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Watch our TEC37 Webinar "The Hype vs. Reality of Hyper-converged Infrastructure" on Demand
In this article
Webinar highlights and Q&A
Our latest TEC37 webinar features WWT experts exploring hyper-convergence and separating the hype from reality. The discussion begins with a look at the evolution of reference architectures and then moves to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions.
Our experts offer advice on where it makes sense to implement HCI solutions based on IT workloads and performance vs. agility and scalability requirements. They also discuss what they're hearing from our customers.
The webinar is available for viewing on demand above, or you can subscribe to our #TEC37 podcast channel to listen to the audio while you're on the go. You can also see what was on attendees' minds by checking out the FAQs below.
Frequently asked questions
- Some reports out there show the HCI market growing at 36 percent year over year for the next three years. In my region, I'm seeing a significant increase in interest not only for remote office / branch office but primary data center usage. What are you seeing company-wide and globally? HCI is definitely growing – you can almost call it exploding. But when you start looking at studies, they're saying that reference architecture and converged infrastructure will be flattening out and that hyper-converged is doing a hockey stick curve in terms of adoption.As far as what we're seeing, we've found it really depends on the use case and customer. But something to keep in mind is that we work primarily with large enterprise accounts. I think down market it's a lot more prolific than what we're seeing. Whereas in our customer accounts it's more of a remote office/branch office (ROBO) use case while for mid-tier market it might be more of their general purpose in a data center platform.
- Are you seeing a debate between HCI possibilities versus greater use of pure cloud, offloading IT responsibilities more fully? I think when people think of public clouds, they think of something very simple and easy to consume. And that's generally true. It may have cost them a lot more money, but generally, it is very simple and easy to consume. It's not that people don't like running their own IT infrastructure, it's just that it's a lot harder to do classically than what it has been to do in a public cloud environment. So, one of the huge benefits we get out of hyper-converged is that it's simple and eliminates some of the layers from the stack.It also brings up security concerns when you go out to the cloud. You don't really know who owns your data or where it's sitting. And you don't really know who's mining the metadata of your applications that are out there. If you want to secure your data and make sure you're in control of your data center and your architecture, hyper-converged can give you that on-prem cloud like model with security.
- What are the common DR technologies used between primary and secondary data centers? Some hyper-converged vendors offer their own replication, some even offer their own kind of run book automation, disaster recovery type. There are so many replication technologies out there that one could leverage from a hyper-converged environment back to a traditional data center.When we bring customers in, we usually spend a lot of time on this topic – really flushing out what the strategy looks like because a lot of times it's different than how a customers doing things today. And a lot of time is also spent on the replication factor. How many copies of data? What nodes are you on and how are you going to be able to get that out if we cover it?
- What are your predictions on where HCI will be in three years? Well, unless you have a magic crystal ball, you don't really know. You don't know what acquisitions are going to happen or who's going to enter the market. The IT industry itself is probably changing faster than we've ever seen it before. But that aside, I don't think it's going away. I think as our customers and the industry figures out how to put it in big data centers, we'll see more people gravitate towards this especially if its easy and the benefits are obvious.