Solutions Guide Autumn 18

FREE UP
YOUR IT STAFF.
64 %
less staff time to complete
business extensions.
less staff time
to deploy storage.
less staff time to run VxRail,
VxRack environments.
FASTER SERVER
(APPLIANCE NODE)
DEPLOYMENTS
83%
81%
56%
Real-world
advantages.
By the very nature of the way
hyperconverged works, virtual
desktop infrastructure (VDI) is a
typical use case for the technology.
“It is great for VDI as you can scale out
the solution as you scale users and get
predictable performance for the end
user as you scale,” Doverspike said.
“And of course, the built-in replication
capabilities mean you can support
high availability and low latency in
geographically disparate sites.”
One national airline recently turned
to Zones for a hyperconverged
implementation after years of
outsourcing its infrastructure to
colocation facilities. “They had some
outages that severely impacted them,”
Barnhart explained. “So, they decided
to take matters into their own hands.”
Now, the airline is running some
of their workloads in their new
hyperconverged environment, but
they’re looking to bring all of that
infrastructure in house – with a good
majority of that running on HCI –
including their critical tier-one apps
and their ecommerce platform as well.
“Hyperconverged infrastructure also
presents a natural evolution to a
software-defined data centre and the
cloud,” said Doverspike. “In addition to
being able to manage their nodes or
clusters through intuitive, easy-to-use
software from a centralized location,
our key hyperconverged partners offer
RESTful APIs and direct integration
with the major cloud players. As a
result, hyperconverged infrastructure
plays a critical role in our customers’
hybrid IT environments.”
Hyperconverged infrastructure
also allows clients with traditional
three-tier architecture to take a
phased approach to upgrading the
data centre. “In some cases, clients
might rely on legacy systems to run
mission-critical apps but may be
concerned about migrating them to
a new technology since they know
their existing environment more or
less works,” Barnhart added. “We
see such customers initially use
hyperconverged with a tier-two
app and then scale out over time
as they realize the benefits that
hyperconverged provides. I can’t
recall an example where a customer
migrated a workload from their legacy
environment to a hyperconverged
environment and – after running
it in their new hyperconverged
environment – moved it back to their
three-tier architecture for any reason.”
“We have clients who may decide to
keep their legacy architecture in place
for older apps and then build out a
whole new paradigm around software
defined, slowly growing their app
collection,” Doverspike commented.
“Eventually, they’ll start moving over
tier-one business apps a little at a time
– never taking a big risk – until such
time as they can totally decommission
the old systems.” It’s a process of
building up a repertoire of scale-out
architecture and scale-out apps.
uk.zones.com +44 20 7608 7676 23