In today’s hyper business climate, companies need to be faster and more agile in order to stay ahead of the competition. To keep up, IT decision-makers are looking for efficient ways to improve operations and reduce costs. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a popular solution but comes with some compromises such as higher costs or limited built-in data protection. HPE SimpliVity offers an alternative that provides the same hyperconvergence experience without sacrificing performance. Keep reading to discover more about this revolutionary technology!

What Is HPE SimpliVity?

HPE SimpliVity is an innovative HCI solution that simplifies IT operations, from edge to core. As an all-in-one platform for general-purpose workloads and VDI applications at the edges, it offers scalability in deployment so customers can start small and grow as needed – a major benefit in a hybrid-heavy workforce. Its packed data services enable efficient resource utilization while reducing complexity and overhead costs.

Video: Cheers To Backup & Recovery As A Service With HPE

This platform also offers an easy-to-use, two-node, high-availability system with built-in data protection and hyper-efficient storage for edge sites and data centers – all at a reduction of the total cost of ownership. , businesses can simplify the management of virtualized storage and will enjoy unified control over all IT operations in one efficient system.

Benefits Of HPE GreenLake for HPE SimpliVity

is also transforming IT by offering managed services as a pay-per-use model. HPE GreenLake for HPE SimpliVity allows organizations to now build their own VM as a service platform with ease. Additionally, with HPE GreenLake Central, organizations can track capabilities for consumption and costs, and it is easier to accelerate the value of application deployments while avoiding costly upfront investments. This provides an excellent opportunity for digital transformation with no overprovisioning needed, which also saves enterprises 30% in savings.

Four Ways HPE SimpliVity Is Creating A New Standard For HCI

1. All-In-One Solution

With its all-in-one intelligent solution, HPE SimpliVity simplifies the deployment and scaling process, streamlines management tasks through software-defined infrastructure, unifies control systems, and automates policies. The best part? It is powered by AI for a truly seamless experience.

This all-in-one HCI solution also provides an easy and fast way to deploy virtual or container-based workloads across your environment. With its rapid deployment capabilities, zero downtime refresh cycles, and modular systems for scaling up as needed, HPE SimpliVity is the perfect solution for any business looking to quickly adjust their IT infrastructure in response to changing demands.

Furthermore, for HPE SimpliVity enables businesses to predict and diagnose infrastructure issues with powerful telemetry, machine learning capabilities, and automated alerts. It provides a multi-site view of all VMs and backups complete with insights on hardware and software problems and recommendations for corrective action. This reduces operational expenses and alleviates support needs.

2. High Availability With Two Nodes

HPE SimpliVity is designed to enable continuous operations while saving you money and valuable space. This is achieved by using just two nodes, reducing the number of appliances required along with a smaller data center footprint. Furthermore, it meets SLAs through protection against multiple failures and uptime across multiple sites, via stretched clustering technology.

3. Incorporated Data Protection

HPE SimpliVity is the perfect choice for data protection, guaranteeing resiliency and disaster recovery. It has powerful capabilities such as VM backups anytime and anywhere with a or less. Also, with its secure cloud bank backup options to reduce costs and risks, organizations can mitigate ransomware threats while enjoying maximum safety of valuable data.

4. Increased Efficiency

With the help of HPE SimpliVity, expect to experience frequent backups with quick restores in addition to longer retention periods and faster recovery times using lightweight VMs. This innovative HCI solution saves of capacity on storage combined with guaranteed backup. Multi-site disaster recovery becomes more efficient due to a need for ten times fewer WAN links. This ultimately allows businesses to save money by reducing the amount of data sent over the network while minimizing expensive resources used within their data centers.

Final Thoughts

Organizations facing limited resources are turning to hyperconverged infrastructures as an effective solution for their business-critical applications. HPE SimpliVity is the perfect HCI tool that helps organizations save costs while meeting distributed edge requirements with ease. Get in touch with WEI today and consult one of our experts on how to reap the full benefits of a hyperconverged infrastructure.

Next Steps: WEI and HPE/Zerto recently welcomed Rachel Wilson for an exclusive IT security discussion. Rachel currently serves as the director of cybersecurity for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and is a former NSA senior executive. Experts from WEI and HPE also provided data protection and disaster recovery options to help combat cyber threats to your organization, data, and self. Learn more by watching the full webcast below.

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It seems like everyone is going hybrid these days when it comes to enterprise architectures. According to Gartner, 75 percent of midsize and large organizations will have adopted a multi-cloud and/or a hybrid IT model by now. The reason is pretty simple, while 97 percent of IT decision makers confirm a positive experience with the public cloud, not everything can go there. Unfortunately, there are issues such as security, compliance, and the uncomfortable uncertainty of managing your stuff “up there” wherever that place is, that prevents companies from the public cloud experience for all. If everything could reside in a public cloud however, what a wonderful world it would be.

The inequality within hybrid models

The adoption of a brings about a lot of flexibility. It lets you choose where to host your applications, workloads and resources. But with hybrid architectures, many organizations quickly discover an unsettling consequence, inequality. While the public cloud is a panacea for matters such as scalability, rapid deployment time, resource utilization efficiencies and reduced startup costs, many of your critical applications that remain on-prem continue to be saddled with the typical restraints as was exemplified in a recent survey by 451 Research that examines the typical cloud experience through the lens of 1,001 “on the ground” practitioners. Here are a few of the key findings from that report that illustrate the ongoing challenges of the on-premises model:

• Scalability and agility were the biggest worries, with 80 percent citing that deployment times are too slow.
• Capacity planning was a major challenge for 71 percent of IT leaders, with 92 percent acknowledging a wait time of 30 days or longer to get new capacity installed.
• 83 percent of enterprises are still using fixed-capital models for on-premise capacity, reducing the agility of budgets and innovation.

There’s no doubt, that from the on-prem world, the grass looks a lot greener on the other side of the fence. And so lies the conundrum. How do IT decision makers balance the need for greater agility, and improved provisioning times that you typically get from a cloud experience while maintaining security and control of their resources? In the end, most IT leaders play it safe, which creates unnecessary 40-50 percent server capacity and lost opportunities.

Consumption-based IT

What IT leaders need is a cloud-like experience on-premises. Doing so would eliminate the blaring gaps that exist when comparing the on-prem experience to that of the public cloud. But is that even possible?

Here’s some good news at a time when good news is at a premium! You actually can have high resiliency, scalability, and effective capacity utilization while still remaining secure, compliant and in control. It’s a new cloud-like financial model referred to as consumption-based IT and it is available today through HPE GreenLake services. While you may not have heard of GreenLake, you have certainly heard of its parent company, HPE. So popular is the idea of transforming your on-prem environment to a public cloud-like experience, that GreenLake is HPE’s fastest growing business. With 10 years of experience as a market leading IT-as-a-Service provider, GreenLake has demonstrated to its customer base that you can have the cloud experience everywhere.

How the HPE GreenLake model works

There are definite reasons why the public cloud experience is superior to the on-prem strategies of most enterprises today. Public clouds are comprised of the latest equipment and service catalog technology. All of it is administered by experts in their field who utilize best practices, operational techniques and orchestration to ensure optimum performance. This what you get with GreenLake. You can achieve that cloud-like experience with the latest technology from HPE such as HPE SimpliVity, HPE Synergy, Nimble Storage and ProLiant Gen10 servers. They also incorporate third party software and services including Docker, Hadoop, SAP HANA, Nutanix AHV, VMware Cloud Foundation, Microsoft Azure and AWS. Multi-vendor flexibility without the lock in, that’s nice! All of this is then managed by them, while ensuring that you are calling the shots. By handing over the administrative burden to dedicated specialists, your own IT department can focus on business objectives and value added projects.

Four steps for adopting ITaaS with HPE GreenLake

The GreenLake blueprint involves the following essential steps to adopting an IT-as-a-Service experience across your entire enterprise.

1. Define the right mix to remain in control of your complete enterprise according to your current business needs
2. Implement in-place scalability and on-demand processes in order to stay ahead of business demand, while only paying for what you use (this is key!)
3. Optimize skill sets within your organization by offloading management of your hybrid environment to HPE GreenLake Management Services
4. Access your operating model to simplify IT, while providing increased security, visibility and flexibility at the same time

Greater cash flow and cost visibility

The GreenLake model is a pay-per-use model. No longer do you have to play it safe with excessive and wasteful capacity that approaches 40-50 percent for the average enterprise. By eliminating overprovisioning and upfront capital expenditures, HPE customers are seeing an average cash flow saving of 30-40 percent on average after adopting the GreenLake consumption-based IT model. On top of everything else they offer, GreenLake’s metering and analytics software helps customers determine the true cost and profitability to each of their allotted IT services.

Talk to WEI about consumption-based IT

There is nothing new about the concept of consumption-based IT. What’s new is that it is no longer just available in the public cloud. It’s available for your on-prem data center as well. If you want to learn how eradicating the inequality of workloads and performance within their hybrid architectures, then talk to WEI where we can introduce you to the GreenLake model, as well as the concept of having the best of both worlds at your doorstep.

Pay-per-use models are looking to be the future of IT cost models, ask us how your business can start reaping the benefits. Send me a message on LinkedIn to start a discussion, or contact our team here. We look forward to helping you find opportunities to move your business forward in the most cost-effective manner.

You might be interested in our white paper about implementing a hybrid IT model and how to overcome some of the common challenges we’ve seen across enterprise organizations. Click below to read more.

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The data needs of today’s enterprises continue to evolve and to keep up, many IT organizations are turning to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). The benefits of HCI, which include rapid deployment, reduced physical space requirements, and streamlined infrastructure, match perfectly with the immediate priorities of IT organizations looking to modernize legacy systems to increase agility, improve the management experience, and simplify scalability.

That said, HCI is continuing to evolve as does the needs of the enterprise. As shared by IDC, it’s predicted that by 2023, 70 percent of enterprises will run varying levels of processing at the IoT edge, and the compound annual growth rate of edge infrastructure spending on compute and storage will grow to hit $21.2 billion in 2023.

As companies modernize their infrastructure and adopt HCI, they realize workloads at the edge are different from typical enterprise workloads. These workloads are creating and processing data at the edge, they are small and resilient, and they require friction-less deployment, connectivity and mobility. HCI must evolve to service the world we are living in, the world at the edge. Let’s take a look at the next steps needed for your organization to extend HCI to the edge, and the reasons why HPE SimpliVity just might be the right choice.

Achieving Edge-Optimized HCI

To optimize and bring HCI all the way to the edge, IDC specifies that enterprise requirements include:

• More efficient technologies for capturing and processing data
• Local resiliency and no-touch IT
• Built in security
• Automation to simplify management and automate day-to-day activities
• Simplified deployment, connectivity, and operations
• High availability (HA) in the smallest physical footprint possible

HCI at the Edge with HPE SimpliVity

is edge-optimized HCI. This leading HCI solution offers enterprises the simplest and most efficient all-in-one appliance (including data protection) with HA in as little as two nodes, remote and multi-site management, and artificial intelligence (AI) and automation through .

Four differentiators of HPE SimpliVity:

1. Easy to deploy – Low-entry price point and packaging for compact, highly available, all-in-one HCI with built-in data protection
2. Efficient data movement – global dedupe, space efficient replication and rapid multi-site DR for fast recoveries in low bandwidth settings
3. 2-Node high availability – Achieve resiliency with 2 nodes in small footprint with built-in data protection and disaster recovery features to help keep data safe at the edge
4. Simple to manage – Remote, multi-site infrastructure management with integrated data services and backup/recovery through VMware vCenter

Research by IDC shows that 75 percent of customers saw better storage utilization and 57 percent saw improved staff productivity when utilizing HPE SimpliVity.

Why are Enterprise Leaders Choosing HPE SimpliVity?

Businesses are moving to more data-centric business models; they are capturing and analyzing more data than ever before. This faster pace of business and the immense volume of data are forcing organizations to modernize IT infrastructure at a rapid rate. They require increased agility, improved manageability, and the ability to scale when needed. Turns out, HPE SimpliVity is solving the need.

A recent PeerPaper Report by IT CentralStation titled, , captures real user reviews of HPE SimpliVity. Of the many factors these companies considered before deploying HCI, here are the top reasons they ultimately went with HPE SimpliVity:

• Simplicity
• Manageability
• Efficiency
• Faster, more highly available applications
• Fast backup and Restore
• Footprint consolidation
• More Cloud options

The other major factor is data intelligence and is part of what makes HPE SimpliVity different from competing HCI solutions. comes with the benefit of AI-driven intelligence with HPE InfoSight, providing visibility and predictive analytics across your infrastructure. With VM-centric management and mobility, built-in , and unparalleled data efficiency in an architecture that’s already optimized for the edge, HPE SimpliVity has truly evolved from the HCI solutions of the past.

It’s Good for Remote Workforce Initiatives, Too!

We would be remiss if we didn’t stop for a moment to call out HPE SimpliVity’s ability to support your remote workforce. In an article on HPE’s Community platform titled, , HPE reports that HPE SimpliVity is a proven architecture for VDI, with running virtual desktops on the platform (that was from May 2020, we estimate it to be significantly higher by now given the implications of the pandemic). HPE customers are already benefiting from the powerful, built-in data protection and single-click lifecycle management of HPE SimpliVity, but the solution goes further to support the evolving needs of a remote workforce. Here’s how:

1. Easily scalable: Customers can start with a small, medium, or large configuration and easily add new nodes in small, powerful increments from pilot to production scale with no disruption.Powerful capabilities in a compact form factor: Starting with the very first appliance, customers can take advantage of the full software capabilities of HPE SimpliVity including guaranteed data efficiency, built-in data protection, and global VM-centric management and mobility.
2. Lower dollar per desktop cost: Doubling the virtual desktops per server provides businesses a 50% savings in cost per remote worker.
3. Seamless integration into existing IT environment: Customers can mix HPE SimpliVity 325 with HPE SimpliVity 380 and 2600 models in the same federation across many sites, easily integrating the new HCI nodes into existing environments.

Highly dense HPE SimpliVity 325 is a powerful hyperconverged infrastructure for space-constrained IT. The 1 rack-unit model is ideal for remote sites, Edge, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Are You Interested In Utilizing HCI At The Edge?

As a global, edge-to-cloud company, HPE is helping enterprises around the world upgrade from legacy systems and experience the benefits of a new generation of HCI. With a variety of use cases, and powered by the industry’s most advanced AI for infrastructure, HPE SimpliVity is offering the HCI experience at the edge, without compromising performance.

If you’re considering a move to hyperconverged infrastructure, rest assured that WEI can help you along the way. Ask us about our experience implementing HPE SimpliVity for mid-market to enterprise companies across several industries. We are there by your side to consult, design and architect a solution, as well as implement and support your organization beyond deployment. Contact us today to talk more about how HPE SimpliVity can fit in your environment.

NEXT STEPS: Modernizing your IT infrastructure? Sure, we all are! Dig into the differences between Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure and find out the key questions to ask before investing in an HCI solution in our white paper below. Read it today!

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The basic function and expectation of IT is to fulfill the day-to-day technology needs of the enterprise, support innovation and ensure a positive user experience for employees and customers. This requires a certain amount of time, money, and resources to be done correctly, but the unfortunate reality is that many IT teams are being asked to do more with less these days.

To meet these budget requirements without sacrificing performance, many enterprises have turned to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Through HCI, enterprises can simplify IT infrastructure, speed up deployment and reduce operational costs with efficiency gains.

The HCI solution we’ll highlight today is , which can deliver savings of up to 66 percent over a three-year period compared to public cloud, 43 percent when compared to traditional three-tier infrastructure, and 28 percent when compared to other HCI solutions, according to a .

Top 5 areas of value from HPE SimpliVity

As shared in the ESG report, HPE SimpliVity 325 brings tangible value in five important areas:

1. 1. Cost of Acquisition
2. 2. Data Protection
3. 3. Administration
4. 4. Data Center Costs
5. 5. Support

1. Cost of acquisition

HPE SimpliVity 325 offers immediate value by reducing the minimum deployment requirement from three nodes to just two, offering instant savings when compared to other HCI offerings. Other cost savings come in the form of data efficiency through software-optimized inline deduplication, compression, and optimization of I/O and network traffic. In addition to offering significant storage and bandwidth efficiency, these advantages also improve performance.

2. Data protection

Several core features come standard with HPE SimpliVity 325, including built-in virtual machine backups, multi-site replication, recovery and cloning, and disaster recovery. In terms of monetary value, these features reduce costs associated with security. HPE also offers benefits through its partnerships with other technology vendors, including Veeam, making it simple for enterprises to acquire solutions for specialized data situations.

3. Administration

HPE SimpliVity 325 builds upon the standard administrative benefits of HCI by facilitating all aspects of management through the interface and requires no specialized training. This means IT teams only require a single generalist to handle management tasks for the entire deployment.

4. Data center costs

For data centers, HPE SimpliVity 325 offers cost savings because of its two-node minimum, meaning the infrastructure takes up less floor space, needs less power and less cooling. This equates to environmental cost savings of up to 16 percent when compared to other HCI offerings, according to ESG.

5. Support

In terms of support, HPE SimpliVity 325, which requires less hardware and features built-in data protection, has lower support costs and has a single support center for infrastructure, software, and backups. This significantly reduces the resources and time IT teams have become used to from years of dealing with support delays and challenges with legacy hardware.

Additional

In addition to the cost savings, HPE SimpliVity delivers self-managing, self-optimizing, and self-healing infrastructure through artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning predictive analytics through elevates the solution above other HCI offerings and give enterprises a truly intelligent HCI solution.

As a global, edge-to-cloud Platform-as-a-Service company, HPE is helping enterprises around the world upgrade from legacy systems and experience the benefits of HCI. With a variety of use cases, HPE SimpliVity can transform any IT operation and reduce costs, improve efficiency, and boost performance.

Find out how HPE SimpliVity fits in your environment. Contact us to start a conversation and learn how your business can start realizing these benefits from HPE SimpliVity.

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Today, work doesn’t just happen at the office. To stay competitive and increase productivity, enterprises around the globe are looking to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) with VM support to provide increased flexibility compared to conventional hardware-defined infrastructure.

The most effective HCI solutions provide management simplicity, cloud options, efficiency, increased availability, fast backup and restore, in addition to the consolidation of the data-center footprint.

, a leader in HCI solutions, provides all of the above and more.

The benefits of HCI

As a solution, HCI relies on virtualization for compute, storage and network. Underlying storage and compute hardware are abstracted from software-defined controls and functionality.

This is in direct contrast to traditional hardware-defined infrastructure, or converged infrastructure (CI). HCI tends to be less complex and costly to mange due to being software-defined.

An HCI system also typically includes a hypervisor for virtual machines (VMs), a virtual storage area network (SAN), and software-defined networking. As an additional bonus, HCI instances can run on commercial “off-the-shelf” server hardware.

Considerations when selecting an HCI solution

When selecting an HCI solution, there are three aspects that should be considered above all else: simplicity, manageability, and efficiency.

As previously stated, when compared to CI solutions, HCI is typically less complex to manage. HPE SimpliVity offers increased management simplicity through components such as , which makes use of telemetry and machine learning. Together, these simplify the experience with predictive resource planning to anticipate and correct infrastructure problems.

When compared to similar solutions, HPE SimpliVity offers enterprises an all-in-one solution that is easy to manage and scale, reducing the management burden on IT, and increasing their productivity.

Additionally, HCI solutions should drive efficiency across the enterprise. By having all of the infrastructure running on a software-defined basis, applications are both faster and more highly available. In terms of data efficiency, HPE SimpliVity’s always-on inline deduplication and compression guarantees 90 percent capacity savings across primary storage and backup saving costs.

The freedom provided by VM solutions

Enterprises are increasingly looking for flexible solutions that offer additional productivity and facilitate communication regardless of where users may be. HPE SimpliVity supports this by allowing remote workers to access data and applications from anywhere via VM connectivity.

In fact, that SimpliVity’s built-in backup capability can complete a local backup or local restore of a 1 TB VM in less than one minute, on average. Additionally, from the HPE SimpliVity interface, which is fully integrated with the hypervisor, it only takes three clicks to back up, restore and move, or clone a VM, all from a single console.

The user interface, from a central location, can also be used to create or update backup policies for thousands of VMs, across dozens of sites, in only minutes.

Additionally, adding or replacing HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged systems will not create downtime for local or remote sites, will not disrupt local or remote HPE SimpliVity backups, require reconfiguration of SimpliVity, or backup policies for local or remote sites.

IT can also make use of HPE InfoSight for additional visibility into VM neighbors, and insights into VM storage utilization, to allow IT to identify high consuming VMs and implement corrective actions.

All of this combined means that users experience a smooth and uninterrupted VM solution that is as easy for them to use as it is for IT to manage.

Ready for a new kind of HCI solution?

HPE SimpliVity brings cloud agility, scalability, and simplicity to the enterprise data center. It streamlines IT operations for a fast, simplified, and efficient hyperconverged platform that combines IT infrastructure and data services into a single, integrated solution. Enterprises searching for a VM solution will discover the increased productivity and flexibility that HPE SimpliVity offers, as well as uninterrupted access at all levels of the enterprise. All at a fraction of the cost of traditional CI solutions. If you’re ready to make the change now, contact WEI to begin building a custom solution for your business.

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