FEATURE : DATA CENTRE process aimed at forecasting hardware needs . “ It will be the key to understanding and optimising the cost of running business services through platform selection ,” he said . “ In the past the IT infrastructure and operations professionals were given the choice of platforms for running an application or business service . This traditional approach is no longer acceptable because it is component and not business service-oriented , and it doesn ’ t take costs and value into consideration .”
Hyper-converged infrastructure
Given the momentum around hyper-converged infrastructure and data centre modernisation , challenges still persist for most enterprises in the Middle East in the data centre infrastructure space .
According to Citrix ’ s Tufekci , the top challenges in the data centre space include : burgeoning costs related to operational overheads , high maintenance cost , end-to-end monitoring and capacity issues . “ Ensuring a secure network , especially with the evolving and growing threat landscape is critical for data centre administrators and IT teams ,” she said . “ Maintaining high availability with minimal downtime and the development of intelligent data centres to support current and future technologies still pose a challenge for CIOs .”
That said , Tufekci pointed out that due to the many advantages , HCI would be in high demand in 2021 . Similarly , added Tufekci , NVMe storage compatible with legacy servers will be sought after as organisations look to ramp up their capacities to meet the rising demand .
Pereira explained that HCI converges the entire data centre stack , including compute , storage , storage networking and virtualisation . “ Complex and expensive legacy infrastructure is replaced by a distributed platform running on industry-standard commodity servers that enables enterprises to size their workloads precisely and to scale flexibly as needed ,” he said . “ Each server , also known as a node , includes x86 processors with SSDs and HDDs . Software running on each node distributes all operating functions across the cluster for superior performance and resilience .”
Paulo Pereira , Senior Director , Systems Engineering – METI , Nutanix
www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO MIDDLE EAST 41