Meta level

The return on investment (ROI) that enterprises can realize by adopting hyperconverged technology rivals that of traditional cloud providers.

Obviously, the match between an on-premise meta tier and cloud computing has not yet been decided. The study published by Forrester Consulting in November 2015 entitled "The Total Economic Impact Of SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure" concludes that customers can improve storage efficiency by a factor of 60 on average by deploying a hyperconverged infrastructure and that the payback period for the investment is only 6.6 months.

Forrester's study assesses the financial impact of IT initiatives on the respective customers surveyed and evaluates the benefits of the technology used to improve efficiency in the company.

One of the users that participated in the study is Geodis, a supply chain solutions provider operating in more than 120 countries with annual global sales of €6.8 billion.

Faced with replacing an aging storage infrastructure with high support and maintenance needs and cuts in available IT budgets and staffing, it became necessary to virtualize and consolidate the data center.

The Geodis IT team opted for a hyperconverged storage solution. The new infrastructure not only improved efficiency and reduced monthly energy costs, but also fundamentally simplified operations by bundling all data processing, storage, backup and replication functionality within one management tool.

After implementing the solution, the company was able to eliminate VM hosts and traditional storage silos, and replace VM hosts with hyper-converged infrastructure systems.

A new wave of virtualization seems to be taking off based on the hyperconverged technology that has emerged. Bernhard Brandwitte, Vice President, Global Storage Business at Fujitsu, says:

"Enterprises should follow a holistic virtualization and cloud approach. There are three core factors when implementing virtual environments: performance, data availability and security.

Fujitsu gives its customers the flexibility they need. For example, our solution has helped several customers increase their system performance by 80 percent, achieve zero downtime and reduce operating costs by approximately 40 percent."

Hyperconverged solutions are also coming from the open source camp: the latest version of the self-managing, self-healing distributed software-based storage solution is a Ceph solution that can be used by all operating systems.

Suse Enterprise Storage thus enables the use of this significantly more economical storage solution, regardless of the operating system used.

"Software-defined storage (SDS) will revolutionize the economics of enterprise storage infrastructures"

says analyst Roger Cox, research vice president, Data Center Convergence at Gartner.

"Whether deployed as a standalone system or as an element of a hyper-converged integrated system, SDS is likely to fundamentally change the way SDS product leaders buy and deploy enterprise storage."

Suse Enterprise Storage powered by Ceph is a software-based storage solution that enables enterprises to build storage on commodity standard servers and drives.

Enterprise Storage supports iSCSI in multipath configurations, enabling block storage on all operating systems and environments, including Linux, Unix, and Windows. Version 2 also provides data-at-rest encryption to enhance hardware security.

"Suse is the first vendor to offer support for heterogeneous operating system landscapes. This is further evidence of how important it is for us to provide solutions for our customers who are looking for innovative storage concepts to meet their growing storage needs in an easy and scalable way."

says Michael Jores, Regional Director Central Europe at Suse.