Data Center Journal

VOLUME 49 | APRIL 2017

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m ost organizations have peak workloads and normal day-to-day workloads. As operations- management experts will tell you, planning for the peak workload is inefficient because it causes your systems to be ineffectively utilized about 80 percent of the time. Today's organizations are better off planning for normal workloads, employing other options for burst capacity. Now, although this operations theory sounds good, the question that's surely on IT decision makers' minds is, how do we better manage our in-house infrastructure more cost efficiently while still remaining modular, simple and scalable? Traditional IT infrastructures include well-known cases of low efficiency, not because people were slack or did the wrong things, but because of the infrastructure's complexity. Enter hyper con- verged infrastructure (HCI). HCI has garnered lots of buzz in the last few years because of its ability to manage business resources, reduce IT costs and create competitive advantages for the organization. ese benefits leave IT professionals around the world wondering, is it a cure for all IT infrastructure ailments? Not necessarily. But, HCI does provide a critical piece of the puzzle, solving CIOs' question of why their companies are not fully moving to the cloud in a much more meaningful dollars-and-cents fashion. Not only have good HCI solutions simplified each layer of the stack—storage, network and servers—but they have also reimagined these layers and provided a ground-up integrated stack that tackles storage, network and compute in one simple-to-use package. Successful hyperconverged infrastructure solutions allow customers to start small (i.e., modular) and grow incrementally by adding modules to achieve massive scale. In addition, HCI vendors are starting to give customers options to seamlessly employ the cloud for their "burst" capacity. But before a business jumps head first into an HCI system, here are the crucial areas of IT that it must address to be successful. provIng the worth of hcI Although great HCI technologies are available, IT decision makers are still le wondering how to adopt HCI and ensure their organization sees the value. e first task is to find an appli- cation or initiative that will start small and is expected to grow; examples include private-cloud IaaS, an SQL farm or a soware- development environment. is step allows you to demonstrate the modularity of HCI by starting small and will prove the sim- plicity via the deployment speed. e next task is to find another workload or application that will be going through a refresh or growth cycle, then modularly add more nodes to your existing THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 25 www.datacenterjournal.com

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