In today’s hyperconnected world where agility and scalability play critical roles, the demand for modern, cloud-ready infrastructure is rising. Tech enthusiasts and IT infrastructure professionals worldwide are shifting towards hyper-convergence for its simplicity, scalability, ease of management, and cost-efficiency. However, choosing the right HCI is not easy.
Meet Ian, who is the Infrastructure Manager for a global tech company. His company uses traditional infrastructure, which is complex and hard to manage. He spends lots of his time and effort to manage communication and negotiate with various vendors to select and carefully integrate technologies. Once deployed, the complex infrastructure is typically slow and hard to upgrade and maintain as it requires specialized teams to manage each independent silo of infrastructure. Like Ian, many Infrastructure Managers are struggling through the same challenges.
So, what will you do to modernize your infrastructure? I am sure you will look for a hyper-convergence solution to modernize your organization’s infrastructure while adding operational efficiency, automation, agility, and security. The solution would also need to be easily scalable and seamless to deploy. You start exploring HCI solutions. Seems like an easy choice, doesn’t it? However, it isn’t that simple with so many options available. So, where do you even begin? Can you evaluate these solutions thoroughly before arriving at a decision?
Let’s break this down. You begin by answering this one question – What do you want the solution to do? Your requirement can be any or all of the following:
Modernize and manage your virtualized infrastructure
The solution must enable you to perform the following:
- Create VMs: Quickly spin up Virtual Machines (VMs) without the need to carve out LUNs or worry about masking or mapping.
- Manage Storage: Effortlessly configure and apply storage policies such as deduplication, compression, and erasure coding to storage in a matter of a few clicks.
- Monitor Infrastructure: Manage all your clusters in a single, intuitive dashboard, where you can seamlessly monitor the entire infrastructure. The dashboard should also ideally provide intelligent recommendations about your workloads with advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms.
Monitor and plan the environment
The right solution will enable you to perform the following:
- Monitor the efficiency of your VMs and optimize performance: To enable this, the solution must be powered with advanced analytics, automation, and ML, to show you the efficiency level of VMs running on the system. You can view the efficiency levels and based on the system recommendations make informed decisions to maximize the performance of your VMs by reclaiming resources or editing VMs to improve their overall performance. You must also be able to generate scheduled and on-demand reports for various purposes, like cluster efficiency.
- Predict and manage current and future infrastructure requirements: To achieve this, you need a solution that provides One-Click Capacity Planning using ML-powered insights. With this, you can view the predicted growth over time and walk through the “what-if” scenarios. This will help you determine how additional workloads will impact your resources and see what hardware configurations are recommended to meet your current and future requirements. Additionally, it will provide resource recommendations to meet the upcoming demand.
- Reduce efforts spent in sequential actions: The solution should provide the functionality that enables you to program or automate sequential actions on specific triggers easily. The actions can be anything from VM operations (like hot-adding memory to a VM), send a Slack message, call an API, execute scripts, and so on.
Quickly deploy and publish applications
To achieve higher scalability and simplicity, you need a solution that would enable application automation self-service that allows you to:
- Deploy applications: To achieve this, the solution must provide a quick one-click application deployment from the internal Marketplace.
- Launch an application quickly: The solution should provide a set of pre-seeded application blueprints available in the Marketplace for you to launch instantly. A blueprint is a template that describes the steps required to provision, configure, and execute a task or action on the services and applications that are created.
- Create app blueprints: Along with launching application blueprints from the Marketplace, the solution should enable you to create and edit blueprints for task automation, such as running a script or sending an API call
- Publish your own applications: The solution should provide the functionality to publish and share your application blueprints on the Marketplace to allow other users to launch your applications.
Ready to Take a Test Drive?
Now that we have narrowed down your requirements. Would you like to test drive the solution before deciding? Your answer would be that providers do not allow this, but what if there is an organization that would like you to test drive their software-defined solution that integrates all elements in the datacenter stack in an open, hardware-agnostic platform. Don’t believe us? Well, seeing is believing. Take Nutanix HCI for a spin with Nutanix HCI Test Drive. No, it is not a simulation but a fully functional live environment for you to try before making your decision about the right HCI solution to modernize your organization’s infrastructure.
So, what are you waiting for? Start exploring and experiencing the “One Platform. Any App. Any Cloud.” Nutanix HCI live. Take the Nutanix Test Drive today!
