A next-generation data centre
for a next-generation world
intelligent INFRASTRUCTURE
The global data centre services
market is expected to register
a compound annual growth rate
of 13.69% during the 2019 to 2024
period, reflecting their importance in a
digitally-driven business environment.
As part of this, hyperconverged
infrastructure (HCI) will provide further
impetus as more companies shift
towards a multi-cloud approach.
The focus on HCI reflects the growing
momentum around the movement
to embrace software-defined IT
architecture as a more effective way of
overcoming the limitations of traditional
hardware-defined systems. However,
the combined opportunities provided by
data centres and HCI have resulted in
an increasingly crowded market where
companies are finding it challenging to
differentiate between the various service
provider offerings.
Understanding convergence
“Hyperconvergence has been getting
a lot of airtime and for a good reason.
It provides organisations with more
user-friendly and cost-effective ways
to manage their cloud environments
as opposed to traditional data centre
architectures. Providing improved
agility over the expensive and difficult
to maintain architecture of the past,
HCI ensures the IT infrastructure of the
organisation is closely aligned to its
strategic business deliverables,” said
Daniel Thenga, NetApp Technical BDM
at Comstor.
Finding the right service provider or
solution set that best meets the unique
organisational needs is therefore critical
to help drive growth and create
competitive differentiation.
“From a top-line perspective, decision
makers should apply criteria such as
scalability, feature set, ease of use,
flexibility, the partner ecosystem and
the total cost of ownership as part of
their process to find the ideal fit. Further
impacting this is how the HCI and data
centre environment supports the growth
of Edge Computing and the Internet of
Things along with the associated increase
in data points. Being able to integrate
all these aspects effectively must be a
priority as companies rely more on finding
value in their data than ever before,”
added Thenga.
Gaining value
At its core, HCI is managed centrally by
a single piece of software. So, storage,
computing and virtual machines are all
managed by the same application. But as
companies are getting used to HCI, there
is already a movement to extend beyond
that with disaggregated hyperconverged
infrastructure (dHCI).
This allows customers to scale in a nonlinear
fashion. In other words, companies
can consolidate workloads and deliver
private clouds with public cloud
simplicity while moderating application
licensing with consistent management
between clouds.
Thenga said: “As technologies continue
to evolve, companies are under pressure
to do more with less. HCI and dHCI
innovations give them more effective
ways to unlock the value of data centres
while giving them the flexibility to easily
move between cloud models as their
business needs change.”
Introducing intelligence
All this is contributing to how the data
centre is being used. While some might
have only used it as a storage repository
or, at best, a way to collaborate between
branches, the next-generation data
centre delivers more value through the
high-performance computing capabilities
delivered to its users.
“Take Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an
example. Leveraging the power of data
centres, AI delivers invaluable automation
and Machine Learning capabilities
to organisations across industries
irrespective of their size,” said Thenga. ◊
58 Issue 17
www.intelligentdatacentres.com