VMware Hyper-Converged Software: Accelerating Business-Critical Applications

One of the fastest growing solutions for evolving to the next-generation data center is hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). In an HCI solution, all the typical hardware-based data center resource pillars — storage, compute, and networking — are virtualized and collapsed onto an industry-standard x86 server. Since the resources are software-based, a proven, well architected hyper-converged software stack is critical. Of specific importance in the software stack is a tightly-integrated, software-defined storage solution that can help increase efficiency, improve flexibility, and reduce TCO across the data center — without any trade-offs in performance or availability.

Storage management is increasingly vexing for data center decision makers. In fact, based on results of a recent IDC survey, the three most pressing problems for IT professionals include: meeting their organization’s service level agreements (SLAs), troubleshooting storage issues, and finding the necessary funds to address storage needs. And don’t expect the appetite for storage to be curbed any time soon. IDC expects global storage capacity to balloon by 40 percent per year between 2013 and 2015 alone.

With these facts in mind, it’s clear that three storage management challenges will remain front and center in the foreseeable future for enterprise and commercial organizations:
1. Providing the necessary SLAs to growing business-critical applications (BCAs)
2. Achieving agility to rapidly and efficiently deploy storage as needed
3. Reducing storage costs to fit within stagnant or shrinking budgets

And as enterprises increasingly consolidate business-critical workloads on virtualized platforms, the greater complexities and demands inherent in BCAs make these storage challenges even more consequential for IT leaders.