During a recent Storage Swiss webinar, “Is Convergence Right For You? 4 Questions To Ask”, we polled our audience and asked what percentage of their environment is virtualized. Over half of the respondents selected 25-50% of their environment is virtualized. This means that for many organizations, the majority of their applications still reside on dedicated, physical servers.
Getting the second half of the environment virtualized is often the most difficult part of the virtualization journey. These applications typically represent the most critical business systems, so naturally, organizations want to proceed with caution when converting them from physical to virtual. They want to ensure that their critical business applications will have ready access to the server compute, networking and storage resources they require to perform optimally, regardless of growth. And they don’t want to have any contention across VMs that are sharing the same infrastructure.
The challenge is that when IT organizations implement virtualized infrastructure, they will sometimes over provision resources for business sensitive VMs and they also may put hard limits on the number of VMs per server to help ensure that performance or contention issues won’t occur. While this approach may help guarantee that business applications will not incur any performance related issues, it could drive up the total cost of ownership of the virtualized environment. As a result, businesses need solutions which can deliver consistent application performance without needlessly over provisioning server compute or storage resources.
Hyperconverged systems are specifically tuned to manage highly dense VM environments that share a common set of server compute, networking and storage resources. But importantly, the operating system on these platforms has the intelligence to scale virtualized resources in lock-step with the application environment. In other words, resource contention or performance issues will not occur in hyperconverged environments since the system has the native awareness of all the VMs that are running in a particular compute cluster. This helps ensure that sensitive business applications will run consistently and maintain their service levels to end-users. Another important benefit is that resources will be fully utilized and over provisioning will not occur. This helps to keep the total cost of ownership in check and relieves administrators from having to perform periodic health checks, system tuning, reconfigurations, etc. This last point is especially important for those IT environments where administrators don’t have the time to babysit their application infrastructure.
To learn whether hyperconvergence is right for you, go to the following Storage Swiss and Scale Computing webinar. By registering for the webinar, you will gain access to over 100 Storage Swiss on-demand webinars.
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As a 22 year IT veteran, Colm has worked in a variety of capacities ranging from technical support of critical OLTP environments to consultative sales and marketing for system integrators and manufacturers. His focus in the enterprise storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions space extends from mainframe and distributed computing environments across a wide range of industries.
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