When it comes to choosing an IT infrastructure, the choices these days are limitless. However, each enterprise has to gauge the available alternatives in light of its unique circumstances and future needs.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure or HCI is one of those technologies that occupy the few top slots among the different choices. HCI stands out of the lot by combining the elements of storage, compute and network into a single platform.
This in turn creates a lot of ease for enterprises that go for HCI. Most of all, HCI is fairly easy to set up, maintain and scale as per changing needs. On top of that, you also enjoy the ability to virtualize in a seamless manner.
One of the key distinguishing elements of the Cloud is also virtualization. However, not all entities feel comfortable with a fully public cloud infrastructure. This is particularly true when the move towards the Cloud is relatively in its early stages.
Most enterprises want to embrace the cloud in smaller, incremental stages. This lets them better evaluate the true capabilities of the Cloud and the service provider (CSP) as well. With HCI, this transition is achieved in a seamless manner.
Enterprises that desire to transition to the public cloud prefer to maintain some core functions or processes on-premise, at least in the initial stages. It is times like these that most enterprises use HCI for their on-premises mission-critical workloads.
The relatively lesser complicated workloads are initially moved to the Cloud, with more complex ones to follow in due course. This is what’s mostly referred to as the Hybrid Cloud. In such environments, HCI plays a leading role in many cases.
Hybrid cloud deployments otherwise represent the “sweet spot” when it comes to infrastructure choices. In this model, enterprises are able to cut IT infrastructure related costs, but not at the expense of security in any case.
