7 Key Requirements When Selecting the Right dHCI Solution
Sandy MacDonnell
The hybrid cloud model is here to stay. Public cloud providers offer a simple, fast, and efficient model to consume required IT services and help optimize budgets. However, organizations still need to address the other half of the hybrid model. On-premises environments are still often the best—or only—choice to meet specific business, compliance, and operational needs. These requirements have led IT organizations to demand equivalent cloud-native IT services for on-premises data centers. Traditional hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions addressed both the burden of sourcing discrete hardware and simplified management, but with an efficiency penalty that can reduce consolidation capabilities, inflate licensing costs, and limit scalability. A new architecture has evolved that IDC calls “disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure” (dHCI). .
The New Business Requirements Driving dHCI
As hybrid cloud adoption continues to grow, the key question for many IT organizations is how to create an integrated approach that enables services, applications, and data to be seamlessly deployed and migrated between clouds (public, private, or hybrid) and IT environments (core and edge). Enterprises often leverage more than one public cloud for strategic, operational, regulatory, or geo-political reasons. Any time a vendor is selected, a potential for lock-in exists, and as organizations evaluate hybrid cloud solutions it is important for them to consider how each vendor will increase or decrease mobility of services, applications, and data. Hybrid cloud is being driven by the emergence of growing technologies, including:- End-user computing and virtual desktop infrastructure
- Kubernetes and containers
- Application modernization
- DevOps and SecDevOps
- Artificial Intelligence and machine learning
- Internet of Things
- Mobile applications
To meet the new demands of IT, dHCI has emerged as a dominant solution because of its ability to provide cloud services on premises with storage that scales as applications are built, is simple to manage, and is highly automated. dHCI is built to address the demands of end-user computing, DevOps, AI/ML, and traditional applications.
End-User Computing
dHCI allows IT to pool resources and dole them out based on who needs what. With dHCI, IT can disperse resources across the infrastructure to do more regular virtual application performance testing.DevOps
dHCI is a cloud-native system, designed to give a common experience across public and private clouds, with persistent storage that follows the associated container, simplifying application development for DevOps teams.AI/ML
dHCI offers the operational flexibility to leverage computing power at the edge for AI inferencing before transferring data to the core or the cloud. With dHCI, you purchase the compute and storage independently so that your resources can be used with maximum efficiency.Traditional Applications
dHCI is architected to handle traditional IT workloads such as databases, but it doesn’t require special skills to install and run. Because dHCI is software defined, installation can be handled by a storage generalist. You can run all of the traditional applications with enterprise-grade hardware, but spend less time dealing with storage and backup matrixes.
Sandy MacDonnell
Sandy is a Product Marketing Manager at NetApp. She fell in love with high tech living in the Silicon Valley. After a stint in NetApp’s legal department, and a brief time in Taiwan, she found her way back home to Colorado for an MBA. When she’s not in the office Sandy is in the kitchen experimenting with ingredients she’s discovered on her latest travels, running up the closest mountain or planning her next adventure.
