Will hyper-converged solutions kill the IT team?

The local scene

Market leader Nutanix has been active in the local market for just over two years, and is enjoying plenty of success.

Darren Ashley, managing director of BEarena, Nutanix’s ANZ partner of the year, was intrigued by the prospect back in 2012. “We were at VMworld in 2012,” he recalls, “and went to visit them at the booth. It was a new idea, and it caught our eye.” Some months of negotiating later, BEarena was one of the first Australian Nutanix partners, and the relationship paid off almost immediately.

“The first customer meeting we took the idea to resulted in a win,” Ashley says. “The light just went on in the customer’s mind.” 

After that first customer, Sanity Music, BEarena has since added plenty of others which like the Nutanix solution, including car maker Hyundai – a deployment covered in detail in the August 2014 issue of CRN. “Upgrades can be done online, during business hours, instead of it being a two- to three-month project,” says Ashley. 

He believes the market is still learning about the benefits of hyper-convergence. “The mid-market is very aware, as is the enterprise,” he says. “At about 500 seats or below, the awareness rate drops off. This tech isn’t that relevant for those people.

“We got resistance in the early days. But now we have so many customers that it’s rare to have a ‘startup’ discussion with a customer.”

Darren Adams, Australia & New Zealand VP and general manager of distributor Avnet, agrees the big advantage of hyper-converged systems is simplicity. The distie represents Nutanix as well as EVO:RAIL and VSPEX Blue. “It’s a more modular way to get a solution in place,” he says. “It’s more scale-out. When you want to add another compute or storage node, it’s simpler, more cost effective, more efficient.”

He also agrees that not everyone will want hyper-converged systems. “You can’t easily un-couple the components but then, why would you want to do that? With other approaches there’s more freedom and flexibility to configure things differently,” he says. 

While hyper-converged systems might be more efficient, customers aren’t necessarily reducing how many IT staff they have, says Adams. Savvy IT departments are using the extra time to help their customers achieve their own goals, though more timely access to information.

“Tying your IT department down with systems management is very 1980s,” reckons Adams. “Now you want someone who helps you make money. Hyper-converged enables IT departments to take on the quest to become profit centres.”

When it comes to selling hyper-converged systems, Adams agrees that customers are well informed of the options. “Buyers are more savvy than ever,” he says. “The internet has allowed people to do their own research. They’ve already read an analyst review, or read a blog.”

Customers are more likely to want to test things out for themselves, to see if the marketing matches reality. Proof-of-concept installations are a common way for vendors to get their solutions in front of customers and in use for their specific problems.

Simple, modular systems that are stable and reliable are displacing the complex and fragile collections of kit we’ve learned to accept, if not love. The trend is unlikely to reverse, and is, in fact, magnified by the explosion of interest in automation through movements like DevOps. The modern IT department of today is far more focused on getting things done for their customers than they are with fiddling with finicky technology in a back room.

It’s well past time. 

Serenity IT helps college shift to Simplivity

St Andrews Anglican College in Queensland had a problem: ageing, fragile infrastructure needed too much manual effort to keep working. With a team of just eight IT staff to look after facilities supporting more than 1,300 students and staff, IT director Rory Chapman was concerned that spending time looking after servers and backups was keeping his team from other, more important, work such as spending time on mobility solutions for its large and mostly mobile customer base.

“Backing up the VMs was a challenge. We have more than 30 terabytes of data to move, and we were struggling to pull them back fast enough.”

Chapman, with the help of systems integrator Serenity IT Solutions, chose Simplivity to help them. “We had a requirement to get backups off-site, and we needed to optimise the traffic across the WAN because the school is regional,” says Mona Taimana, technical director at Serenity IT Solutions. The compression and de-duplication capabilities of the Simplivity systems, and their low-bandwidth cross-site replication meant Chapman could achieve his data protection goals without compromising on system performance or purchasing other specialised tools.

“We started the migration on Thursday, and were two-thirds done by Monday – 90 percent of the migration was done in a week,” says Chapman.  

Chapman’s team handled the migration themselves, using the existing VMware tools they were familiar with, which just worked with the Simplivity gear.

When Serenity IT first approached St Andrews with the Simplivity solution, they realised the team would take some convincing. “It was a shift for them,” says Taimana. “We had to explain what hyper-convergence is, what the benefits are.”

Chapman says that the commitment of Serenity IT helped to convince St Andrews to go hyper-converged. “It’s new, so we need the VAR to stand by us if things go pear-shaped.”

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