Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) – The Key for Driving Digital Transformation Across Credit Unions (Part 1)
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined solution that is gaining rapid interest across the financial services industry due to its ability to enable seamless connection of systems, bulletproof protection of data and significant increases in agility, as well as an overall decrease in all associated costs. Today, credit unions in particular, are looking to hyperconvergence as a key enabler of their digital transformation strategies for reasons, such as the potential benefits it can provide to its emerging and increasing use of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its growing need for edge computing systems.
With the billions of smart devices spread across the globe, each with the ability to connect, communicate, share and analyze data, it should come as no surprise that along with virtually every other sector, IoT offers credit unions a truly unique opportunity to transform IT and business processes, and deliver greater value and experiences to customers (CX). With IoT, not only can customers access their finances, as well as financial information and applications in real-time, from anywhere at anytime, but banks can better view, manage, control and protect all of their customers’ data. Moreover, that customer data can then be analyzed and leveraged to create and deliver solutions and services specifically tailored to meet current and emerging customer wants and needs, which in turn drives increases in customer loyalty, revenues, profits and the bottom-line, as well as shareholder value.
Likewise, edge computing is spurring otherwise unattainable advances, enabling financial services organizations to decentralize the workload, and to collect and process data at the edge or nearest to where the work is actually occurring, which can overcome the “last mile” latency issues. In addition to reducing complexity and enabling easier collection and initial analyzing of data in real time.
Credit unions and other financial institutions’ edge data centers can also be leveraged to offload processing work near end users, acting as an intermediary between the IoT edge devices and larger enterprises hosting the high-end compute resources, for a more in-depth processing and analytics. However, many financial organizations have faced a number of challenges as they have endeavored to deploy, manage and reap the benefits of IoT and edge computing. And, that’s where hyperconvergence can make all of the difference.
Unfortunately, the common misuse and misunderstanding of the term hyperconvergence has led to confusion and continues to serve as a barrier for those that could otherwise benefit immensely from an IT, business agility and profitability standpoint. Let’s try to clear up that confusion here.
The Inverted Pyramid of Doom
Before hyperconverged infrastructure came the inverted pyramid of doom. This refers to a 3-2-1 model of system architecture. And, while it can get the job done in a few key areas, it is the polar opposite of what a businesses truly want or need today.
The 3-2-1 model refers to a scenario where there are virtualization servers or virtual machines (VMs) running three or more clustered host servers, connected by two network switches, backed by a single storage device – most often, a storage area network (SAN). The issue here is that the virtualization host relies totally on the network, which in turn relies totally on the single SAN. To say it another way, everything rests upon a single point of failure – the SAN. (Of course, the false yet popular argument that the SAN can’t fail because of dual controllers is a story for another time.)
Introducing Hyperconverged
When hyperconvergence was first introduced, it meant a converged infrastructure solution that natively included the hypervisor for virtualization. The “hyper” wasn’t just hype as it is today. This is a critical distinction as it has specific implications for how architecture can be designed for greater storage simplicity and efficiency.
Who can provide a native hypervisor? Just about anyone can. Hypervisors have become a market commodity with very little feature differences between them. With free, open source hypervisors like KVM, anyone can build on KVM to create a hypervisor unique and specialized to the hardware they provide in their hyperconverged appliances. Many vendors still choose to stay with converged infrastructure models, perhaps banking on the market dominance of VMware―even with many consumers fleeing the high prices of VMware licensing.
Saving money is only one of the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure.....-->
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined solution that is gaining rapid interest across the financial services industry due to its ability to enable seamless connection of systems, bulletproof protection of data and significant increases in agility, as well as an overall decrease in all associated costs. Today, credit unions in particular, are looking to hyperconvergence as a key enabler of their digital transformation strategies for reasons, such as the potential benefits it can provide to its emerging and increasing use of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its growing need for edge computing systems.