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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.