This blog post is an excerpt from our recent report with Force 3, Addressing IT Compliance and Complexity with Hyperconverged Infrastructure. To download the full report, head here.
Public-sector IT must move away from siloed services, along with storage and legacy IT, and instead embrace hyperconverged, cloud-based technologies to enable better services and efficiencies.
Hyperconverged infrastructure is a virtual computing infrastructure solution that essentially provides federal agencies with a “cloud in a box” solution. By allowing them to deploy applications in one shared resource pool and combining multiple data center services, federal IT teams can accelerate the deployment of virtualized workloads. In turn, they can transform their data centers and simplify their infrastructures by combining servers, storage, virtualization and management components into one platform, i.e., a single pane of glass.
The result? Federal IT teams can reduce complexity, improve efficiency and save money. HCI also addresses infrastructure challenges by combining the traditional compute, virtualization and storage architectures into a single, highly scalable architecture. By doing this, HCI allows agencies to handle heavier workloads, while also providing citizens with a more reliable, consistent user experience. In terms of staying compliant and meeting government mandates, the cloud-in-a-box nature of HCI offers private cloud capabilities, keeping data and processes on premise when needed, but also moving workloads to a public cloud as necessary to leverage that bandwidth.
This allows infrastructures to work together virtually so that data is no longer siloed. With a single HCI architecture in place, you can streamline management tasks and reduce the number of skills required to support HCI. Simplifying these systems creates more agile IT departments and fosters more agency-wide confidence in IT.
“With HCI, agencies can manage both the servers and the storage from one single pane of glass, and they’re seeing a lot of benefits in doing so,” Greer said. “They can deploy applications more quickly, they can merge functionalities, and they reduce roadblocks created by previously complex IT systems.”
