A fairly new narrative around IT Infrastructure has emerged. It’s called Hyperconverged. Nutanix was kind of the founding company and gained quite a following. The promise of simplification and easier management is enough to perk the ears of any CIO. Once Nutanix got some traction, the bigger manufacturers jumped on board. Dell/EMC’s version is called VxRail. HP’s flavor is called HPE SimpliVity. In our own environment, we still had an on-prem data center for legacy applications. We had a back-end SAN still built on fiber-channel. Our SAN switches were aging and we needed to do something different. With some depreciation expense still left on the books, we couldn’t just replace everything and we wanted to move forward in a methodical, pragmatic way. We looked at EMC/Dell, Nutanix, and HP. Our incumbent server provider had been HP but we had standardized on Dell laptops a few years back. We had some leverage on EMC/Dell since we did a large amount of laptop/desktop business with them and they really wanted to get back into our data center (we had kicked EMC out several moons ago). So we went with Dell/EMC and the VxRail solution. We are eliminating most of the need for that back-end SAN so we are in a much better position to retire it. We are still early in our process but I’ll be sure to update it after we’ve had several months to kick the tires.
-Cheers
