TECH BRIEF

REINVENT YOUR HARDWARE REFRESH CYCLE WITH HCI

WHAT’S DRIVING THE CHANGE?

• A complicated landscape of diverse applications and platforms

• A heightened need for speed and security

• A mandate to keep OpEx and CapEx in check

A Process on the Cusp of ChangeYesterday’s server refresh cycle was nothing if not predictable: Every three to five years, IT would evaluate purpose-built storage systems, and replace them with a new storage silo. Next came the arduous process of training administrators on the new solutions and establishing new processes for migration, management, and troubleshooting. It was difficult to keep up with rising demands or inadequate performance without expanding storage capacity.

This old way was slow, expensive, and inflexible for several reasons:

• Hardware: Aging servers and storage hardware were replaced every 3–7 years, depending on overall health, reliability, and amortization schedules.

• Inefficient design: Traditional data centers were designed on an open systems approach. Standalone server racks, external SAN/NAS storage, and networking hardware were purchased, deployed, and managed separately, creating inefficient silos. Components often had individual refresh cycles, causing further aggravation.

• Complex migration processes: Migration had to be discussed, planned, and executed before EOL of hardware, so data and applications could be moved. This shrank the window of productive or usable time on the hardware even more.

• Functional silos: Silos for different data center functions not only slowed decision-making but also added expense when resources couldn’t be shared due to infrastructure isolation.

Combined, all these factors made refresh a major event that took months or years to plan and execute. Waiting for approvals on cost overages for scaling, upgrades, or storage replacements could make it drag on even longer. As a result, businesses became less agile and more vulnerable to faster-moving competitors.

If you’ve been stuck in the traditional refresh cycle, it’s time to embrace a more efficient way of keeping your server and storage up to date, without sacrificing on quality—or your budget.

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“As the cyclical refresh of 2015 comes to an end, the market focus has begun to shift towards software-defined infrastructure and hybrid environment management, as organizations begin to transform their IT infrastructure as well as prepare for the compute demands expected over the next few years from next-gen IT domains such as IoT and cognitive analytics.”

KUBA STOLARSKI RESEARCH DIRECTOR SERVERS AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES AT IDC

Business Wire, March 09, 2016

Rejuvenating the Refresh CycleToday’s data center has largely been virtualized, making it ill-suited for the traditional refresh cycle. Businesses have to move faster than ever to keep up with changing demand, and can’t afford the time and money that such a long process requires.

So what does the modern refresh cycle look like? Something like this:

• Seamless: Requires no downtime, supporting an always-on virtualized environment

• Continuous: Features a near-constant cycle of assessing needs, defining requirements, acquiring new technologies, and configuring and deploying

• Simple: Doesn’t require legions of IT staff with specialized experts to handle the complexity

• Affordable: Fits into tight budgets

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REINVENT YOUR HARDWARE REFRESH CYCLE WITH HCI

What is HCI?Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) collapses compute, storage, and management onto industry-standard x86 servers, enabling a building-block approach to the software-defined data center. In an HCI, all key data center functions run as software on the hypervisor in a tightly integrated software layer.

The Key is Hyper-ConvergenceHCI is an ideal way to streamline your data center and reinvent the refresh cycle.

With HCI, the rip-and-replace model is no longer necessary. It allows you to approach refresh in a way that suits the needs of your business—you can upgrade what you need, when you need it, instead of the expensive “all-or-nothing” model that can slow you down.

HCI makes it possible for you to:• Take advantage of the latest technologies as they become available, rather than having to wait for lengthy

refresh cycles

• Eliminate silos and reduce the number of infrastructure components

• Upgrade with little or no downtime, with changes unnoticeable to end users

• Enable granular, non-disruptive scaling—both scale out and scale up

• Enjoy simplified deployment and maintenance with one integrated software stack

• Get protection with built-in inflation—for instance, three years after you buy something, it’s still current—you just have to upgrade the hardware

IDC ESTIMATES THAT HYPER-CONVERGED SALES WILL GROW FROM APPROX.

$400M $5B2014 2019

Source: IDC, Worldwide Converged Systems Forecast, 2016–2019: Special Report, Doc#US40940816, Feb 2016

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REINVENT YOUR HARDWARE REFRESH CYCLE WITH HCI

The High Cost of WaitingDon’t buy into the myth that you can defer capital expenses by delaying your refresh cycle. What you lose in agility and efficiency can add up to a whole lot more. By making the move to HCI, you can:

• Work more efficiently Take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies as they become available, which includes the latest flash technology and faster and more power-efficient processors. Simplify or eliminate complex migration processes when you phase out siloed storage equipment.

• Save money The cost of operating and maintaining old equipment for several more years can pay for investments in new, lower-cost technology today. Consolidating hardware via virtualization delivers savings in power/cooling, capital expenses, and licensing fees. You can even get space savings from the smaller footprint size.

• Become more agile and responsive HCI lets you scale up and scale out easily, without disruption. Enjoy fast, easy software updates rather than the rip-and-replace hardware upgrade common in traditional environments. Accelerate the deployment of applications with agile infrastructure that can be tailored through policies for each application.

• Increase reliability and availability Older equipment results in increased failure rate and downtime. Extending server replacement beyond the recommended useful life of around three years could increase failure rate and pose unnecessary risk to business operations.

• Adapt quickly to changing business needs Older infrastructure doesn’t have the horsepower to support many modern projects. HCI gives you the support you need for new use cases like big data and cloud-native applications.

• Focus on innovation With HCI, it’s easy to devote more resources to innovation, because they aren’t tied up in maintaining and managing old infrastructure. And because HCI automates manual tasks and provides intelligence that allocates resources as needed, your team can focus on more important things.

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REINVENT YOUR HARDWARE REFRESH CYCLE WITH HCI

“We got IOPS that were probably 10 times faster than our old storage. We almost fell out of our chairs when we saw the performance from this tiny little server running Virtual SAN. It was staggering. The numbers were just unbelievable.”

TOM LYNOTT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING MANAGER iGOV TECHNOLOGIES

A Thoughtful TransitionReady to take the plunge? You can start small and go at the pace that’s right for your organization. HCI enables a modular approach toward transforming your data center, with minimal upfront capital costs, and low risk.

You can start off with a particular use case, like management clusters, then expand your HCI footprint to new deployments like Business Critical Applications (BCA), Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO), Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), or Disaster Recovery Sites/Secondary Data Centers as you become more comfortable. This way you can rest assured that you can have a transition that is non-disruptive to your business, eliminating migrations and reducing any impact on existing apps.

Customer Case Study: iGov TechnologiesiGov Technologies builds and supplies mobile networking and computing solutions for austere organizations worldwide, including the U.S. military forces. Having a fast, secure, streamlined solution is crucial for their business. They needed to reduce the weight and size of their tactile mobile computing system, reduce power consumption, and simplify their systems.

iGov replaced network-attached storage in its tactical network platforms with a hyper-converged infrastructure solution based on VMware Virtual SAN™ storage. This reduced weight by more than 75%, increased performance by 10X, and extended battery life from 18 minutes to 2 hours.

Update Your Infrastructure—or Wait? The Choice Is ClearTechnology is constantly improving, IT budgets are stagnant or shrinking, and business needs are changing fast. IT needs to find a way to not only do more with existing resources but to do new things that simply weren’t possible before.

Evolving your infrastructure to a hyper-converged model can help you address this gap.

The benefits of new technology and HCI are so significant that waiting longer to refresh your existing architecture simply to defer CapEx costs can actually be counterproductive. Making the move now will allow you to keep pace with new demands and adapt fast as technology continues to evolve.

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REINVENT YOUR HARDWARE REFRESH CYCLE WITH HCI

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.comCopyright © 2016 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: vmware-understanding-the-differences-between-network-virtualization08/16

Choose the Market Leader in Hyper-Converged Infrastructure SoftwareVMware enables the lowest-cost and highest-performance next-generation HCI solutions. The natively integrated software combines radically simple Virtual SAN™ storage, the market-leading vSphere® hypervisor, and the vCenter Server™ unified management solution with the broadest and deepest set of HCI deployment choices.

The Solution That Delivers More• Radically Simple. VMware delivers one integrated software stack with streamlined management from a

single pane of glass.

• Lowest Cost. VMware offers “pay-as-you-grow” pricing, so that you pay only for what you need, when you need it.

• Highest Performance. VMware ensures consistent performance for every application, with enterprise-class availability and built-in failure tolerance.

• Ready for Any App, Any Scale. VMware gives you versatility in a fast-moving world, with solutions designed for the applications of today and tomorrow.

Learn more about VMware-powered HCI >Try Virtual SAN in a Hands-on Lab >

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REINVENT YOUR HARDWARE REFRESH CYCLE WITH HCI