By Brandon Harris, Senior Director HPE Solutions at Logicalis US
The rapid pace of innovation and ever-changing IT requirements are pressuring CIOs and IT staffs to shed complex, costly and cumbersome IT infrastructures in favor of those that provide greater power, simplicity and efficiency. Rapid application development cycles, along with increasing public and private cloud usage, are driving the use of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This has resulted in adoption of composable hybrid IT infrastructures that are continually updated in response to enterprise demands.
Many organizations are experiencing a “legacy lag” due to continued reliance on older technologies that are not as flexible and agile as today’s enterprise requirements. In fact, CIOs are looking to simplify. According to our fifth annual Logicalis Global CIO Survey, complex legacy technology is the chief barrier to digital transformation. One solution for this challenge is a composable and hybrid infrastructure platform that enables IT teams to create an infrastructure on-the-fly by choosing from a pool of provisioned resources.
The Logicalis CIO Survey found that legacy complexity doesn’t just slow down or prevent digital projects, it also prevents refocusing on higher level, strategic activities like digital transformation. Savvy CIOs are looking to hyperconverged infrastructure solutions capable of combining compute, storage and networking in addition to traditional IT functions, including WAN optimization, unified global VM-centric management, data protection, cloud integration, primary storage deduplication, backup deduplication, caching, and global scale-out, all in one platform. This greatly reduces management headaches common with legacy systems.
A Three-Stage Evolution Plan for Enterprise IT Architecture
Let’s look at a staged IT architecture evolution plan for enterprise IT that shows the way forward to digital transformation via simplified and hybrid solutions. The plan below moves away from traditional platforms and dramatically reduces IT management while providing increased power, simplicity and efficiency.
- Legacy Stack. In this first phase, traditional infrastructure elements like server and storage are provided with a basic software virtualization and management layer for control.
- Integrated System. In this second phase, taking the legacy stack a step further, pre-integrated server and storage sub-systems share a resource pool but lack the deduplication, compression and optimization that would provide additional agility and control.
- Composable Infrastructure. By the third stage, we have a single, shared resource pool that provides the greatest efficiency and increases performance. A composable infrastructure, like HPE Simplivity, includes native deduplication, compression, and optimization for all data, inline and in real-time.
The evolution from converged infrastructure to hyperconverged infrastructure to simplified, composable infrastructure mirrors many organizations’ journeys to becoming more digitally enabled enterprises. At each stage, legacy thinking and processes are shed in favor of greater automation and orchestration.
Want to Learn More?
Read more about challenges facing CIOs on their digital transformation journeys in Logicalis’ fifth annual Global CIO Survey: http://ow.ly/jVfZ30gzqws. Then, learn how to accelerate time–to–market with a composable infrastructure: http://ow.ly/YqFy30gHRpQ. Also, read a Logicalis blog article, “How to Build IT Infrastructure for the Idea Economy,” here: http://ow.ly/UNiU30gHRx0