Welcome our guest blogger David Paquette, Product Marketing Manager at Scale Computing.
For decades, technology innovation, including HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure), has been geared toward the enterprise level rather than SMB organizations. This has created a challenge for IT departments in most midsize companies, providing enterprise-level services with a staff size best suited for a small organization. It can be a high-stress environment with administrators working nights and weekends on top of normal business hours to complete projects.
Luckily, the benefits of HCI solutions are available to midsize companies and have alleviated that burden for their IT departments.
IT Challenges for Midsize Companies
Let’s look first at the hurdles that these IT departments are facing:
Lack of expertise
Midsize IT departments are often small with only a handful of IT professionals. It can be difficult and very expensive to recruit the right experts to handle all of the technologies they need to juggle including storage, virtualization, networking, security, and much more.
Understaffed
Midsize IT departments are generally not adequately staffed to deliver the types of solutions they are asked to provide. This is especially difficult when they have complex infrastructures to manage that require a lot of monitoring and tweaking to keep things running.
Underfunded
Midsize IT departments are often asked to do more with less in almost every area, making it very challenging to tackle big projects. When larger asset purchases are approved, the investment is expected to meet the company’s needs for many years to come, though trying to predict this is very difficult.
Benefits of HCI for Midsize Companies
Good hyperconverged infrastructure solutions have several immediate, tangible benefits for IT professionals that help them address the challenges of the midsize IT department including:
Rapid deployment
Replacing IT infrastructure in the past has been an arduous process. It can take weeks to get hardware installed and operational so that the migration of existing systems can begin. With HCI, the new infrastructure can be deployed in as little as a matter of hours, saving weeks of labor that could intrude on nights and weekends.
Ease of use
HCI solutions typically consolidate the management of storage, servers, and virtualization into a single intuitive interface. This consolidation can dramatically decrease training and management time, freeing up IT professionals to work on other tasks. Better HCI solutions automate many common management tasks such as storage configuration to further simplify administration and the need for deep expertise.
Scalable
Another benefit of HCI is that solutions are known for being easy to scale, with clustered architecture that allows expansion with the seamless addition of new cluster nodes. This allows IT departments to start with only the infrastructure resources they need with the ability to scale as their resource needs grow, eliminating the struggle of predicting 3-5 years into the future when purchasing hardware.
High availability
The clustered architecture of HCI solutions enables high availability without the deep expertise associated with traditional server clustering that uses shared storage configurations. The traditional cluster architectures are more prone to instability and single points of failure. Good HCI solutions are inherently more highly available and less at risk when components fail.
Better support
Most IT professionals have dealt with the nightmare of having multiple vendors involved in a support issue, often with more finger pointing than problem solving happening in these scenarios. When you are a midsize IT department you need quick support resolution because many issues can affect the entire organization. HCI typically eliminates multiple vendors by consolidating infrastructure components like servers, storage, and virtualization under a single vendor, dramatically improving support resolution times.
HCI provides simplicity for midsize organizations that have enterprise-sized needs and small-sized resources. It eliminates the complexities and liabilities that can be inherent in infrastructure architectures designed exclusively for enterprises. The reduction in complexity can lead to lower costs and frees up IT pros to work on projects that are more innovative, productive, and beneficial to the whole organization.
Are you ready to give up those long nights and weekends working on your IT projects? The benefits of HCI have become a reality for midsize companies with solutions designed uniquely for them. A hyperconverged infrastructure from Scale Computing can bring you much-needed relief and we can set up a demo for you to see it firsthand. Let’s have a conversation about the options available and how CCB can help you make it happen!
