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Leading IT analysts predict hyperconverged solutions to be the largest segment in integrated systems, growing in excess of 40% CAGR, while other segments are likely to plateau or marginally decline. In this blog, I am bringing forth, how global customers are simplifying their IT operations and making positive impact on business strategy by embracing modern hyperconverged solution with Hitachi. You may also like to read a couple of stories on enterprise customers deploying hyper-converged infrastructure, powered by VMware vSAN, here.

Let’s look at a few customer HCI stories that can be easily replicated in environments facing similar challenges

Asian Health Care Provider:

This Asian hospital is part of a larger conglomerate with diversified business interests. The hospital delivers comprehensive health services to their community. It constantly strives to improve patient care by adapting data-driven approach, which enables doctors and other health care providers to leverage data insights to make informed decisions.

In its endeavor to provide better care for cancer patients, the hospital uses Big Data analytics tools to predict the prognosis of cancer patients (such as death probability at 6 months and 1 year) and studies the probability of going to the intensive care unit due to illness. Thousands of researchers and doctors working at Hospital are building and analyzing data that can be used for further research. To meet the demand for the various projects, the hospital needed a new system that could manage large quantities of data without adding complexity. 

Building IT infrastructure for current and future needs was key driving factor for teams. Rapidly rising real estate and power costs led to the hospital deciding to virtualize and optimize their environment with hyperconverged infrastructure, which provides scale-out flexibility to add capacity non-disruptively as and when needed.  Customer’s familiarity with Hitachi’s reliable external storage platform helped earn the trust in hyperconverged Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC (UCP HC) systems.

UCP HC’s integrated ‘all-in-one’ approach enabled hospital to quickly build and implement the solution, saving time and resources. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Advisor (UCP Advisor) software allowed IT team to have deep visibility into systems and automate life-cycle management on software and hardware. Infrastructure provisioning and automation with UCP Advisor made it very easy to manage the UCP HC cluster and needed no new skill enhancement for the existing IT teams.

Increased agility with UCP HC allowed customer to meet the growing demands of hospital’s research projects and tasks. Easier planning, implementation and automation introduced with industry-leading policy-based management will lead to substantial operational cost savings that can be ploughed back to improving medical care.

Industrial Manufacturer, Switzerland

Headquartered in Switzerland, this manufacturer was running its production environment on a virtualized converged platform. Although providing high performance, its design did not allow easy and rapid recovery, if the production platform goes down as it hosted both data and control planes. Any outage required lengthy troubleshooting to fully recover applications to pre-outage stage.

Increasing business pressure on maintaining near 24*7 uptime got IT teams to redesign the architecture that allowed fast recovery, in the event of any downtime on primary systems. Customer separated control plane from their primary infrastructure and hosted management software (vCenter, vROPs, native management tool) on Hitachi hyperconverged stack. Customer chose UCP HC solution for the new Management Cluster to run independently from the production environment. UCP HC was a no-brainer due to agile deployment and ease of management in day 0-2.

Highly integrated UCP HC solution that combines compute, storage, hypervisor and data protection provided the customer the ability to recover faster from disasters and other unplanned outages.

Leading analyst IDC came out with an independent market note that can be referred here for more info on all-NVMe and storage-class-memory (SCM) use cases, enabled by UCP HC.