What Partners Need to Know about HCI Acceleration

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a key component of a company’s strategy to effectively deal with dynamic growth and change, and partners now have to be able to support a growing number and a variety of organizations in effectively leveraging and expanding their use of the technology.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) enables organizations to converge physical storage onto industry-standard hardware. This enables them to take a building-block approach in the data center. All key functions run as software on the hypervisor in a tightly integrated software layer, delivering services that were previously provided via hardware through software and making it easier for companies to scale as business and computing needs change.

And change they do.

Increasingly, companies in all places, of all sizes and with a variety of budgetary concerns need the kind of agility and power that enterprise-class HCI provides—whether they have skilled in-house IT staff and big budgets or not.

However, while many companies have implemented HCI in the data center itself, it’s less likely that they have implemented it at remote and branch sites. And small and midsize businesses may have shied away from HCI altogether in the past.

VMware is looking to bridge these gaps with its new vSAN-enabled VMware HCI Acceleration Kit, which offers relatively affordable and easy-to-manage enterprise infrastructure.

By extending vSAN to the edge, so to speak, VMware is making it possible for partners to expand their customers’ use of distributed processing. This will enable them to, among other things, make use (or better use) of real-time data. In addition, because the data is closer to its source, the HCI Acceleration Kit can lower bandwidth requirements and data transport costs.

By its nature, HCI helps companies reduce cost and complexity, but the acceleration kit opens up the technology to organizations in the education, healthcare, retail, government and other verticals where money—and IT resources—may be especially limited (and managed services especially appreciated).

The HCI Acceleration Kit will also support a company of any size in its adoption of next-generation technologies: While it’s common to see the edge computing model implemented in branch offices and remote locations, companies can implement it more widely to support technology such as self-driving cars and the Internet of Things. With these and other next-generation technologies, data processing near the source is key to fully exploiting data in an economical way.

The kit includes VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN standard licenses, which support single-socket vSAN ReadyNodes. For or the latest news and technical insights about hyper-convergence, software-defined storage and many related topics visit Virtual Blocks.

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