The data center is now more than ever the core of the business – nearly all primary IT functions are housed in, routed through, and co-ordinated from this hub, and every phase of business relies on it.

However over the years, many data centers have become hard to manage as disparate technologies have been rolled in, requiring increasingly demanding configurations to make everything work together.

Business demands on IT have added pressure to deliver agile and flexible environments that allow business operations to pivot quickly to meet market demands.

The price for this agility has traditionally been large investments in infrastructure, with costs that add up every year. The three key data center systems - servers, storage and networking equipment - need separate specialist teams to manage them, adding not just cost but complexity.

So what does this mean for businesses? Hyper-convergence (HC) presents an accessible, affordable way for organizations - of any size - to modernize their data centers and embrace 21st century business models. The advantage is the need to do this without having to invest heavily in new technology. That’s not to say there won’t be a need to purchase new products, but it won’t require a complicated refurbishing or modernization project across a whole new data center.

HC is the logical successor to converged infrastructure, the pre-integrated and tested bundles of data center components that became popular several years ago.

Ultimately, the idea is to take all of the guess work out of deploying, provisioning and managing the infrastructure. The key value of HC is that it puts the promised benefits of SDDC within reach of smaller and mid-size businesses. For larger enterprises, it fits with their need to set up data centers at branch offices and remote locations, because it’s a single, compact appliance that can be managed by an IT generalist.

This type of hyper-converged architecture lends itself to exceptional resilience. The tight integration of data center elements makes for easier management, improved performance, and a turnkey solution to the problem created by systems diversity.

Companies today understand the value of cloud and cloud-like operational models. The self-service capabilities, service catalogs, and automation inherent in cloud operations eliminate hours and days of manual IT work. But combining the synergies of hyper-convergence with cloud can take the data center to a whole new level.

With a hyper converged system, organizations can start small and fast with cloud and see how it can add value for business workloads and tasks. The cloud enables an enhanced level of end user independence via self-service portals & APIs, enabling organizations to pull together all the resources they need for a big project with a few strokes on a keyboard.

All they have to do is create a template which, for example, might spin up three web service VMs, two app service VMs, and one database. And then, with a click of a key or two, you have your service up and running.

But as with any other technology change, the complexity lies not just in the infrastructure, but in the people and processes around it. What often happens is that organizations build a top-notch self-service cloud environment for their customers – but no one uses it.

What the hyper-converged layer does is help organizations to rely on in-house infrastructure for their average use, and then turn to the public cloud when there’s a spike in activity or a surge in demand. It also enables organizations to pursue a hybrid cloud strategy on hyper-converged platforms. With its support for multiple hypervisors and public cloud providers, it is a great choice for companies looking for an open, hybrid ‘cloud in a box’.

For the past six years, HudsonAlpha’s data production doubled every six months, and the amount of data under management is now growing at 1PB a month.

According to HudsonAlpha’s chief information officer, Peyton McNully, the scale of the company’s growth became larger than most enterprise systems are built to support.

HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology is based on a 155-acre campus in Huntsville, Alabama and is a leading center for genomic research in the USA. In addition, the institute runs an education outreach program that educates 100,000 children a year from Alabama and nationally in genomics and genetics.

“The research that happens at HudsonAlpha results in some of the latest and greatest findings that are going to translate into better care, better crops and a better quality of life for humans all over the world,” McNully said.

With 200 individuals working on the non-profit side and 600 in 30+ associate life science companies housed on the HudsonAlpha campus, huge amounts of sequencing data are produced.

“Data is our biggest challenge. We generate over 1PB of data a month that needs to be stored, manipulated, computed and so forth,” co-founder and chairman of the board, Jim Hudson said.

"The entire organization is now focused on delivering changes to an IT environment that have business value, and that’s hugely important, because there is a lot less education that has to take place between the sales organization and the IT organization here at HudsonAlpha.”

HudsonAlpha decided that hyper-convergence was part of the answer to its challenging growth.

As users transition to a software-defined data center (SDDC), hyper-converged products serve as self-contained, modular building blocks that can handle changing workloads and accommodate new business. Because of its existing relationship with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and following a visit to HPE Discover in Las Vegas, HudsonAlpha chose the all-in-one compute, storage and virtualization platform, HPE Hyper Converged 380.

The Hyper Converged 380 is HPE’s latest hyper-converged infrastructure platform, aimed at midsized businesses, enterprise remote office branch office sites and enterprise line-of-business (legacy and DevOps) environments.

Each HC 380 “building block” combines extensible compute, storage, hypervisor and management capabilities into a compact, 2U scale-out appliance. More specifically, the HC 380 incorporates HPE ProLiant Gen9 DL380 x86-based server technology, HPE StoreVirtual software-defined storage, VMware vSphere® hypervisor, HPE OneView InstantOn software and the HPE OneView User Experience (UX) interface.

Each HC 380 appliance includes two server nodes. Up to 16 server nodes can be clustered as a system and managed from the same user interface. CPU, memory, networking, SSD and HDD are preconfigured for key workloads such as cloud and VDI.

The scale-out, software-defined storage platform provides data mobility across tiers and locations and between physical and virtual storage, enabling linear scaling of capacity and performance.

Balancing business demands with IT capabilities has been a challenging proposition, given limited budgets and the constant pressure to ‘do more with less.’

But agility and flexibility are vital for businesses that need to compete in the increasingly fast-paced and global 21st century marketplace. The price for agility has always been large investments in infrastructure that can handle peak loads - which results in a large up-front cost to cover those peaks. The increase in equipment and complexity leads to IT admins wasting time and effort on day-to-day activities, just keeping the lights on rather than adding real value.