Hyperconverged Infrastructures Offer Hospitals IT Simplicity
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) agreed to acquire SimpliVity, a leading provider of software-defined hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), for $650 million last month with the aim of expanding its HCI offerings. The purchase could be a steal for HPE: The market is expected to grow at a rate of 25 percent to nearly $6 billion in 2020. With businesses increasingly seeing the advantage of upgrading to hyperconverged systems, the announcement comes at a time of increased competition within the HCI market, wrote Eric Sheppard, research director for IDC's storage and converged systems, in a January statement on the research and analysis firm’s website.
Hospitals are certainly set to gain from the technology upgrades. As healthcare organizations struggle to keep costs down, HCI can become a panacea for those looking for simplicity in their data center, as well as the ability to leave their head count as is. As a software-centric architecture that integrates computing, storage, networking and server virtualization resources, the technology aims to help hospitals manage their entire their virtual environment on a single platform. This can speed up processes and help manage expansion, saving healthcare organizations time and money.
“Hyperconverged infrastructure features simplicity of administration,” says Jeff Kato, senior storage analyst at the Taneja Group. “It’s truly one of those infrastructures that a general IT person can manage. Traditional infrastructures usually require you to have people separately in charge of networking, compute and storage. Hyperconverged removes that burden.”
Because everything is controlled from a single pane of glass, you don’t need someone with deep networking skills or a certified storage engineer. That said, make sure that the hyperconverged system you purchase is truly hyperconverged, Kato says.
“Sometimes people will bolt together scaled-out software, a virtualized environment and some kind of scaled-out storage, but in reality you’re still managing three panes of glass,” he says. “You need a vendor that has truly put together all three so you can manage everything from one place.”
To learn more about how hospital IT teams are looking to HCI to improve performance, check out our article on how hospitals are benefitting from hyperconvergence.
