Hyperconvergence for the Distributed Enterprise
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IT departments face a variety of challenges but maybe none as challenging as managing multiple sites. Many organizations must provide IT services across dozens or even hundreds of small remote offices or facilities. One of the most common organizational structures for these distributed enterprises is a single large central datacenter where IT staff are located supporting multiple remote offices where personnel have little or no IT expertise.
These remote sites often need the same variety of application services and data services needed in the central office, but on a smaller scale. To run these applications, these sites need multiple servers, storage solutions, and disaster recovery. There is no IT staff on site so remote management is ideal to cut down on the productivity cost of sending IT staff to remote sites frequently to troubleshoot issues. This is where the turn key appliance approach of hyperconvergence shines.
A hyperconverged infrastructure solution combines server, storage, and virtualization software into a single appliance that can be clustered for scalability and high availability. It eliminates the complexity of having disparate server hardware, storage hardware, and virtualization software from multiple vendors and having to try to replicate the complexity of that piecemeal solution at every site. Hyperconverged infrastructure provides a simple repeatable infrastructure out of the box. This approach makes it easy to scale out infrastructure at sites on demand from a single vendor.
At Scale Computing, we offer the HC3 solution that truly combines server, storage, virtualization, and even disaster recovery and high availability. We provide a large range of hardware configurations to support very small implementations all the way up to full enterprise datacenter infrastructure. Also, because any of these various node configurations can be mixed and matched with other nodes, you can scale the infrastructure at a site with extra capacity and/or compute power as you need very quickly.
HC3 management is all web-based so sites can easily be managed remotely. From provisioning new virtual machines to opening consoles for each VM for simple and direct management from the central datacenter, it’s all in the web browser. There is even a reverse SSH tunnel available for ScaleCare support to provide additional remote management of lower level software features in the hypervisor and storage system. Redundant hardware components and self healing mean that hardware failures can be absorbed while applications remain available until IT staff or local staff can replace hardware components.
With HC3, replication is built in to provide disaster recovery and high availability back to the central datacenter in the event of entire site failure. Virtual machines and applications can be back up and running within minutes to allow remote connectivity from the remote site as needed. You can achieve both simplified infrastructure and remote high availability in a single solution from a single vendor. One back to pat or one throat to choke, as they say.
If you want to learn more about how hyperconvergence can make distributed enterprise simpler and easier, talk to one of our hyperconvergence experts.
Original article: http://blog.scalecomputing.com/hyperconvergence-for-the-distributed-enterprise/
