Technology refreshes are necessary but often difficult to complete, and that can make you feel trapped
As soon as you finish refreshing one device, it’s time to update another. It’s much like being caught in quicksand – you try to move, but it is almost impossible. In fact, you may even be sinking. Anyone who has used older IT infrastructure models knows the feeling of constantly refreshing but never getting ahead.
Most businesses today are dealing with refresh cycles in their data center every three to five years, for as many as a dozen different devices. No matter the lifespan of the technology, once tech refreshes come around, the cycles take a lot of time. Before they can actually choose, implement, and migrate to a new solution, the business has to define infrastructure requirements, research an appropriate solution, and then vet the vendors and sales teams. With all this time spent on finding, implementing, and training on a new solution, businesses can be wondering, “When will I actually find time to innovate?”
Escaping the quicksand
There is an answer to today’s data center problems, especially when looking to reduce complexity and battle inefficiency. Hyperconverged infrastructure offers an extended hand (or very long vine) to IT professionals stuck in tech refresh quicksand to vastly simplify IT operations and break the cycle of constantly buying new technology.
Because hyperconverged infrastructure consolidates multiple IT infrastructure components into a single product, the technology lifecycles are also brought together, making it easier to plan for tech refreshes and easier to manage the entire process centrally. By combining all IT functions and services below the hypervisor, hyperconverged infrastructure offers the opportunity for IT to deal with a single vendor. And since the entire solution is managed through existing and well-known tools, training time is minimized as well.
Reducing the amount of complexity in the data center leads to only good things. For tech refresh cycles, it gives time back to the IT team. No longer do IT professionals have to spend all of their time going through the strenuous (and time-consuming) process of vetting, implementing, and training on new data center solutions. The time saved by hyperconverged infrastructure is time you can spend innovating.
In fact, an IDC white paper noted that hyperconverged customers who implemented HPE SimpliVity increased IT budget spent on new technology projects/purchases (from 43% to 57%) compared with IT budget spent on maintaining existing infrastructure. The white paper also stated that HPE SimpliVity customers increased time spent on innovation and new projects from 16% to 29%. Generally, this innovation was made possible from time savings associated with managing fewer infrastructure components to support respondents’ virtualized workloads, simplified backup/recovery and disaster recovery (an improvement of 44%), and less time spent troubleshooting.
If you feel like you’ve been caught in tech refresh quicksand, don’t continue to struggle with legacy IT and outdated systems — you’ll only sink faster. Hyperconverged infrastructure offers a way to break the buying cycle, leave the quicksand behind you, and take back control of your data center.
About Jesse St. Laurent
Jesse St. Laurent is the Chief Technologist for HPE Hyperconverged and SimpliVity. He uses his 20 years of experience to engage channel partners, evaluate emerging technologies, and shape innovative technology solutions involving data center modernization. To learn more about how hyperconverged customers are benefitting from HPE SimpliVity, read the full IDC report. For more information on how hyperconverged infrastructure can elevate your hybrid IT environment, download the free HPE SimpliVity edition of Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Dummies ebook.
To read more articles from Jesse St. Laurent, check out the HPE Converged Data Center Infrastructure blog
