Is hyperconverged infrastructure right for your business?

At many organizations, the enterprise network underpinning just about everything employees are doing can be mind-bogglingly complex. It’s often hard to maintain, let alone upgrade. But, a new trend is cropping up that has the potential to save the day for network admins: hyperconverged infrastructure.

Think of a hyperconverged infrastructure as the first step to a software-defined network. Hyperconvergence ensures that network admins only need one box to oversee many different parts of the network. That one hyperconvergence solution is involved in configuring everything from compute and storage resources to virtual machines, TechTarget’s Margaret Rouse noted.

Since it dramatically reduces the amount of both hardware and software needed to effectively manage a network, it’s no small wonder that hyperconverged infrastructure is taking off in a big way right now. Between 2014 and 2015, the hyperconverged market globally grew by around 116 percent, according to IDC, and it will likely top $1.5 billion by the end of 2016. In addition, a recent report from 452 Research found that about 79 percent of enterprises will probably spend more money on hyperconvergence technology in 2016 than they have in years past, with very large companies and financial firms leading the pack in this arena.

“These systems are helping to deliver many of the proven benefits of integrated systems, including reduced complexity, risk and inefficiencies, into new environments with targeted infrastructure needs or smaller budgets,” said Eric Sheppard, IDC’s research director of storage systems and storage software. “As such, hyperconverged systems represent a market expansion opportunity for infrastructure suppliers and their partners.”

Cisco HyperFlex is one of the best hyperconverged infrastructure products on the market today.

Cisco enters the hyperconverged infrastructure market

Cisco, perhaps the biggest name in the enterprise networking space today, entered the hyperconverged infrastructure market by releasing its HyperFlex solution in 2016, Data Center Knowledge reported. HyperFlex has quickly made a name for itself as a premier hyperconverge product, and it’s not hard to see why:

• It makes provisioning workloads a total breeze, especially for companies already using virtualizations.
• It dramatically decreases hardware footprints.
• It is highly flexible, capable of handling both large deployments like enterprise data centers and smaller ones like remote branch offices with ease.
• It is ideal for sandbox deployments, making testing and development more streamlined.
• It spreads out data across multiple nodes to prevent single points of failure.
• It is designed to be fully integrated with a Cisco network, which can dramatically streamline deployment deadlines.
• It is built with deduplication in mind, ensuring that extra copies of data are not created.

“As Cisco takes a big swing at a new market, it’ll be interesting to see the growth in the space and all the new use cases around HCI architectures,” Data Center Knowledge’s Bill Kleyman wrote.

Since this is such a new technology, many organizations will likely need some help if they want to leverage a hyperconvergence solution like HyperFlex. Luckily, iT1 Source is here to help in this endeavor. As a Cisco Premier Partner, iT1 Source has the Cisco know-how and enterprise networking expertise needed to help any business leverage hyperconvergence. Be sure to contact iT1 Source today to learn more about your available options and what you can do to improve your network.