7 Reasons Why Hyperconvergence Is Good for MSPs
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is becoming increasingly popular due to its ability to simplify the management of data centers, but most MSPs have yet to dip their toes into the HCI pool.
October 17, 2018
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Hyperconvergence is a huge money and time-saver, both huge concerns for your customers (needless to say). By combining networking, compute, storage and virtualization together in a single appliance, everything is simplified. This saves the customer time, headaches, and is easy on the pocketbook. And a bonus: It condenses and simplifies your product packages.
HCI systems let you stretch your legs a little, increasing the flexibility and agility of IT departments, and meshing well with cloud systems. If your customers are already using the cloud, or are migrating to it, HCI is the clever little tool that will ensure flexibility in your setup and will make sure there is chatter between the different systems.
Everyone is moving toward the cloud. As the marketplace gallops in that direction, having all components completely software-defined, integrated and all from a single vendor will be a significant asset when it comes to a customer’s support needs.
Customers don’t want to deploy new infrastructure in their data centers. They want to purchase it, and they want top-notch, simple and streamlined service from whoever they’re buying it from. Sometimes they want to just be able to pay for cloud infrastructure and manage it entirely on their own. HCI makes that possible — and easy.
Hyperconverged infrastructure helps customers get more bang for their buck from their hardware by cutting out integration and maintenance costs and providing an avenue to introduce new capabilities. No additional hardware necessary, plus they get more out of their current hardware investments.
HCI consolidates several IT functions at once, such as deduplication, WAN optimization and backup into the same platform. With hyperconverged infrastructure, all workloads fit under the same umbrella. This makes it far easier to migrate virtual machines (VM) between different appliances and data centers. It’s important to note that HCI also allows for the recognition and prioritization of primary, mission-critical workloads. This is key for customers, say, in the health-care sector.
HCI can break down silos in your company’s old-school, traditional data center.
“We call this data fragmentation,” says David Kosman, head of global cloud service providers at Cohesity. “In your data center, everything resides in silos. How much intelligence, analytics and incremental benefit could you possibly hope to glean if that data is all disparately located across your data center in separate silos? Silos that aren’t talking to each other? HCI eliminates the concept of data fragmentation, breaking down those walls, so to speak.”
Hyperconvergence software is built to anticipate inevitable hardware failure, because this will likely happen at some point. It is necessary during the initial deployment that multiple appliances are utilized to achieve full redundancy and data protection. In a hyperconverged environment, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery are built in. They’re part of the infrastructure, not third-party afterthoughts to be integrated.
Hyperconvergence software is built to anticipate inevitable hardware failure, because this will likely happen at some point. It is necessary during the initial deployment that multiple appliances are utilized to achieve full redundancy and data protection. In a hyperconverged environment, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery are built in. They’re part of the infrastructure, not third-party afterthoughts to be integrated.
**Editor’s Note: Throughout the fourth quarter of 2018, as part of our Channel Futures/Channel Partners “In Focus” series, we will feature a series of galleries designed to help partners grow their businesses in 2019 and beyond.**
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a fairly new concept to most folks in the managed-services realm. Heck, make that the entire IT realm.
Most MSPs have yet to dip their toes into this particular technology pool, but HCI is quickly making a name for itself, emerging as a new, attractive opportunity with efficiency and flexibility that are appealing to managed service providers, SMBs and enterprises alike.
Hyperconvergence refers to both hardware and software that take many functions and features, and combines them into a smaller footprint. Essentially, it combines the technology stack of compute, network, storage and virtualization, and packages it all up in one integrated system. With a bow on top. Probably.
HCI is still very much in the very early stages of adoption, but it won’t stay that way for long. Hyperconverged systems have already become the standard foundation of the software-defined data center. According to IDC’s Worldwide Hyperconverged Systems 2015–2019 Forecast, hyperconverged infrastructure is an exploding market, one that’s projected to grow rapidly, reaching almost $4 billion by 2020, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 60 percent. Stratistics MRC predicts growth from a little more than $800 million in 2015 to $12.8 billion by 2022.
MSPs now more than ever are seeking to expand their capabilities in order to grow their customer bases. According to Tom Baumgartner, vice president of marketing at Virtuozzo, HCI is one of the golden tickets.
“Data tells us that the HCI marketplace is going to take off in the next three to four years, so there’s an enormous opportunity for MSPs to grow as they evolve to meet the demands of their customers as they grow their technology needs and businesses,” says Baumgartner.
Drew Lydecker, President and co-founder, Avant, the master agent and tech distributor, agrees that the winds of HCI change have begun to blow.
“The pace of change in IT is increasing, with hyperscalers launching [more than] 1,000 capabilities in the past year,” says Lydecker. “There has never been a better time for an MSP to assist customers in navigating the possibilities of the cloud, while helping them stay grounded in the realities of their legacy application migration challenges. Hyperconverged environments blend on-prem, cloud and connectivity options which are ripe for the role of the MSP as a trusted adviser.”
Scroll through our slide show for seven reasons why hyperconvergence is good for MSPs.
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