Simplicity and Flexibility. These are the tenets of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s latest infrastructure evolution.
Introducing Nimble Storage dHCI. dHCI stands for disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure. It’s a mouthful, but it makes sense once you understand how we got here.
One of IT’s biggest challenges is physical: how do you store, organize, maintain, and upgrade the hardware necessary to run the systems supporting your business? While software innovations make business easier for productivity, marketing and such, the speed at which these innovations evolve challenge IT departments to keep up. IT is then tasked with not only supporting these innovations but also keeping costs down while doing so. Implementing supporting systems and training team members on how to best maintain them can be a tall order. Modernization comes at a price. HPE knows this and has been evolving their infrastructure systems to help IT departments keep up with demands.
First, There Was Converged Infrastructure
IT professionals have been familiar with convergence for quite some time. A converged infrastructure (CI) aims to optimize by grouping multiple components into a single system. Servers, networks, and storage were placed on a single rack. Replacing the old silos of hardware, convergence allowed IT to become more efficient by sharing resources and simplifying system management. This efficiency helped keep costs down and systems running smoothly. On the flip side, it was expensive and not the most flexible in scaling.
Next, Came the Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) was designed to fix the scalability issue, and it certainly improved things. Designed as a building-block approach, HCI allows IT departments to add in the nodes (i.e., servers, storage, or computing) as needed. It continues to simplify management by placing all controls under a single user interface.
Hyperconverged infrastructure, by leveraging commodity products across the board, significantly disrupted the financial dynamics. It was radically less expensive, at least initially, than converged infrastructure while still providing most of the benefits. Hyperconverged solutions have been shown, however, to have use cases where they do not fit, and this has caused problems for customers who disrupted operations by not realizing the impact some workloads would have.
While not every workflow can run on a hyperconverged infrastructure, they can on a dHCI. That’s part of what makes it appealing. It doesn’t come with the restrictions of its predecessors.
Now, Introducing the Disaggregated Hyperconverged Infrastructure
HPE has introduced its next-generation of the hyperconverged infrastructure – centered around its Nimble Storage All-Flash Arrays – and they’re calling it Disaggregated Hyperconverged Infrastructure (dHCI). While not every workflow can run on a hyperconverged infrastructure, they can on a dHCI. That’s part of what makes it appealing. It doesn’t come with the restrictions of its predecessors. Ultimately, disaggregated HCI leverages similar components to converged infrastructure but leverages modern infrastructure automation techniques to enable automated, wizard-based deployment and simple, unified management at similar costs to HCI.
3 Reasons to Consider the Nimble Storage dHCI
- Ease of Use
One interface. Boom. - Predictive Analytics
Powered by HPE’s InfoSight, Nimble Storage dHCI features artificial intelligence that will take care of performance optimization, predictive support automation, and problem prevention. - Maintain Security
Nimble Storage dHCI is ideal for business-critical applications, because it ensures everything stays running. Again, thanks to InfoSight, problems are identified before they become problems. You’re able to leverage automated internal backup capabilities to protect and recover from user-data errors, crypto-viruses, and other threats to your business data.
Why We’re Excited about dHCI
Helping IT departments spend more time fulfilling their potential and less time putting out fires caused by process inefficiencies is one of our goals at Advizex. We help organizations look at IT in the big picture, because we know that IT has great potential to more actively solve business challenges within organizations. As any IT department will tell you, one of their biggest challenges is maintaining their infrastructure, so any evolution that may help make it easier is one to which we’re going to pay attention.
