Styles come and go in fashion, sports, and enterprise IT. Whether it is big, squared shoulders on suits, spread offenses in football, or mainframe to client-server to cloud, there is constant motion and change in most areas of our lives. Often driven by the desire to sell more stuff, all that is old is often repackaged into something new. In the world of enterprise IT, each new generation of systems proclaims it will simplify your life, reduce costs, and integrate all of your spaghetti-like sets of systems.
Is it any wonder that IT managers and directors routinely become cynical grumps? (Or more like the Charlie Brown character who always had a cloud of doom over his head?) Spend more and get more complexity and systemic fragility.
The cycle of IT complexity
Let’s be clear—there are no panaceas. The world is complex, and IT organizations are increasingly asked to manage and provide for geographically disparate, often multinational organizations, often cobbled together through M&A, with territorially protected systems. (If only it were THAT easy.)
But what if there were a hardware platform that truly made operations simpler, more efficient, and cheaper? What would this take?
What IT teams really need: A unified, simplified solution
Compute, storage, and networking integration
A unified platform that integrates compute, storage, and networking into a single, cohesive solution. If this were to happen, it would eliminate the need for multiple management tools and reduce (or eliminate) the administrative burden on IT teams.
Unified console for easy management and monitoring
A unifying console, which would allow for management and monitoring from one place. The system would have automated provisioning and scaling capabilities which would enable new resources to be added or removed with minimal effort, ensuring that the infrastructure can adapt to changing business needs.
Scalable like LEGO™ blocks
Lego™ like building block scalability: One of the beauties of the public cloud is that it scales with ease. One can buy and consume by the drink. Only does one discover the cost of those drinks after the party has begun. What if, instead, you could scale your cloud easily and as needed, adding new hardware as one’s needs grew? If a system provided pre-integrated building blocks that automate the provisioning of storage, compute, and networking resources, scaling would be worlds easier, and organizations could deploy a fully functioning, multi-tenant private cloud with ease.
OS agnostic and stateless design
OS Agnostic: If the hardware were stateless and atomic in its design (built around small, independent components that function as individual units), the result would be that nodes can be auto-configured, maintained, and hot-swappable. This would enable high availability and reliability while minimizing downtime. With these features, the platform’s real-time metrics and alerts provide visibility into the performance and status of the cloud environment, making management straightforward and efficient.
Integrated software and virtualization support
Integrated software management capabilities: The hardware would support a wide range of virtualization and containerization technologies, which would allow organizations to run any application on any platform. In an ideal world, the hardware’s API would include popular infrastructure as code solutions like Terraform, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and SaltStack, enabling automated deployment and software resource management. This would reduce the need for manual intervention and ensure consistency across the environment. If there were a unified management interface, software updates and patch management would be greatly simplified, ensuring that systems are up-to-date and secure.
Easy upgrades with minimal disruption
Easy Upgrades (no, not an oxymoron): Upgrading and patching software is typically an ongoing and endless headache. What if a hardware platform could fully automate this process by delivering upgrades through a unified software bundle that covers firmware, OS, and management stack updates? While this occurs, the platform could remain online during upgrades, restarting a single node at a time using workload migration to avoid customer disruption. If this could occur, organizations could benefit from the latest innovations and security enhancements without the hassle and risk associated with traditional upgrade processes.
Integrated hardware and software for seamless IT
Integrated hardware and software components: If this could be done, the silos that often exist in traditional IT environments would be eliminated or greatly reduced. This would allow organizations to maximize their existing resources and ensure that new infrastructure projects are additive rather than disruptive.
While this might sound like a nice wish list, can this be delivered?
In a word – yes.
HyperCloud: Simplifying enterprise IT with scalability and security
HyperCloud is SoftIron’s answer to this daunting set of challenges. Over a decade in the making, HyperCloud is a highly scalable, secure, and simple way to lay a foundation for your organization’s IT needs. Designed from inception to be user-friendly, HyperCloud is easy (and inexpensive) to set up and operate. It is highly scalable and uses only US-made components, giving it unheard-of levels of auditable security. And,….it can run in a closet; no air conditioning required (although we wouldn’t recommend this as an optimal scenario).
Ready to simplify your IT? Contact SoftIron
So, if your organization is concerned about staff burnout, security, energy usage, the rapidly increasing costs of maintaining aging IT infrastructure software costs, which seems to be increasing at rates that are orders of magnitude higher than the rate of inflation, or any of the myriad of issues facing your overworked IT staff, check us out.
Talk is cheap; let us show you. Contact SoftIron at info@softiron.com or fill out the form here.
