Modernizing your infrastructure can be an exercise in frustration. Your traditional data center might be holding your business back, but moving forward can be risky business—without the right partner.
Converged and hyperconverged infrastructures might be the right choice for your business. Understanding what they are and the advantages of each can be an important first step to making an infrastructure decision.
Is a converged infrastructure right for you?
A converged infrastructure is discrete storage, compute, and networking resources that have been tightly integrated to work together into a kind of plug-and-play module. These resources typically come from multiple manufacturers, and can be used individually for their intended purposes.
The advantage of this approach is that you can sometimes maximize existing hardware investments by making them part of the converged infrastructure. While there can be issues with integration, the advantages—fast deployment, simplified management and lower maintenance and support costs—can outweigh the issues. Many converged infrastructures also come with reference architectures that have been pre-validated to work in standardized environments.
In either case, it’s relatively cost effective to expand converged infrastructures because servers and storage can be scaled independent of the other. And a management dashboard allows you to manage and optimize the infrastructure as a whole, instead of separately managing the parts, reducing IT time as well as maintenance and support costs.
Converged infrastructures offer big benefits to some businesses, but not all. Those businesses may want to consider hyperconverged infrastructures.
What is a hyperconverged infrastructure?
Unlike a converged infrastructure, a hyperconverged infrastructure is inherently integrated and cannot be separated into distinct components. According to CIO Review, a hyperconverged infrastructure has these characteristics:
- It’s software defined – Automated processes for increased performance, efficiency, and agility.
- It’s highly efficient – Storage space and network overloads are minimized, while improving application performance.
- It’s inherently secure – Built-in data protection via improved data transfer and WAN optimization.
- It’s easier to scale: Quickly scale by adding a node for lower upfront CapEx and OpEx aligned to the business.
Because of its software-defined approach, the cost of a hyperconverged infrastructure can vary dramatically depending on the underlying hypervisor and associated licensing costs. Even with a “free” open source hypervisor, costs can run up due to “custom” configurations.
Hyperconverged infrastructures feature an inherently integrated management tool that makes it easier to support and manage and reduces admin time.
While a hyperconverged infrastructure can deliver simplicity and flexibility, it may not be right for your organization.
So how do you decide which infrastructure approach is best?
The Logicalis approach to choosing the right infrastructure
With Logicalis in your corner, deciding on the right infrastructure for your organization is easy. We’ll start with a 3-4 hour workshop to fully understand your organization’s application workloads, as well as related data and business priorities.
Based on your needs, we’ll help you evaluate your infrastructure options and provide unbiased advice on the right solution for your organization. Our professional services team offers a suite of services to help build, integrate, and configure your solution for fast deployment, while our managed services team stands ready to help support and maintain your infrastructure so you can keep your team focused on your business.
Plus, Logicalis ranks #10 among the world’s most strategic and innovative managed service providers, according to the Channel Futures 11th annual MSP 501 Worldwide Company Rankings.
Learn more about how Logicalis can help you implement a data center plan that’s right for your business—and one that modernizes your infrastructure for greater growth and agility.
Brad Bailie is a Solutions Architect at Logicalis who is expert at helping customers design next-generation data centers and modernize their processes.