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Hyperconvergence with Intelligent Management: Empowering IT to Achieve “Anywhere Simplicity”

Without the right tools, technologies and strategies, today’s environment has the potential to bury IT in complexity. IT teams must address explosive data growth, the internet of things (IoT), increased mobility, IT consumerization, accelerated development cycles, multi-cloud environments and many other challenges.

Simply put, IT can’t afford to become overwhelmed by complexity. In fact, the only way IT can truly succeed and evolve to a more service-oriented delivery model is by conquering complexity and simplifying IT across the board. This means:

  • Make it simpler for IT to deploy and manage data centers, edge environments and multiple clouds. This lowers Opex and puts less “keep the lights on” pressures on tightly stretched IT teams.
  • Make it simpler for users to access technology and accelerate the business—including DevOps teams, mobile workers, line-of-business managers, customer-facing employees and others.
  • Ensure simplicity anywhere users are located, whatever they are doing and whichever technology platform meets the needs of their apps and workloads—from core to edge to multi-cloud.

HCI with Intelligent Management
Since their introduction earlier this decade, hyperconverged infrastructures (HCIs) have been extremely beneficial in helping IT reduce complexity. Nearly 80% of IT professionals say their top reason for deploying HCI is to simplify infrastructure management/maintenance, according to a survey conducted by 451 Research.

By leveraging pre-integrated hardware for compute, storage and networking—along with unified software-defined management—HCI solutions can be deployed much faster than traditional three-tier infrastructure.

In addition, HCI allows IT teams to accelerate and simplify hybrid cloud deployments and build new edge computing environments that are much simpler to manage—delivering greater performance, security and reliability to mobile users and workers in branch offices or remote locations.

IT teams can now take another important step forward in simplifying IT with their HCI solutions. By deploying Cisco HyperFlex with the cloud-based Cisco Intersight unified management platform, IT can leverage intelligence to analyze, simplify and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with previous generations of tools.

For instance, Cisco Intersight incorporates a recommendation engine that provides actionable intelligence for IT operations management. This reduces the time it takes to configure, provision and manage infrastructure across data centers and edge environments. Intelligence also reduces risk by proactively reviewing metadata to identify issues and prevent problems before they impact availability.

A Success Story in Simplicity
Companies across the globe are already leveraging Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco Intersight to simplify operations and drive IT modernization. One example is The Orvis Company, a leading retail and online seller of high-end fly fishing, hunting and sporting goods.

Orvis found it difficult to be as innovative and agile as it wanted because of too many technology and information silos. The company’s goal for IT was to enable seamless integration between retail, call center and web channels, while ensuring stability, security and scalability.

“The complexity and lack of agility tied the hands of our business behind its back and essentially tripled the work of our technologists,” said Tyson Martin, director and chief information security officer. “Simplifying our environment and reducing the footprint are vital to making sure that IT can truly enable innovation.”

Orvis simplified the IT environment and reduced the technology footprint by deploying Cisco HyperFlex in three data centers for two environments:

  • VSI for core applications such as e-commerce, point-of-sale, warehouse systems, operations and the SQL database.
  • Virtual desktop infrastructure for all call center agent desktops.

Orvis IT now has a single view and unified management for all three data centers with Cisco Intersight. As a result of this modernization initiative, Orvis has seen a 66% improvement in efficiency; has dealt with holiday-season business spikes without having to engage a third-party call center, and is launching a new e-commerce experience in 2019. 

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Conclusion
Simplicity should be at or near the top of the agenda for every IT department. IT teams don’t have time to deal with complexity, while users, developers and customers don’t have the patience.

With hyperconverged infrastructure, IT teams can achieve simplicity anywhere data, workloads and applications are used—from core to edge to multiple clouds. With the right solution, IT can use a unified management platform infused with intelligence and automation to simplify even further.

Are you ready to take the next step in simplicity? Visit Cisco to learn more about the latest advances in Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco Intersight.

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