Please note: This post was written by Highlander prior to their rebrand to FluidOne Business IT - Sheffield.
We’re huge advocates for hyperconverged infrastructure, and for very good reason. It’s everything you could ever want for your datacentre wrapped up in a single, neat, compact stack that radically improves the management, speed, and footprint of your technology without you barely needing to lift a finger.
We believe that the undisputed leader in the hyperconverged space is HPE, and Forrester would tend to agree with us, having recently named them number one in The Forrester Wave: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Q3 2018. HPE SimpliVity is their crowning jewel.
HPE SimpliVity is an integrated, all-flash hyperconverged stack that combines compute, storage, networking, and other datacentre services into one all-encompassing system. Providing seamless virtual machine (VM) management, intelligent automation, accelerated application performance, and much more, it is the ideal solution for any organisation looking to refresh the key components of their infrastructure.
We typically find that any conversations we have about HPE SimpliVity will be born from a specific request or problem within the datacentre that a customer has brought to our attention. Their legacy infrastructure might not be performing as it should, or their host hardware for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) might be failing, or they may just need a solution that quickly eradicates the management overhead in the datacentre to help free up their team’s time. For these use cases and many more, SimpliVity is frequently a great fit.
Here’s why we think this award-winning solution could make your datacentre IT so much easier.
These are three words that every IT team wants to hear, and HPE SimpliVity has this in abundance. It’s an incredibly agile and flexible platform that helps you better optimise your workloads, speed up your applications, and realise greater operational efficiencies.
We all like to do our bit for the environment by reducing our footprint as best we can. SimpliVity was built with this in mind, requiring less power, cooling, and most importantly, rackspace than traditional datacentre stacks. In fact, its physical footprint is so small, you could even end up reducing your datacentre devices by as much as 10:1.
A small footprint in no way means that you’re restricted, however. SimpliVity is hyper-scalable, too – if ever you need more capacity or want to expand, all you have to do is add a new node to your stack. It’s quick, uncomplicated, and so easy to implement – an IT team’s dream.
Thanks to built-in backup and disaster recovery features, SimpliVity also ensures your data is always protected. And because it’s optimised for VDI, you’re able to backup, restore, and clone your desktop VMs in seconds, and on a global scale.
Because of the automation that powers it and its unbelievable ease of use, SimpliVity saves your IT team so much valuable time. It’s significantly low-touch and quick to install, meaning your team’s resources can be better utilised elsewhere in the business where they can really make a difference.
By consolidating the most important aspects of your datacentre into a single stack, it goes without saying that the cost savings to be realised are phenomenal. When compared to traditional datacentre stacks, SimpliVity’s hyperconverged platform has even demonstrated colossal savings of up to 40%.
Above all, the best thing about SimpliVity is that it more than lives up to its name – it really is brilliantly simple. Based on familiar VMware technology, it’s easy to get to grips with, easy to install, and easy to manage. All controlled from a single pane of glass through vCentre, it works exactly as you need it to.
HPE SimpliVity doesn’t end there – it’s technology that’s already being built on ready for the demands of the future. HPE recently announced HPE Composable Fabric, its new software-defined networking fabric built to enhance its SimpliVity hyperconverged solutions. With friction-free scalability, more optimised performance, and up to 60% faster upgrade speeds, we think Composable Fabric could be the next big thing in hyperconvergence.
To learn more about HPE SimpliVity and HPE Composable Fabric, get in touch with one of the team.