Preparing for the Data Decade: Why Irish businesses should embrace HCI

Guest post by Ronan Carey, Senior Manager Ireland Enterprise, Dell Technologies

The data universe is growing exponentially. It is estimated that there is currently 40 Zettabytes of data in the world and this will grow to 175ZB by 2025 when there will be more than five billion internet users.

And with more data comes more challenges, including how to collect, store, manage, move and analyse it to extract the most value. With a tidal wave of information upon us, how Irish businesses adapt their IT environments to this data surge will set the stage for the next era of digital transformation.

The introduction of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) into organisations’ IT environments will enable them to collapse the traditional three-tier infrastructure by natively integrating compute, storage, networking, virtualisation, management and data services. Besides reducing IT administrative tasks, it will also provide businesses across Ireland with the ability to scale at their own pace, while reducing operating costs and providing flexibility as the foundation for multi-cloud approaches.

In the Dell Technologies 2020 Digital Transformation Index (DT Index), 80% of businesses globally have successfully accelerated at least some of their digital transformation programmes this year. However, many organisations in Ireland continue to be constrained by legacy infrastructure despite leaders recognising that accelerating the pace of transformation is key to enabling their business in 2021 and beyond.

HCI systems bring value to businesses by optimising efficiency and cutting down on operational costs. The sooner organisations take a hard look and re-evaluate their data centres, the sooner they can stand to benefit from this value—ultimately allowing them to do more, for less.

In the past, most Irish businesses considering HCI solutions were those implementing new workload requirements. Today, that number is equalled by those planning a tech refresh. Customers that have or plan to adopt HCI have said that Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), accelerated deployment, improved operational efficiencies, improved ability to scale and the reduction of infrastructure tasks are the top benefits they expect to realise when implementing it.

In the wake of unprecedented data growth, organizations are rapidly becoming aware of the benefits of multi-cloud. In the 2020 Dell Technologies DT Index, data management tools were ranked among the top three tech investments. Through engagement with our customers in Ireland, we understand that cost and performance are the leading motivators behind this trend.

As businesses – large and small – arm their on-premises clouds to support and optimise IT infrastructures for multiple cloud types, they are looking for solutions that provide optimal performance, flexibility and, ultimately, management consolidations and simplification—all of which HCI offers.

We expect to see more organisations turning to HCI as operational hubs for multi-cloud approaches, prompted by the need to ensure that data and workloads are stored and managed in environments to suit the changing needs of the business.

Additionally, the rapid implementation of 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is spurring data growth at an incredible rate and changing the data game in terms of speed and accessibility. This growth, however, comes at a cost as it is expensive and cumbersome to bring the entirety of this data on-premises.

Businesses in Ireland should instead adopt a “hub and spoke approach,” where they take in data at Edge locations, glean insights and take only those insights back to the core hub to act on them. As HCI is easily scalable, it enables users to put the appropriate amount of compute power analysis at those Edge locations.

Another step we see organisations taking to manage their operations and the data surge is to look strategically at how their applications and workloads are being developed. A key enabler for this is the emergence of Kubernetes (K8s) as the ubiquitous infrastructure feature for container management and orchestration.

Irish businesses can determine whether to transform them into cloud native workloads either to operate in a more agile manner or in a DevOps model. HCI is a suitable deployment platform for containers and a cloud native approach being enabled to support not only existing workloads but also offers a Kubernetes dial tone anywhere—whether at the Edge, core or cloud.

Currently, we are seeing more mainstream customers adopt this model by rewriting and refactoring workloads in this way to leverage the scalability and reliability that HCI offers.

The rapid pace at which data is being generated and accumulated will serve as one of the primary catalysts to transform IT infrastructure in the coming decade. To effectively embrace the data-driven decade that lies ahead, organisations in Ireland must modernise their data centres and embrace an HCI delivery model. And in taking advantage of this innovation, businesses and organisations across Ireland will be better equipped to navigate the next era of digital transformation.