An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
The central idea behind hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) was that organizations needed a way to simplify and abstract the enterprise on-premises technology stack to enable them to simultaneously reduce costs and increase organizational agility. As public cloud began to change the way organizations conceptualized and consumed infrastructure resources, HCI evolved to become a primary enabler of so-called private cloud — allowing organizations to realize many of the same benefits of management simplicity and provisioning flexibility, but with the security and control of on-prem deployments.
Nutanix has long been a leader in the HCI market sector and has been at the forefront of the first two evolutions of HCI technology. Today, the company believes that HCI is going through another evolution and is reinventing the technology for the hybrid world in which enterprises find themselves. As part of this evolution, the company has been repositioning itself as a software-focused solution that helps organizations simplify and abstract infrastructure resources on-premises (e.g., private cloud), in the public cloud, and also at the edge.
The company sees that broader interrelated technology trends such as artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and IoT advancements are leading to increasing demand for flexible and abstracted processing functionality at the edge — exactly, as the company sees it, what HCI is best able to deliver. It considers this new edge processing capability as a distributed cloud that sits on factory floors, at branch office locations, and other non-central locations, but which also must seamlessly integrate with the public and private cloud infrastructures that are central to the enterprise’s core technology capability.
Moving advanced processing capabilities to these edge locations will be essential, the company believes, as organizations seek to create better customer and employee experiences using the vast amount of data generated at the edge. Doing so, however, will also create significant management and orchestration challenges. The company believes that its reinvention of HCI as an architectural model that bridges private, public, and edge clouds with a consistent management and orchestration layer will be essential as organizations reorient themselves for the era of hybrid IT and multi-cloud environments.
Copyright ©2019 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. At the time of this writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.
