Why High-Security Industries Are Adopting Hyper-converged Infrastructure

Today, modern businesses rely on data centers to provide the storage, computing, and networking necessary to host critical enterprise operations and data. However, data centers are complex environments with many moving parts. Often, many different vendors compete to deliver numerous different systems, software, and devices. The result is often a complex system that struggles to provide peak performance without labor-intensive optimizations. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) arose to address these challenges and more.

HCI combines compute, virtualization, storage, and networking into a single cluster that usually consists of x86 hardware. Through this virtualization and unified management, all resources can be organized into pools and divided into performance tiers before being seamlessly provisioned to workloads independent of where those resources are physically located.

With this in mind, let’s look at the benefits of HCI and its importance for high-security environments like healthcare facilities.Benefits of Hyper-converged Infrastructure

HCI offers many benefits over traditional three-tier architecture, including:

• Workload consolidation: With HCI, you can combine multiple IT functions, including backup, deduplication, and WAN optimization, into a single platform. And since workloads fall under the same umbrella, it’s easier to migrate VMs between different appliances or data centers.
• Faster development: HCI removes silos and barriers that slow development.
• Increased flexibility and scalability: Since HCI is software-based, it’s able to offer increased levels of flexibility and agility compared with legacy infrastructure.
• Data protection: HCI offers numerous data protection features, including snapshotting, deduplication, and more. This makes disaster recovery efforts much more straightforward. Additionally, HCI relies on a distributed model where data is spread across multiple nodes throughout a data center, ensuring that performance and availability aren’t impacted when an appliance or even a whole rack goes down.
• Lower costs: HCI lowers costs by using industry-standard x86 servers rather than costly, purpose-built networking hardware. You also eliminate over-provisioning by adding capacity as needed, reducing infrastructure costs across the data center.

Importance of HCI for High-Security Environments

Unreliable and non-responsive IT systems can cause catastrophic harm to healthcare facilities. Healthcare facilities like hospitals need robust systems that protect critical patient data and support seamless around-the-clock operations. This is precisely why the healthcare industry is increasingly turning to HCI. A healthcare system supported by HCI means fewer user errors, more robust security, improved productivity, and increased visibility. Additionally, HCI also functions as a reasonably inexpensive way of achieving more efficient and effective disaster recovery.  And critically, it’s not just healthcare IT teams that benefit from HCI, but patients too.

Final Thoughts

HCI reduces data center complexity, enhances performance, and reduces maintenance, making it a worthy investment for healthcare organizations of all sizes. And with the global hyper-converged infrastructure market expected to grow from $7.8 billion in 2020 to an eye-watering $27.1 billion by 2025 , it should be part of your infrastructure technology strategic plan, at a minimum. So get in touch today if you want to learn more about how Nutanix can simplify your healthcare operations with HCI.