Nothing lasts forever, especially IT infrastructure technology. In the ever-evolving world of IT hardware and software, change is inevitable. Right now, organizations all over the world are seeing the signs they need to refresh, whether they know it or not. End of Life or End of Support are obvious reasons, but what other reasons are being realized or possibly ignored?
#1 – Performance becomes a pain.
IT is an engine that drives business. Over time, increased load and decreased efficiency take their toll on the performance of the IT engine. Performance issues can be dealt with in a number of ways such seeking out and fixing specific hardware performance bottlenecks to improving processes for greater efficiency. As with an automobile, there is a breaking point where the cost of fixing the problems outweighs the cost of repair. Performance issues can be notoriously hard to diagnose without expertise. For that reason, the pain of performance issues often demands IT infrastructure refresh.
#2 – Datacenters need consolidation.
For a variety of reasons, sometimes datacenters need consolidation. The needs may include acquisition, restructuring, or relocating but it may not make sense to consolidate what exists. Often different sites and even different departments use different infrastructure technologies for no particular reason. While it is possible to coexist a number of different SAN/NAS devices and hypervisor architectures, it adds a load of complexity to the combined datacenter. This is a classic opportunity for infrastructure refresh to eliminate complexity
#3 – Capacity is limited.
When you bought your SAN you had space for extra shelves for growth but you filled that faster than expected. Capacity planning isn’t an exact science, not even close. You could add another storage device and cobble the two together but there might be a better way in scale-out architecture. Software-defined scale-out storage built into hyperconverged infrastructure solutions offers very easy and cost-effective scaling, on-demand. Refreshing with hyperconvergence is not only going to help scale storage effectively but also scale RAM and CPU as needed, in a much simpler solution.
#4 – Alice doesn’t work here anymore.
Remember Alice? She was the out-sourced IT consultant who designed and built the current infrastructure with her own unique set of expertise? Well, her fees for continuing to fix and manage the solution whenever there was an issue was just too expensive. No one else can quite figure out how anything is supposed to work because she expertly put together some older gear that isn’t even supported any more. It works for now, thanks to Alice, but if something goes wrong, then what? It could be time to start over and refresh the IT infrastructure with something newer that staff IT administrators can deal with.
#5 – Costs are examined.
IT is a cost center. The challenge is to get the most benefit from that cost. Older technologies like SANs, whether physical or virtual, are costly and were never designed for virtualization in the first place. Hypervisors and management solutions like VMware vSphere come at a high cost in ongoing software licensing fees. There is the cost of integrating all of the storage, servers, virtualization and management software, not to mention backup/DR. Then finally the cost of expertise to manage and maintain these systems. The costs of this traditional virtualization architecture can be overwhelming. Avoiding these high costs is a primary reason IT professionals are looking at technologies like cloud and hyperconvergence to simplify IT.
Whatever the reason for an IT infrastructure refresh, it is an opportunity to lower costs, increase productivity, and plan for future growth. This is why so many are considering hyperconverged infrastructures like HC3 from Scale Computing. It dramatically simplifies IT infrastructure, lowers costs, and allows seamless scaling for future growth. While some workloads may be destined for the cloud, the HC3 virtualization platform provides a simple, secure, and highly available solution for all of your on-prem datacenter needs. If it is time to refresh, take a look at everything HC3 provides and all the complexity it eliminates.
