Easing the Admin Burden: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for Centralized Management of Remote Data Centers

IT organizations know what a challenge managing a distributed data center can be. Many an IT Director has spent sleepless nights figuring out how to maintain – or fix – data-center infrastructure deployed at regional offices. While they serve a purpose for companies with specific needs, such as those with branch offices far from headquarters or manufacturing facilities spread across the globe, distributed data centers are notorious for being a drain on resources. They can be siloed systems running well below capacity, and they usually require expensive, on-site data-center support, often requiring IT admins to jet around the globe in direct, hands-on-support roles.

But times are changing. The old model of hardware-focused data centers operating as silos in various geographies has given way to a new technology: hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). While HCI’s predecessor – converged infrastructure – combines compute, networking and storage capabilities on a single chassis in the data center, HCI goes a step further by integrating all of those functions in a software-defined environment. HCI involves running all of the functions of a datacenter as software on the hypervisor rather than on dedicated physical equipment. HCI is packaged in a compact, factory-integrated appliance, enabling data centers to scale by running compute, networking and storage in virtual building blocks and stacking those blocks to create a flexible infrastructure.  

The software-defined nature of HCI features robust management and orchestration tools that provide for automation and self-service of common IT tasks such as desktop provisioning, resource allocation and system monitoring. With the infrastructure, itself, proactively managing many of these functions, the IT organization doesn’t need administrators constantly attending to them.

What does that mean for the overtaxed IT organization?? Ultimately, it means easier and more cost-effective data center management by fewer resources, including consolidating data center support in a single location while also greatly reducing the physical travel around the world to distributed sites. And that means cutting operating expenses (OpEx).