In order to survive in the highly competitive Idea Economy, today’s businesses must continuously hone new IT capabilities to drive better outcomes, proactively manage risk, become more predictive, and nurture a hyper-connected workplace. As businesses increasingly realize that traditional IT infrastructures alone will be unable to support future business goals, they are leveraging software-defined IT infrastructures and high performance computing (HPC) technologies in an effort to eliminate data center complexity, reduce IT expenses, and accelerate IT innovation.
Trends such as virtualization, cloud computing, Big Data analytics, and mobility are quickly overwhelming IT teams and pushing many traditional IT infrastructures to their limits. Legacy IT architectures are often siloed and hardware-oriented, with each platform having its own management environment, hypervisor, and storage. This limits the ability to unify, automate, and streamline IT delivery, as well as suffocates flexibility and scalability.
At the same time, today’s businesses are being challenged to keep pace with a variety of new technology shifts that require faster time-to-value, reduced costs, and IT agility. Because their workforces are growing progressively mobile, they must also seamlessly and securely manage a number of remote branches/offices, control data center expenses, and maintain staff of varying skill levels scattered among different locations. All of these factors add up to high levels of complexity when it comes to data center management and end-user computing.
Software-defined data centers (SDDCs) consist of fully virtualized compute infrastructure that can be easily managed by software in an automated fashion. SDDCs offer a more converged, service-oriented IT delivery model that provides rapid value and accelerates the ability to support trends like virtualization, virtual desktops, and remote office IT.
Software-defined HPC solutions are proven to offer a number of significant benefits for today’s businesses:
- Hardware standardization: With a software-defined approach, IT becomes standardized within the server infrastructure, eliminating the need to purchase costly and proprietary hardware or acquire vendor-specific skills to operate it.
- Cost Reduction: Organizations can boost overall capacity by fluidly adjusting available resources to balance workloads, which helps to reduce IT administration costs.
- Simplified management: Software-defined technologies can be easily managed via a simple, intuitive dashboard, which improves user visibility into capacity and eliminates the need for specific programming skills.
- IT automation: The ability to automate many IT functions speeds operations and ultimately enables businesses to move faster and be more efficient.
The first critical step for businesses who wish to begin the journey to an SDDC approach is to migrate applications off legacy platforms and onto next generation servers. Older servers are slow, inefficient, costly to maintain, and complex to manage, and will be unable to support large technology shifts like virtualization or cloud computing. The industry-leading portfolio of hyper-converged infrastructure solutions from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) provides the foundation for a software-defined infrastructure that can not only support the needs of today’s IT, but adapt to a future style of IT as well.
Mastering virtualization is critical for a successful transition to a hybrid IT approach, so organizations must virtualize their servers, storage, and networks. HPE solutions built with NVIDIA virtual GPU solutions lets enterprises simplify deployments of virtual applications, desktops, and workstations to meet all use cases and workloads. NVIDIA’s virtual GPU products include three products designed to meet the challenges of today’s digital workplace: the Quadro® Virtual Data Center Workstation (Quadro vDWS), the NVIDIA GRID™ Virtual PC (GRID vPC), and NVIDIA GRID™ Virtual Apps (GRIC vApps). Offering the industry’s highest user density (supporting 64 desktops per board and 128 desktops per server), NVIDIA GRID is the industry standard for graphics virtualization that helps businesses deliver virtualized desktops to all of their employees at an affordable cost.
Traditional IT probably isn’t going away anytime soon, but as businesses increasingly consider hybrid IT delivery models as an alternative to traditional IT, they must invest in technologies that support the shift to a software-defined approach. Together, HPE and NVIDIA are providing the technologies that empower businesses to continuously create and deliver new value from IT and accelerate business transformation.
Don’t miss a moment of the exciting things that software-defined HPC solutions have to offer – follow me on Twitter at @Bill_Mannel, or for general news and updates you can also check out @HPE_HPC or @NvidiaAI.
