Customers that have transitioned or plan to transition to HCI state cost reduction, accelerated deployment, improved ability to scale, improved operational efficiencies, and reduction in infrastructure tasks as top benefits they expect to realize when implementing HCI. From one IDC study of VxRail customers, they were able to provide up to 56% faster IT service delivery and improve productivity and efficiency of IT infrastructure teams by up to 60%.
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 targeted for specific workloads. A main contributor to lower TCO and the increased agility of hyperconverged solutions is the ability start smaller and scale incrementally. That is not the case in traditional settings: customers either must buy more resources than they need in anticipation of scaling up, or wait until current workloads exhaust the allocated resources, then add infrastructure after the fact. Buying at the inopportune time means that resources are not optimally allocated and can even slow down customer’s business from expanding.
HCI enables a pay-as-you-grow approach—start with what is needed today and expand incrementally rather than purchasing large amount of compute and storage up front. It also addresses the typical over-provisioning and over-purchasing that occurs when technology is intended to last for multiple year cycles.
