Hyper-converged infrastructure is advancing rapidly, both in the underlying technology and in the critical capabilities it must deliver in the cloud era. The catalyst for this change has been the exponential growth of public cloud services—and the consequent need for IT to seamlessly integrate multiple public clouds with on-premises infrastructure.
More than 80% of enterprises now have a multicloud strategy, using an average of 4.8 public and private clouds, according to the 2018 RightScale State of the Cloud Report. As public cloud usage becomes more ubiquitous, hyper-converged infrastructure must enable users to access any service, from any cloud, at any time, for any workload.
With these new demands facing on-premises infrastructure, it is time to rethink what we mean by HCI. It is no longer about what HCI is but what it does. Today’s reality is that the HCI initials work far more appropriately as a descriptor for what hyper-converged infrastructure is evolving to. And that is hybrid cloud infrastructure.
What is hybrid cloud infrastructure?
The cloud experience is the new standard for IT: self-service, low friction, automated, integrated, consumption-based, rapid deployment, flexible. This experience must be delivered across multiple clouds, (i.e., the multicloud experience, which means seamless and consistent consumption of IT services whether they are delivered via on-premises infrastructure or from a choice of myriad public cloud options.
This requires a hybrid cloud infrastructure that delivers predictable performance and simplified operations on a highly flexible and efficient cloud architecture. The industry’s first real model for the next stage of HCI is NetApp Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, which is integrated into NetApp Data Fabric for a complete hybrid cloud data services solution.
NetApp HCI extends the public cloud experience into enterprise data centers, delivering a frictionless consumption model with self-service, automation and interface independence. Customers leverage a consistent platform across all public and private clouds, with the ability to mix and match services to meet the needs of any workload or application.
NetApp HCI goes beyond traditional hyper-converged infrastructure solutions in many key areas, but these three in particular:
- Automation: NetApp HCI delivers increased operational efficiency through workload performance protection, consolidation and automation with predictable performance. NetApp HCI achieves 22% more efficient use of compute resources than leading hyper- converged infrastructure solutions.1
- Flexibility: One of the biggest advantages of NetApp HCI is that you can scale storage and compute resources independently. This building-block approach lets you scale at your business requirements, not IT requirements, leading to significantly lower total cost of ownership versus hyper-converged infrastructure—up to 59%, according to research.2
- Simplification: IT can reduce operating costs with easy consumption across multiple clouds. Simplified deployment and ongoing system automation lead to 67% lower operating expenses.3 NetApp HCI solutions can be deployed in less than 45 minutes, accelerating speed to agility.
Children’s Mercy Hospital Turns Digital Leader and Delivers World-Class Care with NetApp
This case study explores how Children’s Mercy Hospital depends on NetApp® technology to deliver high-quality, compassionate pediatric care in the Midwest.
Download NowTaking the next step
IT teams are under pressure to be agile in the delivery of IT as a service, so it is important to partner with companies that have adopted a similar cloud-first approach to their solutions.
If your organization doesn’t move forward in evolving to a hybrid cloud infrastructure, you risk being stuck with the status quo—which will hinder your ability to grow business with agility and deliver the hybrid multicloud experience to your organization.
As the industry evolves from hyper-converged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure, make sure your organization has the flexibility to use any service from any cloud at any time to empower your business-critical and cloud-native. Please visit NetApp to learn more about how your organization can leverage hybrid cloud infrastructure as the new HCI.
1 Evaluator Group’s Blog, HCIs Can Have Disaggregated Architectures, Oct 8, 2018.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
