Hyperconverged: do it for your business, and for yourself
How do you spend your weekend? For me, it can be squeezing a couple of hours in the saddle, negotiating a pass to get out on the golf course, or chilling with the family after a crazy work week.
Whatever it is you do, weekends are something we all cherish. Unless, perhaps, you’re responsible for keeping the lights turned on within a Service Provider!
Dealing with an offline storage array that’s taken the service down. Removing rogue snapshot files that have robbed capacity and killed performance. Performing planned maintenance activities outside normal working hours. These are just some of the challenges I recall from my time growing a Service Provider business and managing 24x7 service platforms.
How I wish that hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions were properly established back then. They would have saved so much time and money, brought more predictability to our platforms and, just maybe, given us some of our weekends back.
What’s wrong with a simple life?
In my business, we ran a traditional three-tier infrastructure that relied on people with specialist skills. I remember the impact on those individuals when we ran planned maintenance windows or were responding to critical support issues.
On top of this, there were the constant requests to add more storage, seemingly only weeks after the last upgrade – despite no significant increase in customers. It was a cash-hungry transactional model, where revenue and service requirements were unpredictable, capacity management was a full-time job and, quite frankly, it was all a bit of a nightmare to manage.
Fast forward to today, and HCI technology is evolving all of this into something fundamentally much simpler. Everything can now be managed through a single pane of glass. New onboarding requests can be fulfilled quickly. Businesses can have the confidence to grow, while still delivering quality.
Cutting out complexity
Moving from a three-tier architecture to software-defined HCI removes so many potential points of failure. It means you can automate decisions, like how to optimise data storage and performance, and you can see clearly when additional platform capacity will be needed.
Also, you can have just one person (a support analyst) manage and monitor the entire infrastructure platform centrally – rather than be reliant on a whole team of server, network and storage engineers.
Slashing costs and adding value
There are clear opportunities for cost savings and efficiency gains too. You no longer need the same variety of specialist skills, or to spend as much on training or overtime – which frees you up to redeploy resources on growing the business and testing new offerings.
HCI removes the need for chunky upfront capital investments, it’s easy to scale on demand and it delivers smart and dynamic use of available capacity. This means better service and value for your customers, plus better use of your own time, with less effort spent on the mechanics of infrastructure management.
Getting peace of mind
HCI ultimately gives your business longevity. You can offer more with less, which ups your ROI from day one. And the flexibility of a Pay-Per-Use consumption model means you benefit from more predictable revenue and cashflow.
HCI simply makes sense!
I work with a lot of service providers who want to drive up capacity and agility. HCI gives them the tools to grow, clear visibility on decisions and, most of all, better stability. Which helps give back some precious time for themselves and their families.
So that’s an insight into my past experiences, but I’d love to hear about your own. What challenges have you experienced in delivering managed services? Have you already moved to an OpEx model? Are you finding it difficult to get your customers to stick?
You can get in touch by commenting on this post, or directly using my details below.
Graham Bromham | Head of Cloud & Managed Service Provider | Fujitsu UK/I
Email: [email protected]
Phone number: +44 (0) 7867 838003