Customers who have transitioned or plan to transition to HCI cite cost reduction, accelerated deployment, improved ability to scale, improved operational efficiencies, and reduction in infrastructure tasks as top benefits. In one IDC study, VxRail customers provided up to 56 percent faster IT service delivery and improved productivity and efficiency of IT infrastructure teams by up to 60 percent.
Savings in initial investments are lower, and operational expenses are also lower when compared to traditional three-tier architectures. Cost savings include power and cooling, ongoing system administration, and the elimination of disruptive updates and data migrations.
Rather than buying monolithic SAN-based infrastructure, a business can buy infrastructure that is targeted for specific workloads. A main contributor to lower TCO and the increased agility of hyperconverged solutions is the ability to start smaller and scale incrementally. On the contrary, in traditional settings, customers must either buy more resources than they need in anticipation of scaling up, or they must wait until current workloads exhaust the allocated resources and then add infrastructure. Buying at an inopportune time means that resources are not optimally allocated, and it can even delay a customer’s business expansion.
HCI enables a pay-as-you-grow approach—start with what is needed today and expand incrementally, rather than purchasing a large amount of compute and storage up front. HCI also addresses the typical overprovisioning and overpurchasing that occurs when technology is intended to last for multiple-year cycles.
[4] Delivering Efficient Business Expansion with Dell EMC VMware-based HCI, October 2018, IDC.
