ARE COMPANIES INVESTING TOO MUCH IN DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE?

Application Infrastructure, Application Storage

Article | July 19, 2023

IT infrastructure scaling is when the size and power of an IT system are scaled to accommodate changes in storage and workflow demands. Infrastructure scaling can be horizontal or vertical. Vertical scaling, or scaling up, adds more processing power and memory to a system, giving it an immediate boost. Horizontal scaling, or scaling out, adds more servers to the cloud, easing the bottleneck in the long run, but also adding more complexity to the system.

Application Storage, Data Storage

Article | July 12, 2023

Discover the list of best hyperconverged infrastructure books and gain knowledge on the latest advancements in HCI and process design & explore areas for HCI improvements in the infrastructure domain. This comprehensive guide presents a curated selection of top books to consider for adopting Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) in IT infrastructure. Organizations increasingly recognize HCI as a transformative solution that streamlines data center management, enhances scalability, and optimizes resource utilization. To navigate this technology effectively, businesses must equip themselves with the proper knowledge and insights from authoritative sources. The carefully compiled list of books featured here offers valuable information, providing IT professionals and decision-makers with a solid foundation to make informed choices and successfully implement HCI within their IT infrastructure. 1. Hyperconverged Infrastructure Data Centers: Demystifying HCI Author: Sam Halabi Hyperconverged Infrastructure Data Centers: Demystifying HCI is a highly informative and authoritative guide that provides a clear understanding of Hyperconverged Infrastructure technology. Written for technical professionals and IT managers, the book offers a vendor-neutral perspective on HCI, covering its use cases and comparing leading hyperconvergence solutions in the market. Halabi effectively explains HCI's benefits, combining storage, computing, and networking into a single system, offering simplicity, scalability, and flexibility without sacrificing control. The book explores computing, virtualization, and software-defined storage advancements, highlighting the improvements they bring to data center designs. The author guides readers through the HCI lifecycle, including evaluation, planning, implementation, and management. The book also delves into HCI applications such as DevOps, virtual desktops, and disaster recovery, presenting a new application deployment and management model. 2. Hyperconverged Infrastructure: A Complete Guide Author: The Art of Service - Hyperconverged Infrastructure Publishing This book is a valuable resource for individuals and organizations seeking to understand and leverage the potential of hyperconverged infrastructure. This guide takes a question-based approach, empowering readers to uncover challenges and develop effective solutions. The guide provides a comprehensive self-assessment tool covering seven core HCI maturity levels. With updated case-based questions, readers can diagnose their HCI projects, initiatives, organizations, and processes based on accepted diagnostic standards and practices. It helps readers identify areas where HCI improvements can be made and provides a clear picture of the attention those areas require, enabling them to lead their organizations effectively and address what truly matters. It empowers readers to make their HCI investments work better by guiding them through asking the right questions and seeking innovative perspectives. 3. Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Practical Tools for Self-Assessment Author: Gerardus Blokdyk The book is a valuable resource for individuals in diverse business roles seeking to optimize their Hyperconverged infrastructure investments. This comprehensive guide emphasizes the integration of HCI with other business initiatives and the monitoring of HCI activities' effectiveness. The guide emphasizes the use of HCI data and information to support organizational decision-making and foster innovation. One of the strengths of this guide lies in its focus on leveraging HCI data and information for organizational decision-making and innovation. The self-assessment tool helps identify areas for improvement, with case-based questions organized into seven core areas of process design. Nevertheless, this guide equips readers with the necessary tools and insights to maximize the value of HCI investments, align with business objectives, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. 4. Hyper-converged Infrastructure Standard Requirements Author: Gerardus Blokdyk This book offers individuals various business roles considering or exploring hyper-converged infrastructure implementation. This comprehensive guide emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions and understanding the challenges and hyperconvergence solutions related to HCI. It provides a set of organized case-based questions, enabling readers to diagnose their HCI projects and identify areas for improvement. The self-assessment tool helps organizations implement evidence-based best practices and integrate the latest advancements in HCI and process design. With the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Scorecard, readers can gain a clear understanding of the areas that require attention and prioritize their efforts accordingly. The digital components accompanying the book provide additional resources to support organizations in their HCI journey. 5. The Gorilla Guide to Hyperconverged Infrastructure Implementation Strategies Author: Scott D. Lowe The Gorilla Guide to Hyperconverged Infrastructure Implementation Strategies is a book designed for strategic planners seeking innovative segmentation methods. This book offers individuals various business roles exploring HCI implementation. It starts with the architecture of hyper-converged architecture, followed by Exploring the Intersection of Software-Defined Networking and HCI. It delved into addressing the pain points and storage performance in HCI, with relevant use cases for practical examples. It covers data-center consolidation, test and development environments, and HCI economics, for its impact on the IT budget. It helps organizations implement evidence-based best practices and integrate the latest advancements in HCI and process design. 6. The 2022 Report on Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: World Market Segmentation by City Author: Prof Philip M. Parker The '2022 Report on Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: World Market Segmentation by City' is a book designed for global strategic planners seeking innovative segmentation methods. This report covers over 2,000 cities across 200 countries, providing insights into the estimated market size (latent demand) of hyper-converged infrastructure in each significant city worldwide. The report ranks these cities based on their market size relative to their respective countries, geographic regions, and global market. The sales of hyper-converged infrastructure encompass a wide range of products, including hypervisors such as VMware, KVM, and Hyper-V, used for various purposes like virtual desktop infrastructure, server virtualization, data protection, and cloud solutions. Prominent companies in the industry, including VMware, Nutanix, Maxta, and others are covered in the report. The information presented is gathered from public sources, including news, press releases, and industry players, and is reported in U.S. dollars without adjusting for inflation. 7. The 2020-2025 World Outlook for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Author: Prof Philip M. Parker The World Outlook for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure study comprehensively analyzes the global market across more than 190 countries. It offers estimates of the latent demand, or potential industry earnings (P.I.E.), for each country, expressed in millions of U.S. dollars. The report also presents the country's share as a percentage of the region and the global market, enabling readers to assess its relative position. The study generates latent demand estimates using econometric models that project economic dynamics within and between countries. While it does not delve into specific market players or product details, it takes a strategic, long-term perspective, disregarding short-term cyclical fluctuations and focusing on aggregated trends. A multi-stage methodology, often taught in graduate business courses on international strategic planning, was employed to formulate these estimates. Wrap-up The adoption of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure represents a significant opportunity for businesses to revolutionize their IT infrastructure, improve operational efficiency, and unlock new levels of agility and scalability. The books recommended in this listicle serve as indispensable resources for IT professionals and decision-makers seeking to embark on an HCI journey. By investing in the knowledge imparted by these authoritative texts, you empower yourself and your organization to leverage the full potential of HCI and stay at the forefront of technological advancements. Remember, success in adopting HCI lies not only in the technology itself but also in the understanding and expertise gained through continuous learning and exploration.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, IT Systems Management

Article | September 14, 2023

Building trust through HCI by unveiling strategies to ensure the long-term reliability of technology partnerships, cementing lasting collaborations in a dynamic business landscape through vendor stability. Contents 1. Introduction 2. How HCI Overcomes Infrastructural Challenges 3. Evaluation Criteria for Enterprise HCI 3.1. Distributed Storage Layer 3.2. Data Security 3.3. Data Reduction 4. Assessing Vendor Stability: Ensuring Long-Term Reliability of Partners 4.1. Vendor Track Record 4.2. Financial Stability 4.3. Customer Base and References 4.4. Product Roadmap and Innovation 4.5. Support and Maintenance 4.6. Partnerships and Ecosystem 4.7. Industry Recognition and Analyst Reports 4.8. Contracts and SLAs 5. Final Takeaway 1. Introduction When collaborating with a vendor, it is essential to evaluate their financial stability. This ensures that they are able to fulfil their obligations and deliver the promised services or goods. Prior to making contractual commitments, it is necessary to conduct due diligence to determine a vendor's financial health. This article examines when a vendor's financial viability must be evaluated, why to do so, and how vendor and contract management software can assist businesses. IT organizations of all sizes face numerous infrastructure difficulties. On one hand, they frequently receive urgent demands from the business to keep their organization agile and proactive while implementing new digital transformation initiatives. They also struggle to keep their budget under control, provide new resources swiftly, and manage the increasing complexity while maintaining a reasonable level of efficiency. For many organizations, a cloud-only IT strategy is not a viable option; as a result, there is a growing interest in hybrid scenarios that offer the best of both realms. By combining cloud and traditional IT infrastructures, there is a real danger of creating silos, going in the incorrect direction, and further complicating the overall infrastructure, thereby introducing inefficiencies. 2. How HCI Overcomes Infrastructural Challenges Hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI) surpass conventional infrastructures in terms of simplicity and adaptability. HCI enables organizations to conceal the complexity of their IT infrastructure while reaping the benefits of a cloud-like environment. HCI simplifies operations and facilitates the migration of on-premises data and applications to the cloud. HCI is a software-defined solution that abstracts and organizes CPU, memory, networking, and storage devices as resource pools, typically utilizing commodity x86-based hardware and virtualization software. It enables the administrator to rapidly combine and provision these resources as virtual machines and, more recently, as independent storage resources such as network-attached storage (NAS) filers and object stores. Management operations are also simplified, allowing for an increase in infrastructure productivity while reducing the number of operators and system administrators per virtual machine managed. HCI market and itssolutions can be categorized into three groups: Enterprise Solutions They have an extensive feature set, high scalability, core-to-cloud integrations, and tools that extend beyond traditional virtualization platform management and up the application stack. Small/Medium Enterprise Solutions Comparable to the previous category, but simplified and more affordable. The emphasis remains on simplifying the IT infrastructure for virtualized environments, with limited core-to-cloud integrations and a limited ecosystem of solutions. Vertical Solutions Designed for particular use cases or vertical markets, they are highly competitive in edge-cloud or edge-core deployments, but typically have a limited ecosystem of solutions. These solutions incorporate open-source hypervisors, such as KVM, to provide end-to-end support at lower costs. They are typically not very scalable, but they are efficient from a resource consumption standpoint. 3. Evaluation Criteria for Enterprise HCI 3.1 Distributed Storage Layer The distributed storage layer provides primary data storage service for virtual machines and is a crucial component of every HCI solution. Depending on the exposed protocol, they are typically presented as a virtual network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) and contain all of the data. There are three distributed storage layer approaches for HCI: Virtual storage appliance (VSA): A virtual machine administered by the same hypervisor as the other virtual machines in the node. A VSA is more flexible and can typically support multiple hypervisors, but this method may result in increased latency. Integrated within the hypervisor or the Operating System (OS): The storage layer is an extension of the hypervisor and does not require the preceding approach's components (VM and guest OS). The tight integration boosts overall performance, enhances workload telemetry, and fully exploits hypervisor characteristics, but the storage layer is not portable. Specialized storage nodes: The distributed storage layer is comprised of specialized nodes in order to achieve optimal performance consistency and scalability for both internal and external storage consumption. This strategy, which is typically more expensive than the alternatives for lesser configurations, is utilized. 3.2 Data Security Currently, all vendors offer sophisticated data protection against multiple failures, such as full node, single, and multiple-component issues. Distributed erasure coding safeguards information by balancing performance and data footprint efficiency. This equilibrium is made possible by modern CPUs with sophisticated instruction sets, new hardware such as NVMe and storage-class memory (SCM) devices, and data path optimizations. In addition, the evolution of storage technologies has played a pivotal role in enhancing data protection strategies. The introduction of high-capacity SSDs (Solid-State Drives) and advancements in storage virtualization have further strengthened the ability to withstand failures and ensure uninterrupted data availability. These technological innovations, combined with the relentless pursuit of redundancy and fault tolerance, have elevated the resilience of modern data storage systems. Furthermore, for data protection and security, compliance with rules, regulations, and laws is paramount. Governments and regulatory bodies across the globe have established stringent frameworks to safeguard sensitive information and ensure privacy. Adherence to laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States, and various industry-specific regulations is non-negotiable. Organizations must fortify their data against technical vulnerabilities and align their practices with legal requirements to prevent costly fines, legal repercussions, and reputational damage. 3.3 Data Reduction Optimization of the data footprint is a crucial aspect of hyper-converged infrastructures. Deduplication, compression, and other techniques, such as thin provisioning, can significantly improve capacity utilization in virtualized environments, particularly for Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) use cases. Moreover, in order to optimize rack space utilization and achieve server balance, the number of storage devices that can be deployed on a single HCI node is restricted. 4. Assessing Vendor Stability: Ensuring Long-Term Reliability of Partners Here are some key factors that contribute to ensuring long-term reliability: 4.1 Vendor Track Record Assessing the vendor's track record and reputation in the industry is crucial. Look for established vendors with a history of delivering reliable products and services. A vendor that has been operating in the market for a significant period of time and has a strong customer base indicates stability. 4.2 Financial Stability Consider factors such as the vendor's profitability, revenue growth, and ability to invest in research and development. Financial stability ensures the vendor's ability to support their products and services over the long term. 4.3 Customer Base and References Look at the size and diversity of the vendor's customer base. A large and satisfied customer base indicates that the vendor's solutions have been adopted successfully by organizations. Request references from existing customers to get insights into their experience with the vendor's stability and support. 4.4 Product Roadmap and Innovation Assess the vendor's product roadmap and commitment to ongoing innovation. A vendor that actively invests in research and development, regularly updates their products, and introduces new features and enhancements demonstrates a long-term commitment to their solution's reliability and advancement. 4.5 Support and Maintenance Evaluate the vendor's support and maintenance services. Look for comprehensive support offerings, including timely bug fixes, security patches, and firmware updates. Understand the vendor's service-level agreements (SLAs), response times, and availability of technical support to ensure they can address any issues that may arise. 4.6 Partnerships and Ecosystem Consider the vendor's partnerships and ecosystem. A strong network of partners, including technology alliances and integrations with other industry-leading vendors, can contribute to long-term reliability. Partnerships demonstrate collaboration, interoperability, and a wider ecosystem that enhances the vendor's solution. 4.7 Industry Recognition and Analyst Reports Assess the vendor's industry recognition and performance in analyst reports. Look for accolades, awards, and positive evaluations from reputable industry analysts. These assessments provide independent validation of the vendor's stability and the reliability of their HCI solution. 4.8 Contracts and SLAs Review the vendor's contracts, service-level agreements, and warranties carefully. Ensure they provide appropriate guarantees for support, maintenance, and ongoing product updates throughout the expected lifecycle of the HCI solution. 5. Final Takeaway Evaluating a vendor's financial stability is crucial before entering into contractual commitments to ensure their ability to fulfill obligations. Hyper-converged infrastructure overcomes infrastructural challenges by simplifying operations, enabling cloud-like environments, and facilitating data and application migration. The HCI market offers enterprise, small/medium enterprise, and vertical solutions, each catering to different needs and requirements. Analysing enterprise HCI solutions requires careful consideration of various criteria. Each approach has its own advantages and considerations related to flexibility, performance, and cost. The mentioned techniques can significantly reduce the data footprint, particularly in use cases like VDI, while maintaining performance and efficiency. Organizations take decisions that align with their specific storage, security, and efficiency requirements by considering the evaluation criteria for enterprise HCI solutions. By considering these factors, organizations can make informed decisions and choose a vendor with a strong foundation of reliability, stability, and long-term commitment, ensuring the durability of their HCI infrastructure and minimizing risks associated with vendor instability.

Article | April 20, 2021

Communications giant Verizon last week launched 5G for Business Internet in 20 new markets, targeting SMBs and enterprises alike. The fixed-wireless plans provide download speeds of 100Mbps ($69/month), 200Mbps ($99/month), and 400Mbps ($199/month) with no data limits. Upload speeds are slower. Verizon is also offering a 10-year price lock for new customers with no long-term contract required. “As 5G Business Internet scales into new cities, businesses of all sizes can gain access to the superfast speeds, low latency and next-gen applications enabled by 5G Ultra-Wideband, with no throttling or data limits,” Tami Erwin, CEO of Verizon Business, said in a statement. “We’ll continue to expand the 5G Business Internet footprint and bring the competitive pricing, capability, and flexibility of our full suite of products and services to more and more businesses all over the country.” The service was previously launched in parts of Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. Verizon started rolling out 5G services last year using lower spectrum bands. According to a study by IHS Markit’s RootMetrics, Verizon offers speeds similar to those of T-Mobile but behind AT&T.