Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) can deliver increased business agility and lower capital and operational expenses as organizations look to modernize their applications and infrastructure and ensure business continuity.
It’s no surprise that the HCI market is growing at a 28% CAGR, according to MarketsandMarkets.
The analysts at 451 Research recommend five use cases as ideal for HCI.
1. Mission-critical applications – HCI is a proven go-to deployment choice for critical applications like Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle databases or SAP HANA. HCI is commonly used to support databases and data warehouses, analytics, security, CRM, and business continuity and backup.
2. Cloud-native applications – HCI makes it easier to support cloud-native applications that run across private, hybrid, and public clouds. The flexibility of HCI makes it easier to provision, manage, and monitor resources across private, hybrid, and public environments, especially for container-based applications.
3. Virtual desktop infrastructure and edge deployments – Deploying server and storage infrastructure to support remote and branch office operations has long been difficult, especially when it comes to management, support and physical space. But the scalable nature of HCI makes it a good fit for edge deployments to support use cases like video surveillance, virtual desktop infrastructure, or remote office/branch office services.
4. Disaster recovery – Traditional data protection strategies aren’t always designed to support hybrid cloud ecosystems and cloud-native apps. Storage can be a particular problem, especially if capacity at the disaster recovery site is different. But HCI makes it easier to scale up both storage and performance so business-critical applications can be run at the disaster recovery site without breaking the budget.
5. Hybrid cloud – HCI is a logical choice to support the hybrid cloud needs of an organization. Virtualization makes it easy to deploy and scale applications in any location, whether in a private data center or the public cloud. Different IT environments can be managed consistently, while workloads can be migrated between public and private.
Automated HCI with Hitachi Vantara
The Hitachi Vantara UCP HC platform offers agility and simplicity to support a broad range of use cases. It’s an integrated turnkey appliance powered by VMware vSAN that allows for rapid provisioning and streamlined administration. It offers seamless extensibility to the SAN with enterprise data protection built in to ensure continuous operations.
Dis-Chem, a retail pharmacy chain, followed the recommendation of its consultant First Technology, to migrate to the Hitachi Vantara UCP HC platform to support the growth of its delivery business. The IT team is now able to adapt to changing business requirements with an operationally efficient, agile solution.
Want to see what it’s really like to work with Hitachi converged and hyperconverged solutions? Check out these demos.