By Amit Luthra, Director & General Manager, Storage Platforms & Solutions, Dell Technologies India
The data universe is growing exponentially. Current times have forced organizations to adopt new models of operations like work from home and remote working, leading to terabytes of data being generated very quickly. And with more data comes more challenges – including how to collect, store, manage, and analyze it to extract its core value. This tidal wave of data, coupled with adoption of enhanced IT strategies by organizations will set the stage for the next era of digital transformation.
Thus to overcome the technology glitches of legacy infrastructure, more businesses are opting for Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). It allows organizations to breakdown the traditional infrastructure by intrinsically integrating compute, storage, networking, virtualization, management and data services. Along with this, it also reduces IT administrative tasks, and provide businesses the ability to scale at their own pace, reduce operating costs and provide flexibility as the foundation for multi-cloud approaches.
Re-Defining IT infrastructure
HCI systems bring value to businesses by optimizing efficiency and reducing operational costs. The sooner organizations take a hard look and re-evaluate their data centers, the sooner they can stand to benefit from this value—ultimately allowing them to do more, for less. Previously, businesses considering HCI solutions were the ones who were implementing new workload requirements. However, today, almost every organization which is revisiting their IT strategy is looking to invest in HCI. Adopting HCI will enable these organizations to reduce operational cost, accelerate deployment and improve operational efficiencies. Not only this, but HCI can also improve an organization’s ability to scale and reduce its infrastructural tasks.
In the wake of unprecedented data growth, organizations are rapidly becoming aware of the benefits of multi-cloud and are understanding the value that data management and data analytics can bring. As per Digital Transformation Index 2020, about 77% of organizations in India are investing in data management and analytics. Hence, as organizations arm their on-premises clouds to support and optimize IT infrastructures for multiple cloud, they are looking for solutions that provide optimal performance, flexibility, and simplification along with management consolidations – all of which HCI offers. We expect to see more organizations turning to HCI as operational hubs for multi-cloud approaches, prompted by the need to ensure that data and workloads are stored and managed in environments to suit the evolving business needs.
The Advent of New-Age Technology:
Organizations are pacing up the adoption of new-age technologies like 5G, IoT and AI which is spurring data growth at an incredible rate and changing the data game in terms of speed and accessibility. This growth, however, comes at a cost as it is expensive and cumbersome to bring the entirety of this data on-premises. Organizations should instead adopt a “hub and spoke approach,” where they take in data at Edge locations, glean insights and take only those insights back to the core hub to act on them. Since HCI is easily scalable, it enables users to put the appropriate amount of compute power analysis at those Edge locations.
Another step we see organizations taking to manage their operations and the data surge is to look strategically at how their applications and workloads are being developed. A key facilitator for this is the emergence of Kubernetes as the ubiquitous infrastructure feature for container management and orchestration. Customers can determine whether to transform them into cloud native workloads either to operate in a more agile manner, or in a DevOps model. HCI is the preferred deployment platform for containers and a cloud native approach being enabled to support not only existing workloads, but also offers a Kubernetes dial tone anywhere, whether at the Edge, core or cloud.
The Road Ahead:
The rate at which data is being generated and collected will serve as one of the primary catalysts to transform IT infrastructure in this data era. To effectively ride the data waves, organizations must modernize their data centers and embrace an HCI delivery model. To take advantage of this innovation, organizations will be better equipped to navigate the next era of digital transformation.
