How Can HCI Help You to Reduce Your Infrastructure Costs?

04/01/2023

How can HCI help you to reduce your infrastructure costs?

Nearly every IT leader will be facing a similar scenario right now. With the economic effects of Covid-19 spreading to every industry and geography, many organisations will be focusing their digital transformation efforts on lowering costs over the long term.

We know the costs of IT infrastructure go well beyond the capital outlays for simply purchasing the physical equipment. With a range of disparate hardware and software solutions that have been purchased or inherited over many years, organisations are usually facing expensive upgrades to their existing server and storage infrastructure, increasing complexity in their backup and recovery solutions, and rapidly growing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments.

At the same time, organisations can’t afford to delay vital application development programs due to inefficient and underperforming infrastructure. This requires us to find middle ground between driving cost efficiencies and performance from our architecture.

Although public cloud alternatives offer cost-effective speed and agility, going all-in on cloud isn’t possible for business-critical workloads where performance, protection, and control are essential.

Weighing the cost benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)

HCI solutions are growing in popularity for combining storage and compute components with a hypervisor and management software to create a comprehensive compute solution. They are attractive platforms for many of the same reasons as the cloud – they are simple to set up and they provide greater operational agility across IT infrastructure.

What surprises many people is that HCI solutions actually offer similar if not better economic benefits than the cloud. A study by Evaluator Group looked at a TCO model that compares the HPE SimpliVity HCI platform with a cloud solution from AWS. By looking at the deployment of 515 virtual machines (VMs) over three years, SimpliVity delivered 22% to 49% lower costs than AWS over the total time frame.

The real cost savings come when we compare HCI to traditional infrastructure models. According to a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study by HPE and Forrester on the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises realise by deploying HCI, organisations experienced an average 69% decrease in costs compared to running traditional infrastructure environments.

According to those organisations interviewed, they realised lower costs across the following areas:

Avoided cost of server and storage hardware of $2,132,130
Reduced cost of professional services of $155,471
Reduced labor to manage backups of $161,148
Avoided cost of data center floor space valued at $119,070
Avoided cost of performing system updates that cost $19,627
Reduced licensing costs of software tools by $49,737

Whether your organisation wants to reduce complexity, improve architecture performance or simply lower costs, HPE SimpliVity’s market-leading platform offers many distinct advantages over traditional infrastructure choices. Through next-generation IT infrastructure SimpliVity delivers:

improved application performance
faster and more reliable data protection
global management across distributed environments from a central console
ease of scale to meet growth demands
dramatically reduced costs

At Honeylight, we understand the new challenges that our clients are facing as they prepare their IT environment for an uncertain future. By bringing HPE GreenLake, powered by Intel® Xeon® Gold processors, we can help you implement this market leading hyperconverged infrastructure platform across your business – enabling you to reduce the time, complexity and costs of managing your infrastructure environment.

To help you create flexibility with your long-term IT capacity planning, we can help you take advantage of the HPE GreenLake pay-per-use model to deploy HPE SimpliVity on your terms. Simply start with the capacity you need today and grow with business demand by leveraging active capacity management and variable monthly payments based on metered usage.