If your business is like most, you’ve become accustomed over the years to approaching your IT like a veritable buffet of options—one vendor for most of your networking needs, another for the rest, and still others for storage, software, and more. Many vendors offered (and continue to provide) solutions for networking, storage, software, or some combination of the three. Generally, you could choose the solutions that worked best for you—putting all your choices on your business’s technology plate as you wanted or needed to make changes. However, this is where tech-solutions-as-a-buffet cease to make sense.
Traditional IT
With traditional IT—much like individual selections on a buffet—you’re responsible for what happens to each once they make their way onto your plate. You’re in charge of integration, onboarding your employees, and most other considerations involving that particular piece of IT. In some cases where there’s an issue with any individual piece, some vendors may direct your attention to the separate vendors in charge of your other technologies rather than pursue troubleshooting.
With a buffet of options, what you like or don’t like is often yours to deal with once it’s on your plate. As organizations sought ways to narrow conflicts between separate pieces of IT and establish systems in which these pieces could work together, systems administrators became famous for lumping multiple pieces of hardware and software together in a package that worked a bit more smoothly. However, integration and cohesion were still a roadblock for some businesses.
What is Hyper-converged Technology and Converged Technology?
The natural next step—converged technology—has emerged as a different approach to the almost overwhelming array of IT options, while also eliminating integration issues. With converged technology solutions, you can choose a package of solutions from a vendor that maintains partnerships with the best hardware and software infrastructure names in the business, without the worry of integrating or managing each separately. In general, most converged technology vendors utilize a custom management interface designed to let you view and manage each piece individually from a single (or reduced number of) dashboard.
As you might expect, a hyper-converged system is like a converged system—but it isn’t precisely the “converged system to the nth degree,” the name implies. Instead, hyper-converged infrastructure takes the premise of combining ideal IT products into a single set of hardware and software components and makes it even more package-based by taking away many of the hardware components. A single vendor offers hyper-converged infrastructure as infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
What Is the Difference Between Converged and Hyper-converged Infrastructure?
Both converged and hyper-converged infrastructure aim to move distinct technologies into a unified system that simplifies the integration and management of all IT considerations. However, they achieve the end goal in different ways. Where converged technology simply aims to consolidate hardware and software and improve integration, hyper-converged infrastructure moves nearly all components into a software-defined data center, manageable from a single dashboard. Converged technology utilizes a server, a network and storage switch, and a storage component attached to the physical server. Hyper-converged technology combines storage and server components by supplying a hyper-convergence storage controller function to run as a service on every node of your network.
In keeping with our buffet analogy, converged technology gives you the ideal plate the first time without having to travel to the buffet and ensures each of the components on it works well with the others. In contrast, hyper-converged technology offers you the entire plate as a single, perfectly unified dish, whose elements work in harmony.
Best of all, hyper-converged technology thrives when teamed with other cloud technology offerings. In fact, hyper-converged solutions can be used with vArida’s cloud service offerings successfully, spanning your locational technology with a cloud infrastructure to provide you with optimal control over your system. In this way, hyper-converged technology can truly come into its own when paired with vArida cloud solutions.
Is Hyper-converged Infrastructure For You?
The advantages of hyper-converged infrastructure are numerous, including:
Performance—reduced cabling and shorter travel distances mean quicker processing.
Efficiency—use a more significant percentage of your system resources without being locked into hardware.
Agility—employees working in multiple areas can provision environments as they’re needed.
Balance—need more capacity to handle higher workloads or applications? Simply add nodes, then balance the workload to maintain a perfectly sized data center for your business.
Simplicity—access to management commands through a single dashboard unifies your system and simplifies controls.
Upgradability—maintenance and upgrades occur within minutes, without disrupting your current processes.
Flexibility—available to adapt to multiple workloads and can be adapted to run any business application imaginable.
Ready to seize some of the benefits of hyper-converged infrastructure for your enterprise? Or, do you need more information about how HPE Greenlake’s infrastructure can be hyper-converged to offer more from HPE’s portfolio of individual services? Contact vArida today for insight into whether shifting to hyper-converged technology is right for your business.
Converged and Hyper-converged Technology Guide
If your business is like most, you’ve become accustomed over the years to approaching your IT like a veritable buffet of options—one vendor for most of your networking needs, another for the rest, and still others for storage, software, and more. Many vendors offered (and continue to provide) solutions for networking, storage, software, or some combination of the three. Generally, you could choose the solutions that worked best for you—putting all your choices on your business’s technology plate as you wanted or needed to make changes. However, this is where tech-solutions-as-a-buffet cease to make sense.
Traditional IT
With traditional IT—much like individual selections on a buffet—you’re responsible for what happens to each once they make their way onto your plate. You’re in charge of integration, onboarding your employees, and most other considerations involving that particular piece of IT. In some cases where there’s an issue with any individual piece, some vendors may direct your attention to the separate vendors in charge of your other technologies rather than pursue troubleshooting.
With a buffet of options, what you like or don’t like is often yours to deal with once it’s on your plate. As organizations sought ways to narrow conflicts between separate pieces of IT and establish systems in which these pieces could work together, systems administrators became famous for lumping multiple pieces of hardware and software together in a package that worked a bit more smoothly. However, integration and cohesion were still a roadblock for some businesses.
What is Hyper-converged Technology and Converged Technology?
The natural next step—converged technology—has emerged as a different approach to the almost overwhelming array of IT options, while also eliminating integration issues. With converged technology solutions, you can choose a package of solutions from a vendor that maintains partnerships with the best hardware and software infrastructure names in the business, without the worry of integrating or managing each separately. In general, most converged technology vendors utilize a custom management interface designed to let you view and manage each piece individually from a single (or reduced number of) dashboard.
As you might expect, a hyper-converged system is like a converged system—but it isn’t precisely the “converged system to the nth degree,” the name implies. Instead, hyper-converged infrastructure takes the premise of combining ideal IT products into a single set of hardware and software components and makes it even more package-based by taking away many of the hardware components. A single vendor offers hyper-converged infrastructure as infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
What Is the Difference Between Converged and Hyper-converged Infrastructure?
Both converged and hyper-converged infrastructure aim to move distinct technologies into a unified system that simplifies the integration and management of all IT considerations. However, they achieve the end goal in different ways. Where converged technology simply aims to consolidate hardware and software and improve integration, hyper-converged infrastructure moves nearly all components into a software-defined data center, manageable from a single dashboard. Converged technology utilizes a server, a network and storage switch, and a storage component attached to the physical server. Hyper-converged technology combines storage and server components by supplying a hyper-convergence storage controller function to run as a service on every node of your network.
In keeping with our buffet analogy, converged technology gives you the ideal plate the first time without having to travel to the buffet and ensures each of the components on it works well with the others. In contrast, hyper-converged technology offers you the entire plate as a single, perfectly unified dish, whose elements work in harmony.
Best of all, hyper-converged technology thrives when teamed with other cloud technology offerings. In fact, hyper-converged solutions can be used with vArida’s cloud service offerings successfully, spanning your locational technology with a cloud infrastructure to provide you with optimal control over your system. In this way, hyper-converged technology can truly come into its own when paired with vArida cloud solutions.
Is Hyper-converged Infrastructure For You?
The advantages of hyper-converged infrastructure are numerous, including:
Ready to seize some of the benefits of hyper-converged infrastructure for your enterprise? Or, do you need more information about how HPE Greenlake’s infrastructure can be hyper-converged to offer more from HPE’s portfolio of individual services? Contact vArida today for insight into whether shifting to hyper-converged technology is right for your business.
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