{"id":33296,"date":"2019-08-29T10:49:19","date_gmt":"2019-08-29T09:49:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/?p=33296"},"modified":"2019-09-04T11:44:03","modified_gmt":"2019-09-04T10:44:03","slug":"edge-computing-and-hyperconvergence-ensuring-distributed-enterprises-are-always-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/2019\/08\/29\/edge-computing-and-hyperconvergence-ensuring-distributed-enterprises-are-always-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Ensuring distributed enterprises are ‘always-on’ with Edge Computing and hyperconvergence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Alan Conboy, Office of the CTO at Scale Computing, discusses how technologies like HCI and Edge Computing could be the answer to enabling distributed enterprises to achieve a robust cybersecurity strategy and mitigate the risk of costly downtime. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

IT downtime is terrible news for any business in this increasingly data and technology driven world. Neglecting to remain \u2018always-on\u2019 is especially damaging when the consequences of just minutes of downtime ripple across the organisation\u2019s reputation, capital and customer satisfaction. Recent high-profile cases, such as the outage which led British Airways to pay an estimated \u00a3100,000,000 after cancelling more than 400 flights and stranding 75,000 passengers in one day, are illustrative of how much downtime can truly cost a business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

British\nAirways may have been able to withstand the monetary and reputational backlash,\nbut many businesses could be so negatively impacted that they never fully\nrecover. For organisations in industries with distributed enterprises like\nretail or financial services, there is an answer to the challenge of keeping\npace with, not only ever-sophisticated cyberthreats, but also the growing\nrequirement for your business to remain \u2018always-on\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Distributed\nenterprises should be looking to the latest technologies, like hyperconvergence\nand Edge Computing, that offer high availability, lower total cost of ownership\n(TCO) and easy deployment and management at each site. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By investing\nin technologies that are simple to manage and don\u2019t require onsite IT experts,\ndistributed organisations can achieve a sophisticated cybersecurity strategy\nthat mitigates the risk of costly downtime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kiss single\npoint of failure goodbye<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edge Computing\nis built for distributed enterprises, because it is all about putting the\ncomputing resources close to where they are needed the most. Unlike a\ntraditional single point of failure, when there are devices at branch\nlocations, like point-of-sale cash registers in retail stores, that all connect\nto a centralised data centre. In that scenario, an outage at that central data\ncentre can affect all the branch locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But by putting\nan Edge Computing platform at each branch location, a failure at the central\ndata centre would not need to bring down everything because each branch can run\nindependently from it. A solid virtualised environment can run all the\ndifferent applications needed to provide customers with the high-tech services\nthey have come to expect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might be\nasking why this hasn\u2019t been done before and there is a simple answer: until\nnow, it was cost-prohibitive to implement the kind of infrastructure that was\nneeded to make this work \u2013 highly-available infrastructure. Until very\nrecently, forming a highly-available virtual infrastructure would involve a\nsizeable investment in a shared-storage appliance, multiple host servers,\nvirtual hypervisor licensing, as well as a disaster recovery solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hyperconvergence\nat work<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then came\nhyperconvergence, which has consolidated those components into an\neasy-to-deploy, low-cost solution. It is true that not all hyperconverged\ninfrastructure (HCI) solutions are cost-effective for Edge Computing. Many HCI\nsolutions are designed similarly to traditional virtualisation architectures\nand emulate SAN technology to support that legacy architecture. This results in\nresource inefficiency and requires bigger systems that are not cost-compatible\nwith Edge Computing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is\nstill hope. HCI with hypervisor-embedded storage can offer smaller, cost-effective,\nhighly-available infrastructure that allows each branch location to run\nindependently, even if the central data centre fails or goes down. A small\ncluster of three HCI appliances can continue running despite drive failures or\neven the failure of an entire appliance. There is no way to prevent downtime\ncompletely, but Edge Computing, with the right highly-available infrastructure,\ncan insulate branches to continue operating independently. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the\ncentral data centre is still a vital piece of the overall IT infrastructure\nwith HCI, the difference is that it consolidates data from all the branch\nlocations for analysis to make key business decisions. That is also the case\nwith Edge Computing, as on-site Edge Computing platforms can provide local\ncomputing while communicating key data back to the central data centre for\nreporting and analytics. By taking the single point of failure out of the\ncentral data centre, outages at any location need not have far-reaching effects\nacross the whole organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One step\ncloser to 100% uptime<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our daily\nlives are increasingly driven by a rise in technologies becoming common place\nand it is no different for businesses. Because of this, high availability is\nbecoming a necessity rather than a luxury. Traditional virtualisation\ninfrastructure is being quickly replaced with technologies such as HCI and Edge\nComputing, because they make that high availability more accessible for\neveryone, including distributed enterprises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alan Conboy, Office of the CTO at Scale Computing, discusses how technologies like HCI and Edge Computing could be the answer to enabling distributed enterprises to achieve a robust cybersecurity strategy and mitigate the risk of costly downtime. IT downtime is terrible news for any business in this increasingly data and technology driven world. Neglecting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":33437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,57,1489,93],"tags":[8296,564,69,13288,4326,70,5913,4364,8297],"class_list":["post-33296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-centres","category-enterprise-security","category-insights","category-top-stories","tag-alan-conboy","tag-cybersecurity","tag-data","tag-downtime","tag-edge-computing","tag-enterprise","tag-hyperconvergence","tag-infrastructure","tag-office-of-the-cto"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33296"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33302,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33296\/revisions\/33302"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}