HCI Paves New Path for Data Center Growth and Business Transformation

‘Big data is at the foundation of all the megatrends that are happening’, in the current Covid-19 pandemic situation data centers and business transformation are the two most trending topics for any organization. The pandemic has in a way created a revolution in terms of operation due to a meteoric rise in the adoption of digital transformation among businesses. This has indirectly benefited the data centers as more organizations are opting for data centers instead of localized server rooms. Amidst the paradigm shift in the manner of business being conducted worldwide currently, Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is helping these organizations in benefitting from the modernization of application deployment and cloud service delivery in data centers as well as individual organizations. According to a report, the HCI market is poised to grow by $32.45 bn during 2020-2024. Organizations had started letting go of the legacy infrastructure and embracing the scalable and virtual combination of their infrastructure, now the process is on fastrack since with the use of HCI. Organizations can overcome the meticulous approach in conducting businesses and the data centers can substitute the hardware components with virtual traditional design.

“Companies are increasingly embracing HCI to address security, productivity and other concerns. At times like these, reduced expenditure and increased profits are what the companies look for and HCI helps them in achieving this goal. Traditional three-tier architecture is expensive to build, complex to operate and difficult to scale and adopting HCI will help in not losing control, increasing costs or compromising security. Array’s vAPV virtual application delivery controllers (ADC) and vxAG virtual secure access gateways (SSL VPN) are an ideal match for applications and other workloads running on hyperconverged infrastructures, providing integrated networking and security functions essential to delivering a quality user experience and realizing the full benefit of HCI in the enterprise data center.” said Shibu Paul, Vice President – International Sales at Array Networks.

Array’s application delivery controllers (ADC) can be hosted on the HCI infrastructure to provide application availability (load balancing) and secure access (SSL VPN) that will deliver end-to-end solutions for scaling and optimizing critical enterprise applications. On the other hand, it can also be deployed as stand-alone physical ADC and SSL VPN appliances validated to work in conjunction with HCI for use cases where a higher degree of scalability, performance and SSL offloading may be required. The use of the integrated virtual infrastructure eliminates the cost and time necessary for procuring hardware and they have also greatly reduced the labor required when setting up servers. Acquiring an integrated infrastructure also solves the problem of unifying server management standards. The scope of device control, the frequency of anti-virus software updates, the decision of whether to assign domains or workgroups for each project and other items that are different at each center will all be common. Anticipating the sudden surge in data transfers, data centers will need to consider upgrading to the latest, high-capacity network servers while following due diligence concerning data privacy and security.

HCI offers consumer-inspired user experience making management of virtual machines simple. The known reasons for HCI gaining popularity are simplified design, cloud integration, reduced footprint, faster disaster recovery and hyperconvergence analysis. On the other hand, next-generation HCI or HCI 2.0 has entered the market where it introduces the concept of disaggregated hardware where instead of integrating compute, network and storage resources at the node level, vendors offer storage modules that scale data capacity independently of other resources. HCI use cases will continue expanding as companies set a course to the software-defined data center, private and hybrid clouds and the edge. Breaking down silos and easing operations, HCI puts IT in a better position to support business objectives as the pace of innovation and change accelerates.