Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is the foundation of a modern datacenter, but adding virtualization delivers more savings, increases IT agility, and supports multi-cloud goals. Join this VB Live event to learn more about how virtualization can remove complexity and increase efficiency, how to choose the right HCI tool, and more.
“HCI was nascent three or four years ago, when it was considered new, but now CEOs are standing up and saying, this is the next phase of on-premises data center technology,” says Mike Wronski, principal marketing manager at Nutanix. “If people are going to do on-prem data centers, it’s going to be HCI-based. We’ve gotten past that portion of the growth.”
In its first incarnation, HCI was all about driving out the storage complexity, by taking standard, off-the-shelf Intel-based compute servers with disc drives inside them and creating storage that works fundamentally just as well as the traditional old way of doing data center storage.
“What we’ve been asking is, can we take that a step further and look at the rest of the data center stack and converge the virtualization portion into this as well?” Wronski says.
Virtualization itself comprises a large set. There’s the hypervisor, which most people consider the base of virtualization. But then there’s a lot of other things on top that add complexity. You have basic management: managing the servers themselves, the virtual machines, creating and reconfiguring the virtual machines and making sure they’re running well. Then you have management tools for things like performance monitoring, performance management, predictive analysis for questions like when do I need to add more servers, more memory, more compute, more storage? Then there’s activities like upgrades.
All these layers of discrete software packages that deliver virtualization add a ton of complexity – but converging virtualization into hyperconvergence can remove that complexity, by building it into the HCI solution.
“What happens is people segment the two,” Wronski says. “They see HCI as one thing and the virtualization choice as independent. But the only way to do it well is to bring the two together: HCI plus virtualization built for HCI. You’ll only get so far if you just go to HCI and you keep your existing virtualization solution, instead of removing that second-order level of complexity.”
He offers as an analog the public cloud, which has gained huge traction over the last 10 years. When industries look at public cloud, they’re looking at the totality of services, he says, rather than discrete components: storage service, compute management services from different cloud providers. And it’s much easier to consume, because you don’t see or have to manage any of the backend facilities of that.
The idea, in other words, is to make the on-premises data center more like the public cloud, where you can remove – not extract or hide – virtualization complexity completely, the way HCI removed much of the storage complexity. It’s essentially leveraging the lessons learned from HCI on how to collapse pieces of software, absorb it into the same management plane, and start to deliver services as part of it. And the results directly impact your efficiency and your bottom line.
“That’s how we start breaking the chains,” Wronski says. “When you reach the first goal – make my data center have a cost profile and a user experience as close to public cloud as possible –you’re going beyond making just cost-outcome-based decisions, and can now make business-outcome-based decisions.”
Where do you start? Timing could be based on your larger equipment refresh cycle or focus on a more strategic IT project. As Wronski puts it, “You don’t want to get trapped in that old adage about insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome.”
“If you know it’s not working and need to make a change, now is the time,” he says. “Don’t keep buying the same old stuff, because you’re not going to get any better results than you had before. Buying more of the same does not help you if you agree that current datacenter architectures are part of the problem and that is what’s pushing you toward public cloud or other alternatives.”
To learn more about how to create a full infrastructure stack that integrates compute, virtualization, storage, networkingk and security, how to move beyond cost-outcome decisions to strategic business-outcome decisions, and more, don’t miss this VB Live event!
Don’t miss out.
Attend and learn:
- How virtualization platform options on the market compare
- Why to consider changing virtualization solutions
- How to choose the right virtualization solution
- How to save thousands in virtualization licensing costs
Speakers:
- Bhavani Yellapragada, AVP of DevOps, Nasdaq
- Mike Wronski, Principal Marketing Manager, Nutanix
- Stewart Rogers, Analyst-at-Large, VentureBeat
Sponsored by Nutanix