Galaxy Office Automation Pvt Ltd is a leading provider of best of breed solutions for infrastructure, networking, security, application delivery, automation, mobility and business intelligence. Incorporated in 1987, Galaxy is a trusted IT solutions provider for more than 1,000 companies across India.
Galaxy is an ISO 9001:2008 organization, backed by over 250 skilled professionals with a pan-India presence. With its best-in-class technologies, Galaxy helps protect, optimize and safeguard companies’ IT infrastructure, and turns it into a competitive edge with business-driven IT solutions for complex enterprise environments.
Pradeep Chakraborty speaks exclusively with
Anoop Pai Dhungat, chairman and MD at Galaxy Office Automation, especially regarding hyper-converged infrastructure service (HCIS). Excerpts:
BW: Tell us something about the evolution of hyper-converged infrastructure.Anoop Pai Dhungat: Hyper-converged architecture is a relatively new term in the enterprise IT space. However, the concept of converged infrastructure has been around for a while now.
As more and more applications place higher demands on data center resources, the traditional silo architectures are falling short in many aspects.
Scaling up a silo architecture typically calls for separate data center design, development of an integration plan, procurement, solution implementation, and long-term management of the expanded silo. This is a very expensive and a complex concern.
CIOs and IT pros are looking at better and cost-effective ways to tackle the increasing needs.Hyper-convergence offers an alternative solution in the modern data center, by lowering the complexity and price of the infrastructure.
We are already seeing a spike in interest and demand for HCIS, owing to the increasing data center complexity and dynamic requirements from the business.
BW: HCIS vs. converged infrastructure. How are they different?
Anoop Pai Dhungat: Converged infrastructure typically combines the core aspects-- compute, storage, networking and server virtualization-- into a single pre-configured box.
HCI takes it one step further by adding more components to a single box, and comes with a hardware-agnostic software layer, which makes deployment and management of the underlying infrastructure easy.
The software layer also allows you to customize the infrastructure to suit special requirements and workloads, which is not possible in converged infrastructures.
BW: What exactly is the need for HCIS?Anoop Pai Dhungat: HCI is a critical step in the journey towards software-defined data centers. Replacing today’s hardware-centric infrastructure for a software-driven future is quite a challenge for CIOs.
HCI makes this transition easier and faster, at a relatively lower cost. It also brings the much-needed flexibility and resiliency required to handle the amount of data generated by various applications.
BW: Why are organizations moving toward an integrated solution?
Anoop Pai Dhungat: As mentioned, the need to curb data center cost and complexity is the primary reason for the move towards HCI, followed by the need for flexibility and ease of deployment and management, etc.
Most importantly, organizations have realized that a hardware-centric, labor intensive data center has no sustainability. Digitalization, cloud, BYOD, IoT and Big data are demanding the infrastructure to be more software-driven, agile and secure at the same time.
The business expects IT to deploy applications and infrastructure in a much faster way, while saving time and resources. Gartner predicts that the market for hyperconverged integrated systems (HCIS) will grow 79 percent to reach almost $2 billion in 2016, propelling it toward mainstream use in the next five years.
BW: Finally, what are the challenges that come with HCIS?Anoop Pai Dhungat: Despite being a highly beneficial model, mature HCI use cases have so far been limited in numbers. I think that the biggest challenge that the user organizations face is the internal resistance toward change.
HCI literally redefines the way the data center has been managed so far, which is a big change for IT teams focusing on specific tasks like storage networking or server administration.
In my opinion, a breakaway from this traditional, specialized approach to infrastructure deployment will gradually get acceptance. As data center resources integrate to become a single entity, the IT pros need to develop a holistic approach and overview of the systems and technology.
