Navigating the evolving IT landscape

Chapter 1

Navigating the evolving IT landscape

Take Edge Computing for example. The International Data Corporation anticipates that nearly 80 billion devices will be connected
to the Internet by 2025—that’s 152,000 devices per minute.⁴

This explosion in connected devices and the data transfer between them are already dissolving traditional network boundaries and pushing legacy solutions beyond their limits. As more computing power is required at the edges of networks, even single-cloud environments are hitting snags when it comes to handling data volume.⁵

Fortunately for organizations and their IT departments, the same trends that are changing customer and organizational requirements are fueling advances in hyperconvergence technology—and HCI Innovators are already taking advantage of these advances to successfully navigate the current IT landscape.

Although hyperconvergence has its roots in converged infrastructure and storage virtualization, rapid developments and improvements have transitioned it into a powerful solution that encompasses the benefits of both private,
on-premises data centers and cloud scaling capabilities.

These developments represent a total rethink of how the different components of a data center can coexist and unite under a central piece of software.

According to Gartner "By 2025, as a result of digital business projects,
75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed
outside of the traditional, centralized data center or cloud,
and increase from less than 10% in 2018"

In addition to promoting operational efficiency, reducing infrastructure costs, and radically improving data center reliability and resilience, the latest advances in hyperconvergence technology include: ^6,7

Built-in backup and replication capabilities that improve data protection
Application and data security
Easy workload migration and cloud
services deployment
Cloudlike scalability to accommodate fluctuations in compute power and
storage needs
The ability to process massive amounts of data at the edge of your network infrastructure

A major way hyperconvergence is driving IT innovation is by enabling hybrid-cloud environments. As flexibility and scalability needs increase, more organizations are turning to cloud service providers to tackle issues related to networking, security, analytics, and data center management.⁸ Hyperconvergence technology is designed
to support multiple hypervisors and offer flexible services for hybrid-cloud setups.

In the following chapter, we’ll examine how HCI Innovators put these hyperconvergence capabilities into practice to power everything from virtual desktop deployments to mission-critical applications.

By 2023, 80% of workloads will shift to or be
created with containers/microservices, reducing
per-app infrastructure needs by 60%, while driving
a 70% improvement in digital service resiliency.

By 2023, more than 50% of new infrastructure
deployed will be in increasingly critical edge
locations rather than corporate datacenters,
up from less than 10% today.