A good storage solution or a partner who can provide these solutions will help manage, protect, and store your data, along with providing a safe environment for your data to survive. Though you can manage your own data storage, it is advisable to start looking at cloud-based storage systems. Cloud-based storage solutions offer an affordable way of protecting your data on a virtual infrastructure without clogging up space on your systems. Bear in mind a few important factors in mind while deciding on the best data storage solution for your business. Definitely bear in mind the architecture which should be such that it is conditioned to upscale or downscale as per your business needs, without affecting the processing capacity. Then there is another essential factor which is data security. Your solution should be able to provide encryption and access control mechanisms, while being to integrate at the same time with security tools. Also, a good storage solution should offer unlimited connectivity and support on multiple platforms.

When you start considering strong solutions for storage, it is time to understand the usefulness and benefits of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). As these keep evolving day by day, it is prudent to determine when is HCI right for you. Converged infrastructure systems unify the 3 basic hardware components of IT which are compute, storage and networking. Hyper-converged infrastructure solutions combine the 3 basic hardware components, plus the software components of operating system, hypervisor, virtual networking functions, etc. to deliver a simple out of the box complete solution. An HCI solution integrates all components tightly. Also, it would be in your best interest to get a complete understand of what an HCI is. An HCI is actually an extension of an IT design. HCI is not a solution by itself, it is simply one of the several ways to build a stronger secure IT infrastructure. The main advantages of HCI are simplicity, ease of deployment, operations and cost savings.

An ideal hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is one that is a software-defined, unified system combining all elements of a data center – storage, computing, networking, and management. The integrated solution uses software and servers to replace expensive, purpose-built hardware. HCI helps decrease data center complexity and increases scalability. Using HCI makes it simpler for you to manage your systems, since due to seamless integration, there are fewer systems to manage. The availability of cloud service in a hyper-converged infrastructure reduces the time required to set up multiple applications, thus reducing solution design time and integration complexity. One of the main advantages of using an HCI cloud is enhanced performance, without sacrificing features, reliability, or time. It allows to design environments to be automated from the outset and focus on running applications and workloads, instead of tweaking the IT infrastructure hardware and software layers. A hyper-converged infrastructure, when well-designed, can be performance driven to allow powerful functioning of all applications. HCI solutions help to maximise utilisation of CPUs and SSD/NVMe storage devices. An HCI solution optimises your infrastructure cost as it merges computing and storage thus elimnating further investment. The solutions generally use a simple interface to run workloads on VM/application level, making it easier for personnel to manage, without requiring special skills. The scalability can also be managed easily since the capacity and performance can be scaled by adding a new server/node to the cluster. This way, each VM can be scaled up to very large CPU, RAM, storage size and performance. A hyperconverged platform consists of four tightly integrated software components. There is storage virtualisation, computing virtualisation, networking virtualisation and advanced management capabilities including automation. The virtualisation software abstracts and pools underlying resources, then dynamically allocates them to applications running in VMs or containers. Configuration is based on policies aligned with the applications, eliminating the need for complicated constructs like LUNs and volumes.

Though some organisations prefer maintaining their own infrastructure for data storage, it is advisable to turn to cloud-based storage systems. Cloud-based storage solutions are an affordable way of protecting your data on a virtual infrastructure. Having an HCI in place can open up innumerable avenues for you to optimise performance. There will be 3 clear choices to go with. You can build a private cloud infrastructure on-premises with lower costs, more control, and improved security. You can choose from a large HCI cloud ecosystem for faster speed of deployment and less time spent managing infrastructure. The third choice allows you to have a mix of the first two, a mix of data center, public cloud and edge environments with a hybrid cloud application. As your business demands handling and securing an ever-increasing amount of data, it is imperative to have a strong data storage solution in place. This will help manage, protect, and store your data, providing a safe place for your data. Do not wait on the IT infrastructure that can support your modern application demands. Switch to HCI for taking better control of your business without increasing costs or compromising security.