Application Infrastructure, Application Storage
Article | July 19, 2023
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.
Read More
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | October 3, 2023
Flexible data access, enhanced disaster recovery, and reduced infrastructure staff burden are some of the biggest reasons businesses migrate to innovative and reliable cloud technologies. Infrastructure-as-a-service or Iaas, is one such cloud computing model that has simplified the lives of enterprises and developers by reducing their infrastructure burden. Iaas gives you access to servers, networking, storage, and virtualization features.
IaaS is fast becoming one of the biggest trends in cloud computing. According to Technavio's latest report, the IaaS market projects a growth of USD 141.77 billion, registering a CAGR of 28.2% from 2021 to 2026.
“So many systems end up as a big dreaded ball of mud (which is totally preventable) when designing an enforceable architecture model.”
Alexander von Zitzewitz, CEO, hello2morrow Inc.
But, how can IaaS technology help you grow and advance your business? Here are some key advantages of switching to IaaS:
Better Performance
One of the more well-known benefits of IaaS is achieving a higher performance level from your infrastructure. Rather than worrying about the latest hardware for your infrastructure, with IaaS in place, your in-house IT team will be able to focus more on working on your business goals and objectives through technology.
Because the SLA (Service Level Agreement) with your IaaS cloud service provider can ensure that you are getting the best performance from your cloud provider's infrastructure. An SLA will ensure that your cloud provider is accountable for continuous upgrades and the best possible service for your business.
Decreased CapEx
With IaaS technology, you can choose the IaaS cloud service provider of your choice. Typically, a cloud provider has a more reliable, robust, and redundant infrastructure setup than what would be feasible and financially realistic in an office environment. This means you can save on maintenance, purchase, and operating hardware-related business expenditures. Additionally, it also decreases your overall IT-related capital expenditure (CapEx).
Increased Flexibility
IaaS increases your scalability and flexibility exponentially. Your business can scale up and down as needed and on-demand.
For example, say your business is hosting a short-term campaign to drive more traffic to your website. IaaS will automatically provision resources to ensure your business infrastructure is well equipped to handle the sudden incoming traffic boost.
Scale- Up Your Business
Additionally, IaaS gives your growing business the flexibility it needs from its IT infrastructure.
For example, if you’re considering opening a new office in a different location, you don’t need to spend extra on new hardware; instead, you can directly connect to your infrastructure virtually. This means you don’t need to invest in additional infrastructure for business expansion continually.
Managed-Task Virtualization
As IaaS supports the virtualization of management tasks, your IT is free to concentrate on other, more thought-intensive work. This will not only drive more efficiency but also help boost ROI.
Disaster Recovery
During disasters like an earthquake or floods, IaaS ensures smooth business operations. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) stores and replicates data in multiple data centers in different geographical locations.
So even if a disaster or mishap causes significant damage to the data center, your IaaS providers can quickly restore the data from another data center.
Conclusion
IaaS allows your businesses to utilize the cloud to achieve your IT goals. It is flexible, scalable, reliable, cost-effective and provides seamless access to maximize business continuity. Therefore, you should choose a reliable IaaS cloud provider who can deliver a variety of cloud infrastructure solutions.
Read More
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | September 14, 2023
Unlocking the potential of hyper-converged infrastructure: Designing an advanced data center with scalability, efficiency, and performance for seamless HCI deployments through recent trends.
Contents
1. Introduction
2. Top Trends to consider in HCI
2.1. Public Cloud Services: An Option to On-premises Storage Infrastructure
2.2. Increasing Priority for Edge in Digital Businesses
2.3. Application Modernization
2.4. Hybrid and HCI: The Way to Future
2.5. HCI Automation Software in Pipeline
2.6. Backup and Disaster Recovery
2.7. Quadrupling of Micro Data and Edge Centers
3. Wrap Up
1. Introduction
In the era of hyper-converged infrastructure, designing an advanced data center is crucial to unlock the full potential of this transformative technology. With HCI combining compute, storage, and networking into a single platform, the data center must be carefully planned and optimized to ensure scalability, flexibility, and efficient operations. In this article, explore the key considerations and top hyper converged infrastructure trends for designing an advanced data center tailored for HCI, enabling organizations to harness the benefits of this innovative infrastructure.
2. Top Trends to consider in HCI
2.1 Public Cloud Services: An Option to On-premises Storage Infrastructure
HCI is experiencing the option of public cloud services as an alternative to on-premises storage infrastructure. By leveraging cloud services and native HCI platform file services, organizations can optimize workloads, leverage data storage services, eliminate silos, and create a unified and high-performance infrastructure. A 2019 ESG survey conducted among IT and data storage professionals found that public cloud storage infrastructure is increasingly favored over on-premises options. The survey revealed that IT professionals are twice as likely to consider public cloud storage infrastructure due to its benefits in cost efficiency, ease of procurement, automation capabilities, and simplified evaluation processes. Hyperconverged infrastructure facilitates on-premises and cloud-based deployments, enabling organizations to integrate and manage their IT infrastructure across both environments seamlessly. As organizations continue to explore hybrid IT strategies, HCI will play a critical role in providing a flexible and efficient infrastructure foundation.
2.2 Increasing Priority for Edge in Digital Businesses
Organizations are investing in IT to support this new business model of edge computing, and HCI plays a crucial role in enabling the deployment of edge resources. This trend also drives cloud adoption for such implementations, facilitating rapid responses to evolving business models and enabling dynamic scalability without impacting the core business. The rise of remote workforces has highlighted the importance of edge computing, where computing resources are brought closer to the point of data generation and consumption. This streamlined approach enables organizations to deploy and manage edge resources efficiently, ensuring reliable performance and data availability for remote employees. Furthermore, the adoption of IT infrastructure is complemented by the increasing use of cloud services. HCI serves as a bridge between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud, facilitating seamless integration and enabling organizations to leverage cloud capabilities for rapid scalability and flexibility.
2.3 Application modernization
One among Hyper-Converged Infrastructure trends, is application modernization is driving CIOs to seek opportunities for migrating to next-generation digital platforms that leverage HCI and cloud-native approaches. As part of this modernization approach, DevOps practices will need to incorporate containers and orchestration layers to provide the burst capabilities required to keep up with the escalating demands of digital experiences. The need for application modernization makes embracing advanced digital platforms that can efficiently modernize their existing applications compelling. This transformation allows for the rapid development of new products, services, and processes, enhancing customer experiences and increasing customer satisfaction. Containers provide a lightweight and scalable environment, allowing for consistent and reliable application deployment across various platforms. Orchestration tools streamline the management of containerized applications, enabling automated scaling, load balancing, and efficient resource allocation. By leveraging these containerization and orchestration layers, organizations can meet the growing demands of digital experiences, ensuring optimal performance and responsiveness.
2.4 Hybrid and HCI: The Way to Future
Traditional, cumbersome infrastructure is slowing down companies and impeding their ability to innovate faster than their more agile competitors. The future of IT infrastructure lies in hybrid environments, and HCI serves as a powerful facilitator for this transition. HCI allows businesses to seamlessly simplify their environments, optimize workload experiences, and improve scalability. According to research by 451 Research, 45% of respondents using HCI report that it facilitates resource scaling across their environments as circumstances and goals evolve. Additionally, an overwhelming 97% of HCI customers agree that HCI simplifies the deployment process for hybrid IT environments. This demonstrates the value and relevance of HCI in supporting the agility and flexibility demanded by the future of IT infrastructure. Fundamental innovations such as compute/storage disaggregation with HCI Mesh, native file services, and Kubernetes integration are broadening the range of applications for which HCI is well suited. With ongoing product innovations, such as compute/storage disaggregation, native file services, and Kubernetes integration, HCI continues to expand its range of applications, providing organizations with the performance, agility, and cost savings needed in modern IT infrastructure.
2.5 HCI Automation Software in Pipeline
The highly automated nature of HCI helps mitigate the risk of downtime by automating everyday life-cycle infrastructure management tasks, such as firmware upgrades and system refreshes. This automation reduces the need for complex, disruptive forklift upgrades traditionally prevalent in data centers. As a result, the data center becomes more intelligent and automated through the pervasive use of artificial intelligence and hyper-convergence, particularly in the monitoring and managing of assets and risks. Hyper converged infrastructure vendors are heavily investing in machine learning and automation to improve the underlying hardware and hyper-converged software for providing hyper converged solutions. The development of automation software, machine-learning-based AI for HCI reflects the industry's focus on enhancing HCI's efficiency, resilience, and manageability. Integrating artificial intelligence and automation technologies into HCI offerings paves the way for more intelligent and self-managing data centers. As the trend continues to evolve, organizations can expect greater automation capabilities and improved management of their decentralized and distributed systems through innovative HCI software solutions.
2.6 Backup and Disaster Recovery
Increasing concerns for faster data backup and security drive significant growth in the backup and disaster recovery application segment. Research firm MarketsAndMarkets reports that backup and disaster recovery are the fastest-growing applications within the hyper-converged market. One notable trend in the backup and disaster recovery space is the ability of hyper-convergence to reduce the total cost of ownership and operating expenses. Organizations can achieve cost savings and streamline their backup and disaster recovery processes by consolidating backup software, deduplication appliances, and storage arrays into a unified infrastructure. This integrated approach simplifies management, eliminates the need for separate components, and improves overall efficiency. According to MarketsAndMarkets, the global hyper-converged infrastructure market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 33 percent over the next four years, reaching a value of $17.1 billion by 2023. The demand for continuous application delivery and the increasing awareness among enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses are expected to drive this hyper converged market size expansion.
2.7 Quadrupling of Micro Data and Edge Centers
The evolution and adaptation of traditional enterprise data centers, driven by the rise of cloud computing, are paving the way for the expansion of micro or edge data centers. Gartner predicts that by 2025 these edge data centers will quadruple, fueled by innovations such as 5G and hyperconverged infrastructure. This shift presents an opportunity for hyper-converged offerings to consolidate servers, storage, networking, and software into a single, streamlined solution at the edge. While small remote office and edge deployments may require fewer storage and compute resources, they greatly benefit from centralized management and high-availability designs. HCI's ability to consolidate resources and its compact form factor make it an ideal solution for edge environments with limited physical space.
3. Wrap Up
Designing an advanced data center for hyper-converged infrastructure trends requires careful planning and consideration of key factors in HCI such as scalability, network architecture, storage requirements, and redundancy. By implementing approaches like modular design, modern digitalization, efficient cooling, proper power distribution, and robust security measures, organizations can create a data center that optimally supports HCI deployments. With an advanced data center, organizations can realize the full potential of HCI, achieving agility, scalability, and improved performance for their IT infrastructure.
An advanced data center tailored for hyper-converged infrastructure is essential to fully leverage HCI's benefits. By following the trends & techniques and considering critical factors in design, organizations can create a future-proof and efficient data center that enables seamless deployment and operation of HCI solutions, unlocking agility and scalability for their IT infrastructure.
Read More
Article | April 13, 2020
Rapid IT infrastructure scaling is always challenging. In March 2020, the coronavirus caused a surge in remote workers as organizations switched overwhelmingly to work-from-home policies. Scaling IT infrastructure to support this sudden shift proved to be a struggle for IT teams, resulting in a migration to cloud-based applications and solutions, a rush on hardware that can support a remote environment, and challenges scaling VPNs to support remote worker security. Here are some of the insights and lessons learned from IT professionals.
Read More