Advantages of Hyper Converged Infrastructure for the Digital Word

Digital transformation is not an end in itself. It is the means to an end. Customers today want to adopt technologies that can help them deploy their applications and help them digitize much faster. One of the things that they should definitely consider is the agility of technology that would enable them to deploy and digitize their end-user experience better. The first key factor that organizations should consider while choosing the right technology is whether the technology is fast and agile enough for them to deploy and go to market faster? Digital infrastructure that is agile, fast and quick to deploy is super critical. The number one criterion is to have the best digital infrastructure with agility and speed of deployment.

The second key factor is end-user experience. While having digital technology is the baseline, the main question is – are you providing the digital experience to users to help them adopt the platform sooner than they would have otherwise done? Digital infrastructure and digital user experience, basically consumerization of IT, will drive digital transformation.

Is HCI the future of enterprise cloud?

Enterprises are opting for hyper-efficient infrastructure with the power and flexibility of cloud and the control of on-premise. Cloud has enabled digital transformation at a very fast pace. Customers love cloud for the agility, invisibility and experience. The reason is that cloud makes infrastructure invisible to an end-user and makes the complexity go away. You don’t touch and feel cloud. This is what has enabled enterprises to adopt cloud. They want to experience the same in their private data centers as well.

However, today, a data center is like a zoo of hardware. Moreover, enterprises have to deal with people issues and siloed infrastructure, which they don’t like. They are looking for a solution that will bring the experience and invisibility of cloud to their own data center while retaining the control of governance, compliance and security.

Nutanix enables them to have a cloud experience in their data center. Hyper-convergence is just a building block. The larger problem that we have solved is to give them a true cloud experience but within their data center. We make the complexity invisible to the end-user. That is what we now call enterprise cloud.

Software-defined infrastructure for a truly digital experience

A hyper-converged infrastructure will help enterprises as well as their CIOs focus on innovation and growth. The idea of hyper-convergence is not new. It has been used by the consumer industry for a long time. In the 90s, the first hyper-converged machine was launched by Canon, which had a printer, scanner and a photocopier machine, all rolled into one. That was the first idea of hyper-convergence – bringing everything into one single device. For example, look at the mobile phones of today, whether it is Apple or any Android phone – be it camera, recorder or music player – everything has become software defined. The same thing goes for today’s data center as well.

Data centers today house an array of hardware such as storage, server, computing, load balancing, networking, switching, routing, etc., making it complex and difficult to manage. Hyper-convergence, at the root, eliminates complexity in data centers and makes them transform from hardware-defined to software-defined. Converge everything to software so that it is easy to manage and can scale when you grow. That is the idea. Can we eliminate the complexity in the data center by hyper-converging every single piece of hardware into software? This will enable you to have a true digital infrastructure to facilitate a truly digital experience.

A version of this article was first published on dynamicCIO by the same author.