Real Tech with WEI - Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Chris Lessard:

Welcome to Real Tech with WEI. I'm Chris Lessard, director of business development. Today we have Dave Fafel, our chief architect. Today's topic, hyperconverged infrastructure. There's a lot of buzz about this word, why?

Dave Fafel:

There is a lot of buzz about hyperconverged infrastructure today and for good reason. hyperconverged brings a lot of benefits to a traditional data center environment today. It consolidates not only the traditional IT infrastructure with software defined components, but it really permits and provides the organizations the start of their IT as a service journey. What it's really doing is giving them the ability and the foundation to be able to deliver back results to the business more quickly than ever before.

Chris Lessard:

First, what is hyperconverged?

Dave Fafel:

Well, hyperconverged is a combination of industry standard components, software defined technologies, unified management interfaces combined into one platform and delivered in a turnkey solution.

Chris Lessard:

Recently we've helped several customers implement hyperconverged in their environment. What are some of those benefits we're seeing?

Dave Fafel:

Well, so there's the obvious benefits of moving from a traditional infrastructure to a hyperconverged infrastructure, reduced overall management, faster time to market, and that's really the crux of this. Businesses and IT organizations have to respond to on demand requests. We can't get away with taking weeks or months sometimes to respond to a business need, sometimes it needs to be immediate. And that's where hyperconverged helps IT organizations enable that responsiveness back to the business. That's really one of the business benefits of moving to this platform. Software defined technologies, consolidated standardized platform, all of those things help you to deploy and provision on demand.

Chris Lessard:

How virtualized would somebody need to be in their data center to begin this journey?

Dave Fafel:

Well, being virtualized certainly helps and we find that most of our enterprise customers are already heavily virtualized. And so that certainly makes a migration to a hyperconverged platform quite a bit easier. But we really try to look at hyperconverged as again, that journey to an IT as a service model, right? By implementing software defined components in your environment, you're able to provision more quickly than ever before, even on existing virtualized environments. You're able to reduce a lot of the oriented that comes with traditional IT infrastructure models. And because hyperconverged solutions are typically turnkey, IT organizations don't have to spend a lot of time getting up to speed or ramping up on this technology.

Chris Lessard:

If a customer wants to get started with hyperconverged, what would be that first step they should take?

Dave Fafel:

Well, the first thing we do with our customers is to understand and characterize their existing environment today, understand their application environment, understanding their existing virtualization level, and then work on a migration strategy to an architecture that we design on a hyper-conversion platform. We want to make sure that we understand what the characteristics from a performance perspective are of their existing environment, from a capacity perspective, and then we design an architect a solution that we think will be a good fit for them. From there, we help them with migration plans and strategies on migrating that environment over to their new software defined hyperconverged platform.

Chris Lessard:

Great. Dave, thanks for joining us today. This has been Real Tech with WEI. We'll see you next time.