Is HCI Cloud The Right Choice For You?

Originally published in ficolo.com in 2021.

Does your current infrastructure hold you back? Do you need to lower costs, better management or maybe you want an environment that is more scalable? Then hyperconverged infrastructure or HCI Cloud might be the right choice for you.

Hyperconverged infrastructure

Traditional data center architecture is three-tiered: There’s separate computing, storage and networking equipment, each requiring their own expertise for operation and management. This type of architecture can be expensive to build and operate as each part of the infrastructure has to be bought and managed separately.

The lack of agility and the time it takes to deploy the architecture often drives organizations to public cloud services which are easy and fast to deploy. But while organizations benefits from the ease-of-use of public cloud, they also have to deal with having less control, higher costs and the lack of enterprise-level security.

But traditional infrastructure and public cloud aren’t the only options available for organizations. Modern hardware can converge the entire infrastructure and run it all on x86-based servers with internal SSD drives. This type of infrastructure is called hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI for short.

Traditional infrastructure vs. hyperconverged infrastructure.

Why HCI Cloud: 

Basically, HCI offers higher agility and lower costs than traditional infrastructure without the negatives of public cloud. Capital expenses are lowered, as all you need to procure is x86 servers instead of storage arrays, storage controllers, or fiber-channel networking. And thanks to everything happening in the servers, the operations become much simpler and require less time and expertise.

There are also business benefits. HCI hardware can be up and running even in a few hours and workloads can be spun up in a matter of minutes. There is no need for complicated constructs like LUNs and volumes because the configuration is based on policies aligned with applications. And scalability is not an issue as drives and servers can be added without disruptions – without a lot of configuration or capital expenses.

HCI Cloud Benefits:

HCI offers the flexible scalability of public cloud with the manageability and security of private cloud, combining the best of both worlds. It is a good option for smaller scale deployment – for bigger deployments HCI can lead to sub-optimized system. When the scale of the operation is large enough, it may be better to have compute and storage segregated. HCI is also most well suited for organizations who don’t have massive amounts of rarely accessed data but require that data is retrieved rapidly and saved within the HCI system.

Your chosen architecture should always be driven by the business requirements: some businesses require a unique platform and other times a more generic platform is all that is needed. Ficolo is happy to help you choose the cloud platform to build your business. Contact us and let’s discuss what your cloud should look like.