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Let’s face it—traditional design for data center infrastructure doesn’t always meet today’s needs. Analytics, transaction processing, high-volume web serving and other data-intensive and mission-critical workloads place new and increased demands on the IT infrastructure. At the same time, specialized IT skills are becoming increasingly challenging to find, and budgets for capital IT expenses continue to shrink.

Many organizations are turning to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to address these challenges because it enables them to greatly simplify operations in the data center and realize capital expenditure (capex) reductions for many use cases. HCI systems combine compute, networking, storage and virtualization resources, all pre-integrated in a scale-out server. Rather than building and managing hardware and software components separately, a centralized management app handles everything.

Nutanix pioneered the HCI category and continues to be synonymous with technological and market share leadership in the hyperconverged private cloud space. Gartner named Nutanix a Leader in this segment in its 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure  report.[1] Many organizations worldwide have procured Nutanix hyperconvergence technology, and companies in industries spanning aerospace, beverages, telecommunications and more deploy it.

We have collaborated with IBM to build a new type of HCI solution—one in which simplicity meets performance, and one uniquely optimized to meet the challenges posed by the most demanding workloads.

Making the right infrastructure choices

Which management app and server architecture should you choose? You want a solution that delivers on the simplification and cost-savings expectations of hyperconvergence without being shortchanged when running today’s data-intensive applications. In addition, your IT teams need the resources to build and manage powerful multicloud environments for private, public and distributed cloud applications and infrastructure. Consider the following five reasons why IBM Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix may be the optimal choice for your organization.

1. Performance

Combining Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software and IBM Power Systems servers offers an integrated, scalable, high-performance enterprise infrastructure solution for highly demanding transactional and cognitive analytics workloads. IBM Power Systems can deliver tremendous virtual machine density in cloud environments, particularly for open source database (OSDB) workloads such as EDB Postgres, MongoDB and traditional relational databases such as Db2.

2. Private cloud with public cloud capabilities

HCI was designed with the key goal to bring the ease and predictable cost of a public cloud-like experience to private data centers. Nutanix helps deliver on this aim with its Enterprise Cloud software. It enables organizations to get the agility and flexibility benefits of the cloud while retaining on-premises control in meeting compliance, security and service-level agreement (SLA) expectations. When combined with IBM Cloud Private, a platform for developing and managing on-premises, containerized applications, IBM Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix can thoroughly modernize the way you deploy and manage both your applications and the infrastructure that supports them.

3. No worries over skills shortage

Imagine increasing IT agility while reducing dependence on IT skills and expertise that can be scarce in today’s business climate. IBM Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix is designed to empower operations organizations to simplify deployment and provisioning of resources. Assembling systems components is not necessary, and the Prism Central console offers efficient management through a single-pane-of-glass approach. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software also helps eliminate the need for specialized IT skills to build and operate cloud-driven infrastructure.

4. Transformation without rip and replace

Organizations adopting HCI don’t need to rip and replace their existing IT infrastructure to transform their businesses for today’s data-driven, AI era. IT professionals deploying HCI solutions can start small and scale incrementally to meet the specific demands of their organizations’ application requirements. For example, IBM POWER–based servers are designed to be cloud ready for running big data analytics and high-performance, data-intensive workloads, and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software enables a single cluster to have unlimited nodes for running multiple workloads with high efficiency.

5. Scale-out topology

What happens when infrastructure needs to grow? With IBM Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix, organizations can cluster multiple servers together in a scale-out topology managed by the Nutanix software stack. Internal physical storage resources from each node are pooled into one large, virtualized distributed file system. With single-click ease, systems can be added to dynamically increase compute or storage capacity.

Taking the right path to hyperconverged infrastructure

More organizations are adopting hyperconverged infrastructure every day. Find out how you can get started on the path to greater simplicity and performance, and gain a better idea of how our hyperconverged systems can help pay dividends for your enterprise.

[1] Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure, 6 February 2018. ID: G00333051

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