, high availability, and scalability make for a more flexible and effective spend. It’s like the difference between a mechanic with a jumbled toolbox and one with everything in its place and ready for use. Simply put, HCI organizes and makes use of assets better.
Furthermore, by supporting ad hoc substitution or replacement, HCI makes it easier to move toward a more modern infrastructure. There’s no need to prepare complex plans or schedule downtime.
One of the biggest savings comes from the fact that with HCI, there’s no need for extra hypervisor licensing. And, by combining many different IT functions into one system, HCI leverages efficiencies in shared resources and avoids duplication of systems and/or system sprawl.
Finally, HCI has a significant impact on the human side of IT through simplified administration. How much of a savings this represents will vary depending on the size of the organization and its complexity. But, obviously, if one goes all the way from dozens of discrete servers and a SAN or NAS to a fully consolidated HCI, the reduction in required staffing will be significant.
And even more so, the reduction in the skill sets required will be dramatic. Even if you’re starting with a virtualized infrastructure, moving to HCI offers a sharp divide with far more modest human resources required after the transition.
Conclusion: Unlocking the Full Potential of HCI
Throughout this paper, you’ve seen the dramatic advantages offered by HCI. In terms of scalability, simplicity, manageability, and cost, it’s hard if not impossible for legacy infrastructure to match.
But not all HCI vendors are the same. It’s imperative to do your homework and look at each vendors’ offerings. When you do, it should become quickly apparent that Scale Computing’s solutions stand out from the crowd.
When you’re ready to do more with your infrastructure; when you’re ready to break down inefficient silos; when you’re ready to incorporate AI and edge computing into your environment; then you’re ready for Scale Computing Platform. See what it can do for you.