Resilient Edge Infrastructure with HCI

Resilient Edge Infrastructure is a key building block in the Modern Datacenter Journey. Building highly Available, Scalable & Resilient Infrastructure improves performance and resiliency of  Application ( Enterprise Applications) and Core Infrastructure Services        (Active Directory, DNS,DHCP, Anti-Virus, Proxy, Patching, CCTV Infrastructure, Backup) at Edge that cater to the organization. With increased focus on IoT , Criticality of Edge Infrastructure is only going to grow.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure as emerged as platform of choice for Edge Workloads considering,

• Reduced Datacenter footprint along with reduction in Power and Cooling costs
• Scalable Infrastructure – Enables us to scale as small as 1 Node & therefore procure based on optimized needs.
• Standardized, Highly Available, Optimized and Resilient Infrastructure platform
• Software Defined Compute and Storage enabling Automated Optimization & Deployment of resources through integration with Cloud Management and orchestration Platforms.
• Higher consolidation ratio per node thanks to powerful compute and SSD backed Storage

Hyper-Convergence is always about Choice and Flexibility. Choice of OEMs (VMware, Nutanix, Cisco)  and Flexibility of Deployment models ( Edge vs. Enterprise). One must always weigh in their requirements/use cases and decide on the right platform and there is no unified choice unless you want to standardize on a platform across your edge and data center sites.

Edge vs. Enterprise 

When it comes to choice of choosing Edge vs. Enterprise deployment model, Please weigh on the overall requirement at your Edge Site before making a choice considering not all OEMs today support online expansion of Edge nodes to Enterprise Nodes.

• How many VMs / Resources would you need considering the future expansion ?
• What Capabilities do your expect from Infrastructure – Availability, Scalability, Performance, Resiliency, Centralized Monitoring & Management ?
• Can it fit-in 3/4 Edge nodes depending on Choice of your OEM ?
• Are there additional requirement like file shares or Backup and does the OEM support them ?
• Can they support expansion of Edge Nodes to Enterprise Nodes ?
• Cost of Edge vs. Enterprise ?
• Choice of Hardware OEM ?

These are some of the key questions which can lead you to decide on the right choice for your use case.

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