Clearpath’s Blog on IT Infrastructure, Hybrid Clouds and IT Security

Remote employee initiatives just skipped the line to be the most important item on many organizations’ IT to-do lists. In an effort to make sure you are aware of what our partners VMware, Cisco and Dell EMC are doing to help support remote employees, we put together a list of vendor initiatives as well as other important information to help you through the challenging times.

Back in the early 2000s VMware transformed the datacenter giving birth to the ‘cloud’ when they brought ESX server to market. Since then, VMware has continued to innovate both organically and via acquisition helping customers cut costs and increase revenue all while giving customers a jump start to their digital transformation journey. Cloud Foundation aims to decrease complexity, increase cloud adoption, and better align IT resources to business outcomes.

Another great Dell Technologies World conference has come to a close. Hosted over four days – April 29-May 2 – in Las Vegas, this annual event brought together 14,000 partners and customers to discover Dell’s vision for the future, meet up with tech gurus, and learn new skills and capabilities.

If you’re thinking about moving to a virtual desktop infrastructure—you’re not alone.  Most people who either have moved to or are considering VDI wan, do so to improve the economics and efficiency in their desktop delivery, ease maintenance and management of their end user computing environment and improve desktop security.   VDI certainly can do all this—but despite it being a virtual solution, you also have to think about the hardware behind the scenes. 

After all, a key objective of a successful VDI deployment is the end user experience. In many way, it’s the one objective that probably matters the most—since the experience has to match or exceed its physical counterpart.   So how can you assure that you’re getting the best experience for your end-users?  You don’t want to be the “slow-poke” when it comes to your VDI experience for them.  When it comes to delivering a high-performance, low-latency virtual desktop environment, you need to think about both the virtual and the physical infrastructure behind it.

Planning for the future means endless possibilities.  Where should our data be stored?  How do today’s infrastructure decisions impact our end-state goal?  Where are our workloads going to be run?  What are our future capacity needs?  As an IT professional these questions are constantly at the forefront of your mind.  According to research firm IDC, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is leading the fastest growing segment of storage solutions[1], making it the hot topic in every discussion.

Today’s IT executives have been keeping a watchful eye on the improvements in HCI since it has been around for several years but has only recently seen rapid adoption.  New generations of HCI solutions provide faster deployment, lower cost of operations, and increased ROI—making the modern enterprise more flexible and agile.  As businesses of all sizes see the benefits of adopting HCI, the adoption rates continue to compound.

No matter where it lives, data needs to be protected, and as the data protection landscape continues to evolve, the amount and variations of data that need to be protected is evolving as well. With these changes, companies cannot afford to secure sensitive information as previously done in the past. Today’s businesses are faced with explosive data growth, strict retention policies and the pressure to reduce costs. Low-cost, high-capacity object storage in the public, private and hybrid cloud is the way to address these challenges.

Dell EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems can solve many of the challenges that companies experience with traditional backup, archive, recovery and replication processes.  Combining high-speed, variable-length deduplication with local compression, Data Domain systems write only unique data to disk.  Deduplication technology reduces disk capacity requirements and overhead, while increasing accessibility and reliability, and makes Data Domain systems a cost-effective alternative to tape.

 Today’s businesses simply will not survive without protecting the endless amounts of data generated from a growing ecosystem of applications. Finding a comprehensive, powerful and scalable solution can seem daunting, time-consuming, costly and complex. 

Complete data protection typically requires building a piecemeal solution. Companies need multiple point products, such as backup storage, backup software, backup servers and search servers from a variety of vendors. Will these multi-vendor products handle data management across private, public and hybrid cloud? Will they meet the strict, always-changing government/and or compliance standards?

IT teams face plenty of challenges daily, and with the ever-changing technology landscape, it can be difficult to keep up. Enterprises are embracing hyper-converged infrastructures as a way to modernize the data center, automate service delivery and transform IT operations. 

As organizations continue to look for ways to deliver a cloud-like experience on-premises, hyper-converged offerings are exceeding expectations. The Dell EMC VxRack System FLEX is a rack-scale hyper-converged system that delivers maximum scalability and business agility, enabling companies to scale their data center growth in flexible, discrete increments.