Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | July 13, 2023
DApps (sometimes called Dapps) are from the blockchain universe and so, logically, the apps part stands for application (obviously) and the D part stands for decentralised (only obvious once you know that we’re talking distributed immutable language here). According to the guides section at blockgeeks, DApps are open source in terms of code base, incentivised (in terms of who validates it) and essentially decentralised so that all records of the application’s operation must be stored on a public and decentralised blockchain to avoid pitfalls of centralisation. So then, Cartesi is a DApp infrastructure that runs an operating system (OS) on top of blockchains. The company has now launched a more complete ‘platform-level’ offering, which is described as a layer-2 solution
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | October 3, 2023
The expertise of leading HCI firms shape the future of IT operations. This Hyperconverged Infrastructure companies list, will provide Hyperconverged solutions for growth and better services.
In IT infrastructure, organizations constantly seek ways to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and enhance user experience. HCI is a game-changing solution combining storage, computing, and networking into a single, integrated system. To leverage the full potential of HCI and ensure enhanced user experience, leading HCI system integrators and consultants have become invaluable partners for businesses across various sectors. In this listicle, delve into the role of leading HCI system integrators and consultants in enhancing user experience, the key contributions, and the significance of the services of the top hyperconverged infrastructure companies.
1. Precision Computer Services
Precision Computer Services (PCS) is a trusted provider of practical and proven technology solutions for businesses. With over 30 years of experience, PCS helps clients overcome complex IT challenges and achieve their strategic goals. It offers expertise in data center upgrades when businesses struggle to manage workloads, need automation and orchestration for virtual infrastructure, aims to reduce physical data center footprint or require guidance on RPO and RTO strategies. PCS differentiates itself by automating processes, ensuring information accessibility and security, specializing in hybrid cloud models, and allowing client teams to focus on business growth while PCS handles complex IT work. It offers converged and hyperconverged infrastructure, reliable servers, data storage and protection, public and private cloud services, data classification, and backup and disaster recovery solutions.
2. IPDS
IPDS empowers businesses to modernize their IT infrastructure, facilitate efficient cloud operations, and capitalize on the capabilities of the modern workforce, by combining cutting-edge technologies with highly skilled engineering talent. The company's website serves to showcase its expertise and offerings. It specializes in Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and Converged Infrastructure solutions. These innovative technologies have become the standard in the IT landscape, enabling organizations to benefit from the advancements in the software-defined data center realm. With seamless connectivity to cloud providers, HCI allows businesses to establish hybrid cloud environments. By leveraging industry-leading technologies and harnessing the potential of a modern workforce, IPDS enables clients to stay at the forefront of innovation and achieve their strategic objectives.
3. Climb Channel Solutions
Climb Channel Solutions, a subsidiary of Climb Global Solutions, Inc, is a leading global specialty technology distributor specializing in emerging and business-critical technologies. One of the critical solutions offered by Climb is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, which combines computing resources, storage, and networking to minimize compatibility issues and reduce the total cost of ownership for businesses. Its HCI solution vendors provide software-defined storage, networking, virtualization, and disaster recovery solutions, enabling organizations to optimize their infrastructure and achieve high availability. With a global presence and a customer base that spans thousands of partners worldwide, Climb Channel Solutions has established itself as a trusted distribution partner.
4. Nexenta by DDN
DDN provides optimized high-performance computing (HPC) storage solutions for research and innovation. By offering scalable and efficient HPC storage solutions, DDN empowers businesses to streamline their data pipelines and achieve enhanced performance at scale. DDN's extensive experience in supporting advanced computing environments enables them to accelerate application performance, reduce operational costs, accommodate data growth, and deliver services through centralized data management. Their solutions, such as EXAScaler, provide efficient building blocks that match storage performance and scalability requirements while reducing administration overhead and complexity. With features like data placement optimization, encryption, and secure multi-tenancy, DDN ensures rock-solid security and efficient storage management. With real-time partnership and Lustre open-source support, DDN enables organizations to access subject matter expertise and effectively manage their entire HPC data lifecycle.
5. StorMagic
SvSAN is a highly efficient and cost-effective hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution designed specifically for manufacturing. To ensure maximum uptime and eliminate single points of failure, SvSAN enables manufacturers of all sizes to run applications smoothly and maintain productivity. By deploying just two x86 servers at each location, manufacturers can leverage SvSAN's virtual SAN capabilities to minimize planned and unplanned downtime. This solution provides 100% uptime, making it an ideal choice for factories and offices where operational continuity is critical. Converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint eliminates physical SANs, resulting in significant cost savings. StorMagic, as a company, is committed to solving edge data challenges. Their storage and HCI security products, including SvSAN and SvKMS (encryption key manager), cater to organizations with diverse site requirements.
6. Fabulix
Fabulix, a Hyperconverged Infrastructure Platform, offers a comprehensive solution for autonomous infrastructure, empowering organizations to break free from the complexities of legacy IT and monolithic data centers. It is an easily deployable and infinitely scalable hyperconverged infrastructure platform that combines compute, storage, network, and virtualization resources into a single, streamlined system. By integrating software and hardware, Fabulix creates or extends private cloud and hybrid environments within local data centers, providing organizations with the benefits of autonomous infrastructure and facilitating the transition from legacy operations to cloud outcomes. Its networking capabilities automate workload deployments without requiring configuration changes on physical networks. Fabulix is designed to be an affordable alternative for infrastructure requirements. It provides integrated protection for data and applications through features like shielded VMs, network micro-segmentation, and native encryption.
7. VZURE Solutions
VZURE Solutions empowers organizations to efficiently integrate and manage their converged or hyperconverged infrastructures. By leveraging their services, businesses can experience a range of benefits, including lower operating costs by consolidating storage and network management infrastructure teams, reduced labor costs through automated data center management, increased utilization, streamlined cabling, and fewer network connections to drive costs down, and enhanced agility through virtualized storage networking and centralized management. As a Cisco Preferred Solution Partner, VZURE offers a comprehensive suite of consultation, training, and support services for various aspects of cloud computing, networking, storage, and more. They provide the necessary expertise and resources to help businesses build, support, and manage efficient converged or hyperconverged infrastructures.
Final thoughts
The significance of leading Hyperconverged Infrastructure system integrators and consultants in enhancing user experience cannot be overstated in today's technology-driven world. With their expertise in designing and implementing optimized HCI solutions, these companies enable businesses to leverage the power of integrated storage, computing, and networking, resulting in streamlined operations, improved performance, and enhanced user satisfaction.
Their deep understanding of HCI technologies and ability to align solutions with specific business requirements helps organizations achieve seamless and efficient IT infrastructure, ultimately leading to enhanced user experiences. As the demand for scalable and flexible infrastructure solutions continues to grow, the expertise of HCI platforms, leading HCI system integrators and consultants will play a crucial role in shaping the future of IT operations and ensuring that user experience remains at the forefront of technological advancements.
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Application Infrastructure
Article | July 19, 2023
Consider IaaS (infrastructure as a service) as a virtual version of your traditional data center. IaaS is a branch of cloud computing technology that offers virtualized storage, server, and networking wrapped together as a self-service platform. It is highly cost-efficient and makes up for easier, faster workloads. Although incredibly convenient for business, it largely depends on what your company needs to use it for.
What is IaaS, and How Can It Benefit Your Business?
IaaS first rose to popularity in the early 2010s. Since then, it has become the standard abstraction model for many types of workloads. But with the rise of the microservices application pattern and the arrival of new technologies like containers and serverless IaaS is still a foundational service, but the field is more crowded than ever.
The most common household cloud computing names—AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure— are all IaaS providers. They all maintain giant data centers around the globe. It includes tons of storage systems, physical servers, and networking equipment under a virtualization layer. Cloud customers access these resources to deploy and run applications in a highly automated manner.
Developing a cloud adoption strategy is a vital step forward for modern-day business. And this subscription-based cloud computing service, IaaS, offers a remote management solution and reduces your purchase cost at the same time.
Additionally, IaaS also provides key solutions vital for any company’s future plans, such as big-data analysis. It allows businesses like yours to analyze massive data sets and see future trends, patterns, and associations that a human wouldn’t.
Understanding the IaaS Architecture
In an IaaS service model, your cloud provider will take over your infrastructure components, such as traditional on-premises data centers and host them on the internet. This includes virtual computing, servers, networking hardware, and infrastructure components, as well as the hypervisor layer.
IaaS service providers will also provide a wide array of services to accompany those infrastructure components.
Monitoring
Detailed billing
Security
Log access
Load balancing
Clustering
Storage resiliency
Backup
Replication
Disaster Recovery
IaaS services are automated and highly policy-driven, so you can implement all your infrastructure tasks effortlessly.
How Does It Work?
IaaS customers access their resources through a WAN (wide area network). Leveraging the cloud provider's services, they will install the remaining elements of an application stack.
For example, you can log in to the IaaS platform to create VMs (virtual machines), install operating systems on each VM, deploy middleware like databases, create storage buckets for workloads and backups, and install the enterprise workload on that VM. Afterward, you can also use the IaaS provider's services to track costs, balance network traffic, monitor performance, troubleshoot application-related issues and manage disaster recovery.
IaaS Use Cases
As IaaS provides general-purpose computing resources, it can be used for any kind of use case. IaaS is most often used today for the development and testing environments, websites, and web apps that interact with customers, data storage, analytics, and data warehousing workloads. Plus, it also offers backup and disaster recovery services, especially for on-premises workloads. IaaS is also a good way to set up and run common business software and apps like SAP.
Real-life Examples
GE Healthcare: Reputed medical imaging facility GE Healthcare adopted Amazon EC2 from AWS to design the GE Health Cloud. GE Health Cloud platform successfully empowered its consumers by collecting, storing, accessing, and processing information worldwide from different types of medical devices to obtain value from data.
Coca-Cola: The beverage giant Coca-Cola collaborated with SoftLayer adopting a pay-as-you-go architecture to manage their CRM system effectively during peak seasons.
Final Thoughts
Before choosing a provider, you will need to think carefully about the services, reliability, and costs. First, you should thoroughly assess the capabilities of your organization’s IT department and determine how well equipped it is to deal with the ongoing demands of IaaS implementation. Accordingly, you will be prepared to choose an alternative provider and move to the alternative infrastructure if you need to.
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Application Infrastructure
Article | June 6, 2022
Introduction
It is hard to manage a modern firm without a convenient and adaptable IT infrastructure. When properly set up and networked, technology can improve back-office processes, increase efficiency, and simplify communication. IT infrastructure can be utilized to supply services or resources both within and outside of a company, as well as to its customers. IT infrastructure when adequately deployed aids organizations in achieving their objectives and increasing profits.
IT infrastructure is made up of numerous components that must be integrated for your company's infrastructure to be coherent and functional. These components work in unison to guarantee that your systems and business as a whole run smoothly.
Enterprise IT Infrastructure Trends
Consumption-based pricing models are becoming more popular among enterprise purchasers, a trend that began with software and has now spread to hardware. This transition from capital to operational spending lowers risk, frees up capital, and improves flexibility. As a result, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues increased by 53% from 2015 to 2016, making them the fastest-growing cloud and infrastructure services segments. The transition to as-a-service models is significant given that a unit of computing or storage in the cloud can be quite cheaper in terms of the total cost of ownership than a unit on-premises.
While businesses have been migrating their workloads to the public cloud for years, there has been a new shift among large corporations. Many companies, including Capital One, GE, Netflix, Time Inc., and others, have downsized or removed their private data centers in favor of shifting their operations to the cloud.
Cybersecurity remains a high priority for the C-suite and the board of directors. Attacks are increasing in number and complexity across all industries, with 80% of technology executives indicating that their companies are unable to construct a robust response. Due to lack of cybersecurity experts, many companies can’t get the skills they need on the inside, so they have to use managed security services.
Future of Enterprise IT Infrastructure
Companies can adopt the 'As-a-Service' model to lower entry barriers and begin testing future innovations on the cloud's basis. Domain specialists in areas like healthcare and manufacturing may harness AI's potential to solve some of their businesses' most pressing problems.
Whether in a single cloud or across several clouds, businesses want an architecture that can expand to support the rapid evolution of their apps and industry for decades. For enterprise-class visibility and control across all clouds, the architecture must provide a common control plane that supports native cloud Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as well as enhanced networking and security features.
Conclusion
The scale of disruption in the IT infrastructure sector is unparalleled, presenting enormous opportunities and hazards for industry stakeholders and their customers. Technology infrastructure executives must restructure their portfolios and rethink their go-to-market strategies to drive growth. They should also invest in the foundational competencies required for long-term success, such as digitization, analytics, and agile development.
Data center companies that can solve the industry's challenges, as well as service providers that can scale quickly without limits and provide intelligent outcome-based models. This helps their clients achieve their business objectives through a portfolio of 'As-a-Service' models, will have a bright future.
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