infrastructure Archives

Assessments – A Necessary Evil

Assessments are a necessary evil for an IT Department. Egos are hurt, exposure of negligence and complacency are all deliverables of a thorough assessment. But we’re going to look at it in a different way.

An IT Department can be considered the Heroes of an organization because they realized an assessment(s) needed to be done. Preventing a catastrophic breakdown or failure of an organization’s infrastructure or by saving an organization millions of dollars, the IT Team can leverage the C-Suite for that pool table in the breakroom without much resistance.

Limited Bandwidth

We all wear many hats in an organization and can be considered the Jacks of all trades and Masters of none. An individual who’s heading up the IT Department may have a Networking core competency but have little or no knowledge of a Storage competency. And, there’s the chance an individual and only that individual makes up the entire IT Department. This can be the case for SMB companies. Enterprises have a few folks, but even their bandwidth is not what it should be.

Gaps in knowledge ranging from Networking, Compute, Storage, etc. can jeopardize an organizations’ infrastructure. This can cause significant trouble with product outputs. However, being proactive instead of being reactive can help minimize the opportunity for failure or loss to occur.

Available Assessments

Assessment is a very broad term. There can be levels and micro-levels of assessments within an IT Infrastructure.

Here’s a very high-level summary of the types of assessments that are available via Zunesis at the click of the ‘SEND’ button on a product / service inquiry form:
1. IT Infrastructure Assessment – Experts will assess the current IT infrastructure and deliver a report detailing observations regarding hardware, software, and the business processes impacted by the organization’s IT environment. Recommendations and potential solutions should also be part of the final deliverable.
2. Data Management Assessment – Data Management Assessment Service can be used to focus separately on Production Data, Archive Data, Backup/Recovery, or it can encompass all three. Part of the perks of having this information would be to document current data management practices as well as short-term and long-term objectives.
3. Recurring Data Center Assessment & Advisory Service – This is a review of the IT Infrastructure Assessment, but it would occur on a quarterly, bi-annually, or yearly cadence. Benefits include lower support and maintenance costs, greater control over the existing environment and other attributes which lead to high performance without breaking the bank.
4. VMware Assessment Services – Deliverables include documentation on current environment, observations about current VMware use and short-term recommendations and areas of opportunity. This information will provide a clearer picture of the environment’s long-term strategy and cost efficiency.
5. Wireless Site Survey – This assessment should be done by all organizations (i.e., Government agencies, Education, office buildings, etc.). A Network Engineer will import floor plans into a tool and draw walls on the map to give them an idea of what their coverage area will look like. Or if already installed, the site survey will validate a recent wireless network installation.
6. Ransomware Recovery Preparedness & Risk Assessment – There’s no need to elaborate on this assessment. To be blunt, if an organization doesn’t feel this is necessary, then they better be prepared to lose all their data and pay a fortune to get it back. And, there’s a chance an organization may never get their lost data back. People will lose jobs over this if this assessment is not done and done soon.
7. Firewall Assessment – This provides the overall utilization of an organization’s current firewall and their adherence to industry’s best standards through a Network Vulnerability Assessment. Recommendations, best practices, snapshot of existing firewall layout, potential of what the layout can be in the long-term are just some of the attributes a company can glean from this assessment.

Potential Problem Analysis

Now that these assessments have been identified and the importance of each, organizations need to think operationally, tactically and strategically about the consequences and costs of not undergoing these assessments. Potential Problem Analysis consists of identifying the problem before it actually occurs. This type of thinking is true in any infrastructure environment and should be implemented immediately. Band Aide’s and Duct Tape can only go so far.

Again, being proactive rather than reactive, an organization can prevent significant down-times, reduce costs by protecting current hardware, avoid ransomware, avoid closure, save jobs and many other elements which will lead to continued operation time and an increased/valid sense of security.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

When making the decision on what is the best solution for your infrastructure, there are a few popular options available. Options include Converged, Hyperconverged, and Disaggregated Hyperconverged. Depending on the size and complexity of your environment, this will impact which infrastructure you may choose.

Choosing between the different available architectures means having a complex understanding of both the current deployments in your data center and the scaling factors impacting your organization specifically.

Converged Infrastructure

IT Sprawl is still a very real issue for data centers. It leads to increased costs, reduced efficiency, and less flexibility. A converged infrastructure (CI) helps with this by creating a virtualized resource hub. It increases overall efficiencies across the data center using a single integrated IT management system.

A converged infrastructure (CI) aims to optimize by grouping multiple components into a single system. Servers, networks, and storage are placed on a single rack. Replacing the old silos of hardware, convergence allows IT to become more efficient by sharing resources and simplifying system management. This efficiency helps keep costs down and systems running smoothly. On the flip side, it is expensive and not the most flexible in scaling.

While converged infrastructure is effective in small-scale environments, most mid-market and enterprise organizations are limited by this architecture. Its hardware is proprietary in nature and it ineffectively distributes resources at scale.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) was designed to fix the scalability issue, and it certainly improved things. Designed as a building-block approach, HCI allows IT departments to add in the nodes (i.e., servers, storage, or computing) as needed. It continues to simplify management by placing all controls under a single user interface.

Hyperconverged infrastructure, by leveraging commodity products across the board, significantly disrupted the financial dynamics. It was radically less expensive, at least initially than converged infrastructure while still providing most of the benefits.

Most organizations today use either a traditional CI or HCI Deployment. There are benefits and advantages to both.

While HCI has many benefits, there are some significant disadvantages. For quickly growing businesses that need an easy-to-manage architecture that embeds as many elements of modern-day computing – like disaster recovery, security, and cloud, this may not be the best solution. Hyperconverged solutions have use cases where they do not fit. This has caused problems for customers who disrupted operations by not realizing the impact some workloads would have.

While more scalable than CI, HCI still requires the interdependent growth of storage and servers. That’s a challenge with the types of workloads companies use today.

It’s hard to argue with the manageability and scalability advantages of traditional HCI platforms. IDC predicts that the HCI market revenue will grow at a CAGR of 25.2% to crest $11.4 billion in 2022. As HCI has matured, enterprises have been looking to use it to host a broader set of workloads.

There are still workloads whose performance, availability, and/or capacity demands encourage the use of an architecture that allows IT managers to scale compute and storage resources independently. A storage solution that is better for workloads whose growth is very dynamic and unpredictable.

Disaggregated HyperConverged (dHCI)

Enter in the latest solution, Disaggregated Hyperconverged infrastructure. Disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure (dHCI) combines the simplicity of CI and the speed of HCI to create a more resilient, evolved data center architecture. There are numerous benefits to dHCI. The biggest value proposition most attractive to users today is disaster recovery as a service or DRaaS.

While not every workflow can run on a hyperconverged infrastructure, they can on a dHCI. That’s part of what makes it appealing. It doesn’t come with the restrictions of its predecessors. Ultimately, disaggregated HCI leverages similar components to converged infrastructure but leverages modern infrastructure automation techniques to enable automated, wizard-based deployment and simple, unified management at similar costs to HCI.

With dHCI, IT teams are able to focus on support and service delivery while Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes care of infrastructure management. The rise in size and complexity of data centers means that such an intelligent solution will help firms get maximum Returns on Investment (RoI) in IT equipment.

dHCI is in demand for IT managers who want the simplicity of HCI and the flexibility of converged. dHCI is simple to deploy, manage, scale and support. It is software-defined so compute and storage are condensed and managed through vCenter with full-stack intelligence from storage to VMs and policy-based automation for virtual environments are integrated throughout.

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI pulls together the best elements of each type of infrastructure. Combining the simplicity of HCI management with the reliability, familiarity, and flexibility of scale of our beloved 3-tier architecture. It is essentially high-performance HPE Nimble Storage, FlexFabric SAN switches and Proliant servers converged together into a stack. Simple deployment, operation, and day-to-day management tasks have been hugely simplified with this solution.

The out-of-box experience requires very little technical experience to use and deploy the stack. Once up and running, day-to-day tasks, such as adding more hosts or provisioning more storage, are simple “one-click” processes that are simple and take up very little technician time. Storage, compute and networking can be scaled independently of each other. This further reduces the requirement for VMware/ Hyper-V licensing at scale. It reduces the costs as there isn’t a need to scale out all the components when you simply need more storage or compute.

The whole stack plugs directly into the HPE Infosight portal and support model. It automates simple support tasks so that 1st and 2nd line support are no longer needed to triage issues. dHCI plugs into this to bring this first-class support and analytics to VMware, Proliant, and FlexFabric as well as the Nimble Storage platform. With dHCI, it’s now possible to deploy an entire virtualization stack and have it monitored and supported 24/7/365 by skilled HPE engineers.

Want to learn more about these infrastructure solutions and discover which one is a good fit for your organization, request a consultation today with Zunesis.

Downtime Prep

So that we ‘don’t let the cure be worse than the problem,’ it’s time to prep your organization’s infrastructure. When the time comes (and it will) to put that proverbial, “We’re Open” sign in the window, you will want to be prepared. We’re all hopeful this tragedy will take the shape of a ‘V’ in economic recovery. Regardless, an organization needs to be fully operational immediately.

There are several options / assessments that should be considered depending on the size of the organization:

NO CONTACT: A LOT OF THESE SERVICES CAN BE DONE BY REMOTE LOGIN

In a normal world, many organizations don’t have the time or resources to tend to the above-mentioned assessments. It’s quite possible some organizations aren’t very familiar with their environment and take it for granted. It’s very possible an organization is about to face something catastrophic with their IT environment and not even know it.

THIS IS THE TIME

Therefore, an organization needs to be ready when that bell rings in the rematch fight against the economy. Not being prepared is like showing up to a gunfight with a knife. It’s going to be hard enough already but putting in the time now to prepare for the Nation’s comeback will provide dividends.

Our Engineers will do everything possible so that an organization can be a recipient of those forthcoming dividends. In fact, they will go the extra mile every single time. Just a few days ago, I was on a call with a client and our Engineers. They were troubleshooting several issues (REMOTELY) with the client’s Backup and their Exchange. Over three hours later and well past 6PM, they found the needle in the haystack.
After checking with the client, the next day, it was really awesome to see the following reply,

“Everything is great. Backups and exchange sync worked perfectly.”

These guys are good!

While I painted the picture of rainbows and butterflies, we do realize budget is a concern. If an organization does decide to conduct one or more of the listed assessments, there are costs involved. Believe it or not, the cost to conduct some of these assessments can be significantly lower than NOT doing an assessment which could result in a complete rebuild of the organization’s infrastructure.

In some cases, this service could be provided to the client at no cost to them. That’s the tease for this blog. We currently have four or five clients who are taking advantage of this opportunity. Now is the time to prepare for the future. Downtime equals prep-time. We’re one tough country and practice the belief of:

It’s not how hard we fall; it’s how quickly we get back up and fight the fight.

Until next time, stay safe and healthy. We’re all in this together and together is the only way we will win!

Downtime Prep

Anyone else feel like we’re living the movie version of Groundhog Day. Only, there’s really nothing comical about our reality right now. This is a surreal time, but there are opportunities to take advantage of the downtime.
So that we ‘don’t let the cure be worse than the problem,’ it’s time to prep your organization’s infrastructure. When the time comes (and it will) to put that proverbial, “We’re Open” sign in the window, you will want to be prepared. We’re all hopeful this tragedy will take the shape of a ‘V’ in economic recovery. Regardless, an organization needs to be fully operational immediately.

There are several options / assessments that should be considered depending on the size of the organization:

NO CONTACT: A LOT OF THESE SERVICES CAN BE DONE BY REMOTE LOGIN

THIS IS THE TIME

“Everything is great. Backups and exchange sync worked perfectly.”

These guys are good!

While I painted the picture of rainbows and butterflies, we do realize budget is a concern. If an organization does decide to conduct one or more of the listed assessments, there are costs involved. Believe it or not, the cost to conduct some of these assessments can be significantly lower than NOT doing an assessment which could result in a complete rebuild of the organization’s infrastructure.
In some cases, this service could be provided to the client at no cost to them. That’s the tease for this blog. We currently have four or five clients who are taking advantage of this opportunity. Now is the time to prepare for the future. Downtime equals prep-time. We’re one tough country and practice the belief of:

It’s not how hard we fall; it’s how quickly we get back up and fight the fight.

Until next time, stay safe and healthy. We’re all in this together and together is the only way we will win!

2020 IT Budget Forecast

Spiceworks recently released their 2020 Spiceworks State of IT Report. They surveyed more than 1,000 technology buyers in companies across North America and Europe. The study focused on how organizations will be spending their technology budgets for next year.

According to their report, replacing outdated infrastructure will be the biggest IT spend next year. Most businesses are anticipating top-line revenue growth. As revenue grows, typically IT budgets increase as well.

What will be the key areas of focus in organizations’ 2020 IT Budget Forecast?

IT Budget 2020 Spiceworks

Other key findings include:

IT BUDGET GROWTH : IT budgets rise as businesses replace outdated technology. 44% of businesses plan to increase tech spend in 2020 which is up from 38% in 2019.
BUDGET DRIVERS: One in four enterprises (1,000+ employees) are increasing 2020 IT spend due to a recent security incident.
EMERGING TECH TRENDS: Business adoption of AI-powered technologies is expected to triple by 2021, while adoption of edge computing is expected to double. Large enterprises are adopting emerging technologies 5 times faster than small businesses.
FUTURE TECH IN THE WORKPLACE: Two-thirds of large enterprises (5,000+ employees) plan to deploy 5G technology by 2021.

88% of businesses expect IT budgets to either grow or stay steady over the next 12 months. Compared to 2019, we’re seeing more upward acceleration.

44% of businesses plan to grow IT budgets in 2020. This is an increase from 38% in 2019. Organizations that expect IT budget growth next year anticipate an 18% increase on average. Only 8% of companies expect IT budgets to decline in 2020.

Key Categories for IT Spend

These categories represent more than half of the total IT Spend in businesses today.

Security: 7% of Total IT Budget Spend. Pain points include identifying the right solution for their needs and comparing multiple solutions.
Collaboration and Communication: 6% of Total IT Spend. Paint points include finding the right solution and quantifying the business problem that is trying to be solved.
End-User Hardware: 22% of Total IT Budget Spend.
Server Technology: 9% of Total IT Budget Spend. Pain points include identifying the right solution and seeing if the purchase will require other system upgrades.
Networking: 4% of Total IT Budget Spend.
Storage and Backup: 10% of Total IT Budget Spend.

Top 5 IT Challenges Expected in 2020

Businesses are looking for technology vendors and service providers to be an additional tool in their arsenal. They need additional help to navigate through all the pain points out there.

These challenges include:

Keeping IT infrastructure up to date
Balancing IT Tasks and Improvement Projects
Upgrading outdated software
Following security best practices
Convincing Business Leaders to Prioritize IT

Small businesses need more guidance than large enterprises when it comes to security best practices and maintaining disaster recovery policies. Whereas, enterprises will need more help with implementing new tech into their environment.

Future Tech

As for new tech adoptions, there are a few categories that are expected to be adopted by 2021. Enterprises with 5000+ employees will be the ones adopting these tech solutions first.

AI Technology
Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Edge Computing
5G Technology
Serverless Computing
Blockchain Technology

In Conclusion

To summarize, the results show a healthy global economy. Aging technology in the workplace and more sophisticated security threats has IT spending up year-over-year.

We at Zunesis, are prepared to assist you with your 2020 technology initiatives. From assessments to support and more, schedule a meeting with Zunesis to discuss how we can help you reach your technology goals.

It never ceases to amaze me. There’re the great big organizations who have million-dollar lobbies and healthy quarterly dividends. The CEO has a jet or six and from the outside looking in, things look like all their ducks are in a row. A facade is misleading. My last date was a facade, but that’s another subject all together. In other words, things are not always what they seem.

A Lack Of Business Continuity

Organizations spend millions and millions on their research & development (as they should), employee retention and many other pertinent tangibles and intangibles. However, I have noticed a significant gap in the investment in their business continuity. They may not even practice business continuity. They pay little or no attention to that gorilla in the room. Also known as a Disaster (Natural or Manual).

Now some of this is due to negligence and some of this is due to that 20-something mentality that one is bullet-proof. The big ‘D’ here is Denial; the fact that it can never happen to us. We’re too big and somebody will know what to do.

Well, that’s not always the case. If a catastrophe does happen (God forbid), an organization needs to have a contingency plan in place. They should also be able to quasi-predict the catastrophe before it actually happens.

The Cost of Downtime

Downtime in an IT infrastructure can cost an organization millions of dollars per every minute the infrastructure is down. That’s why maintenance windows are done at 1 AM and not during peak times. Could you imagine if Amazon went down on Cyber Monday? Yes, it’s an extreme example, but imagine if your organization went down.

Then ask yourself the following questions:

What would happen?
Would our clients be adversely affected?
How much money would you lose?
How much data would you lose?
How valuable is that data to your organization?
How are we going to get it back?
Who do we call?

The list of questions is infinite. Your organization may not ever be able to be fully down. Imagine if a city’s fire department IT infrastructure went down? It could project total chaos.

Now that I have made my point on the seriousness of an IT infrastructure going down, it’s time to make my other point. That is business continuity.

Business Continuity- What is it?

Wikipedia defines Business Continuity as:

“ The process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company. In addition to prevention, the goal is to permit ongoing operation, before and during execution of disaster recovery.”

The keywords in that definition is “ongoing operation.” Floods, earthquakes, cyber-attacks, human error can all affect the ‘ongoing operation’ of an organization. Having backups (quite possibly more than one) in place to keep the lights on is vital. This is a worthy investment and by investing in a Disaster Recovery plan may make you cringe, imagine the investment you would have to make if you didn’t.

When did Noah build the ark?

Before the storm….Before the storm….

Zunesis has an IT Health Check service which is quick and not physically painful! Let us come in, understand your infrastructure and help you prevent that 10,000-year flood. Click here for more information!

Credit and Leasing

In today’s world, you rarely, if ever find someone who does not have a payment schedule for something they couldn’t or didn’t want to buy outright. Between phones, cars, houses, and credit cards, most of us have something that we put on credit. The concept of credit is not new, and it has had many different faces and reputations over the years.

In fact, I find it somewhat assuming that as a society we depend on credit. Yet in general our concept of credit is one of disdain. Or we use it just because we have to, not because we want to.

Leasing options in the IT industry have been met with similar attitudes. In fact, there are some companies and agencies that will make a hard and fast rule that you CAN’T lease.

But what if things were different?

What if there was a way to purchase the technology you need, pay for it on a yearly basis as your budget becomes available and still not sign a lease?

Subscriptions or subscription agreements have been around as long as credit/leasing have. With the rise of software and cloud computing, subscriptions have become more and more prevalent in our IT world.

Subscribe Click GIF from Subscribe GIFs

So the brain trust here at Zunesis thought this through, and we said to ourselves:

“What if we could provide a subscription agreement for on premises hardware and remove the stigma of a lease from our customers minds?”

What would this look like?

Customer Challenges

First, we wanted to come up with a list of challenges our customers are facing. Here is what we found:

Traditional storage infrastructures have hard limits on capacity and data growth is unpredictable.
Traditional infrastructure refresh cycles are typically every 2.5 – 5 years, and these refresh cycles require extensive planning and time-consuming data migrations.
The rate of data growth today is unprecedented. This growth is being driven by analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, video, and edge-based Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
Capital costs continue to rise on enterprise storage because of demands for faster I/O, greater redundancy, and enhanced security. Finding cost-effective ways to provision storage is a major challenge for most organizations today.

So after some careful thought, we realized that we would need a procurement model that allowed our customer to purchase all the infrastructure necessary for a complete data center refresh. It needed to be sufficient enough to support current operations and five-years of planned growth.

Subscription Agreement

To make that happen, Zunesis teamed up with Hewlett Packard Financial Services to create a SLED/Nevada compliant agreement that would allow our customer to make cost-effective annual payments for managed infrastructure.

We would set this up as a subscription agreement, providing the following benefits:

An annual cost that is consistent year over year. No surprises.
Proactive support from vendors is included, off-loading administrative overhead of updates, migrations, and end-of-life transitions.
The Subscription Agreement allows for rapid and unpredictable storage / infrastructure growth.
The Agreement enables costly and risky data migration to happen only once (in 5-year life cycle).
The Agreement enables consistent and predictable budgetary planning.

This agreement would be created to allow organizations to buy best in class infrastructure at sufficient scale to allow the organization to be supported today and into the future. This would be beneficial to our customers by eliminating the need to incrementally improve their infrastructure and remove all of this risks of frequent migrations with this incremental upgrades.

Now in theory and on paper we thought this would be a great benefit and something our customers would really gravitate toward, but as my mother used to say, “the proof is in the pudding.”

Would customers ever sign an subscription agreement like this? Well, I am happy to announce that we signed our first customer subscription agreement in March of this year. We have several other customers that are working to be next on the list for this option.

If this sounds like something you may be interested in looking in to, we would welcome you to contact us to see if this will fit your needs!!

HPE SimpliVity As the founder and CEO of a Colorado-based HPE Platinum Partner (Zunesis), I have been working hand-in-hand with Hewlett Packard for more than 15 years. During that time, I have seen many technology products come and go. In the past year, I have had a chance to understand the value of HPE’s most recent acquistion – SimpliVity and this solution has really caught my eye as unique and compelling.

SimpliVity is a next generation hyperconverged solution that takes advantage of the hyperconverged strategy while also providing new and improved solutions to the limitations that have existed in other hyperconverged solutions. First, let’s talk about business value and benefits. According to unbiased research firms like Forrester, IDC, and ESG, SimpliVity provides the following business value:

73% Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings compared to traditional IT infrastructure
10:1 device reduction
Up to 49% TCO cost savings when compared to AWS
81% increase in time spent on new projects
Rapid scaling to 1,000 Virtual Machines with peak and predictable performance
One hour to provision an 8-node cluster
57% of customers reduced RTOs from days/hours to minutes
70% improvement in backup/recovery and Disaster Recovery (DR)
Nearly half of customers retired existing 3rd party backups and replication solutions

HPE SimpliVity HyperGuarantee

We are seeing enterprise clients deploy SimpliVity because of the way it protects data and provides built in disaster recovery. Enterprise clients with larger mission critical workloads find that SimpliVity is unique in the way it provides a robust and reliable infrastructure framework. SimpliVity provides a hyper-converged solution that is purpose-built for workloads that cannot afford to go down. Take a look at the next generation of Hyper-Converged technology in SimpliVity. Give Zunesis a call and let us spend time explaining how SimpliVity works and the value it can provide your business.

Why HPE SimpliVity and Zunesis? Read More

Composable

Have you heard the term “composable infrastructure” and aren’t really sure what it is? You’re not alone. There’s a lot of confusion out there about infrastructures of all types, from converged to hyper converged and now composable, so we understand the confusion. First, let’s talk about three types of infrastructures to give you a bit more background:

Converged Infrastructure. This is a hardware-focused, static (aka it doesn’t change) infrastructure that supports both private and cloud environments.
Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI). In an HCI environment, the infrastructure is software-defined instead of hardware-focused like a converged infrastructure. All of the various technologies (compute, storage, networking, and virtualization) are integrated together into a hardware box from a single vendor.
Composable Infrastructure. Here, nothing is static. It consists of compute, fabric, and storage modules that you can access and use as you need them.

The main differentiator for a composable infrastructure, specifically one from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is that it’s completely programmable and software-defined. This means that you can access your composable infrastructure to configure and reconfigure all of the resources—compute, fabric, and storage—for whatever your particular workflow needs are at that moment. Composable infrastructure is hallmarked by these three differentiators:

Fluid Pool of Resources. Your compute, storage, and fabric resources are pooled together and provisioned to use at will.
Software-Defined Intelligence. This is where you define the resources you need and manage the resource lifecycle.
Unified API. The HPE OneView is a programmable interface that you use to set everything up through just one line of code.

Synergy

For composable infrastructure, we work with HPE Synergy. Maybe you’ve heard of that, too, and aren’t sure what it’s all about? Let’s dig in.

Consider this: You need to test something, and in order to do that, you need resources. So, to deploy those necessary resources, you would go to the Synergy template and request the exact resources you need in the form of an infrastructure. Synergy then quickly gets to work to compose the exact infrastructure you need from the pool of resources. When you’re done with what you’re working on, you then go back into Synergy and release those resources back into the pool for others to use.

Now that you know more about it, contact us to learn how we can help you make the move to composable infrastructure.

Over the last several months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has introduced new some technologies and, of course, new terminology to go along with them. We now have terms like “Composable Infrastructure” and the “Virtual Vending Machine” to understand. Here’s a quick overview of what these trendy new terms mean:

Composable Infrastructure

hpe synergy introduction This is HPE-speak for one of their newest products: Synergy. Recognized as the infrastructure of the future, Composable Infrastructure is designed to run traditional workloads as efficiently as possible, while accelerating value creation for a new breed of applications that leverage mobility, Big Data, and cloud-native technologies. This is a new approach to traditional architecture is built to allow the IT organization to work with the speed and flexibility of the cloud in their own data center.

For more information, visit the official site here.

Virtual Vending Machine

HPE HC 380 Recently, HPE announced the new Hyper Converged 380. This is based on one of their most proven technologies, the ProLiant DL380 Gen9 platform; and it introduces the concept of a Virtual Vending Machine. The solution integrates compute, storage, and virtualization. It features simplified upgrades, increased uptime and service levels. The new software-defined intelligence layer provides advanced analytics and reduces the costs to start, scale, and protect. The HC380 puts you on a direct path to composability.

Check out the site for more details.

Ask us for more information about either of these new technologies and how they can fit into your greater data center roadmap.