“We believe in a multi cloud environment, more and more end users will use different types of clouds”

Hyper Converged Infrastructure Is a Key Enabler of Digital Transformation

As your enterprise tries to adapt to the digital era, IT infrastructure approaches that worked well just a few years ago may no longer be adequate. To succeed, your IT team needs infrastructure that is easier to manage and that is faster to procure and to deploy. Infrastructure that is built with simplicity in mind frees up your time and budget, enabling greater focus on new applications and services.

Many IT teams are discovering that hyper converged infrastructure (HCI)—which brings together servers, storage, virtualization, and management—is proving to be a better infrastructure choice. HCI can address a broad range of use cases, including end-user computing, private cloud, and consolidation of business-critical databases and applications. Gartner predicts that by 2020, at least 20% of business-critical applications will have moved from traditional infrastructure to HCI.

HCI solutions offer significant business benefits that include:

• Ease of purchase
• Simple setup
• Consolidated management
• Full-stack support
• Pay-as-you-go economics

Because of these advantages, HCI enables your IT team to respond more rapidly to new business demands, a crucial advantage for enterprises today.

Although HCI solutions from different vendors offer a similar set of core business benefits, there are some significant architectural differences between solutions. As you evaluate HCI options to meet your next-generation data center needs, it is important to understand the differences between various HCI offerings before you choose a solution. Each architecture has particular strengths and limitations that might make it more or less suitable to satisfy your unique business needs.

This guide examines the characteristics of three HCI architectures and explores the potential advantages and disadvantages of each approach. This information can help you make a more informed decision that closely matches your business needs.

NetApp are the Data Authority for the Hybrid Cloud, here's my two minute elevator pitch to explain more:

Try NetApp Cloud Volumes Service Today!

From the birth of the hybrid cloud concept, companies have dreamed of finally achieving the elusive free-flowing workload migration. Moving or migrating virtual machines from on-premises to the public cloud has theoretically been possible for some time, but in practice it has proven difficult. Reasons for this difficulty include the differences between on-premises private clouds and public clouds, virtual machine file format differences (for example, Qcow, OVA, OVF), and virtual disk differences (for example, VHD, VMDK, .raw).

The introduction of containers has greatly reduced the barrier of format differences, making application mobility more realistic. Better yet, the largest hyperscale cloud providers have opted to use Kubernetes as their underlying container framework, providing a more consistent approach for customers.

One obstacle has remained: the inability to accomplish data mobility, in large part due to the lack of robust file storage services from cloud provider offerings. Nearly 80% of all file data is created through NFSv3, yet there are few options in the cloud to provide NFS features equivalent to what’s available in traditional on-premises file storage systems. File storage performance is an additional challenge because many enterprise applications storing file data require consistently high performance, often an expensive proposition in the cloud. Finally, customers face the challenge of providing data consistency between their traditional on-premises data and their public cloud datastores (volumes), which often require legacy utilities (rsync) and can carry painful ingress and egress charges.

Until now.

What if we told you that NetApp now offers Cloud Volumes Service on all your favorite hyperscalers that supports multiple file access protocols (NFS, SMB), provides rich features that enables customers to better manage their data, and provides consistently high performance delivered as a simple native cloud service? NetApp® Cloud Volumes Service delivers these benefits today: NFS and SMB support; Snapshot™ copies to protect and restore your data; and features to migrate, replicate, and sync your data sources/destinations, whether they exist on-premises or in the cloud. All built to perform as they would on dedicated flash storage systems. Now customers can go from zero to 100TB storage services in a matter of seconds! You can have NetApp cloud data services on demand, when you need them, in the leading cloud offerings.

We are very excited about the future of cloud services and our ability to provide some really cool solutions for customers. More to come, so stay tuned.

Want to be a pioneer?

Sign up to try the new NetApp Cloud Volumes Service on MS Azure, AWS or Google Cloud Platform to experience some of these features already available in the preview programs.

Circulaire economie?

Tegenover het lineaire ‘maak, gebruik en gooi weg’ model streeft een circulair model er net naar de levensduur van producten zo veel mogelijk te verlengen. Eerst en vooral door de toestellen te repareren, langer te hergebruiken, te herverdelen in de maatschappij en deze cyclus zo veel mogelijk te herhalen om de cirkel te dichten. Het model baseert zich op duurzame producten en hernieuwbare energie en zoekt naar manieren om de maximale waarde uit de producten te halen door ze een tweede leven te geven en te recycleren.

Lees meer over het standpunt van CHG hierin en de voordelen van circulaire economie:

Op 29 mei organiseerden we een Avond voor beleidsmakers uit de publieke sector. ICT reikt verder dan pure technologie. Het draait om een innovatieve aanpak met veel creativiteit en ondernemingszin. 

Wilt u er dit jaar ook bij zijn? Schrijf u dan hier in.

Bekijk zeker ook de opmerkelijke inzichten die uit het ICT trendonderzoek kwamen.

Wilt u er dit jaar ook bij zijn? Schrijf u dan hier in.

Het bedrijf Automation uit Halle, gespecialiseerd in datacenteroplossingen, haalt een belangrijke opdracht binnen voor de uitbreiding van de datacenters bij het Europees Centrum voor Kernenergie (CERN). De tien bestelde modules representeren een contract van 10 miljoen euro en laten het CERN toe om meer informatie te capteren en beheren tegen een aanvaardbare kost en binnen een korte leveringstermijn.

De eerste twee performante modules worden na het zomerreces boven op de experimenten geplaatst (Near source) wat data-analyse in real-time mogelijk maakt.  “Ook en vooral bij het CERN is het nodig om nieuwe technologieën te omarmen om het steeds groter volume aan data die gegenereerd wordt door onze experimenten te verwerken. De ‘prefabricated datacenters’ van Automation zijn daar een mooi voorbeeld van”, vertelt Maria Girone, CTO bij het CERN. CERN heeft beslist om voor de upgrade van twee experimenten (Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) en ALICE O2) geen nieuwe of additionele (traditionele) datacenters te bouwen maar realiseert de upgrades door middel van Prefabricated Datacenter Modules.

Voordelen 

De voordelen van de modules spreken voor zich: snelle, flexibele en efficiënte oplossing die de hoogste kwaliteitsstandaarden behaalt – ondersteuning van de hoge performantie-eisen die de CERN-ICT stelt – leveringstermijn van 12 weken – geoptimaliseerde performantie-configuraties aangaande kracht, densiteit en energie-efficiëntie – near Source, de modules staan boven op de experimenten wat een enorme besparing oplevert op de overdracht van data.

Bron

Op 30 mei vond de VITO-raamcontractdag van Securitas plaats. De presentaties van deze dag zijn beschikbaar. 

Bent u geregistreerd op het portaal? Bekijk dan rechtstreeks de presentaties.

As an innovative technology manager with decades of experience, CHG-MERIDIAN creates maximum cost transparency, identifies potential savings – and achieves these savings. Read further to learn how.

“Do you know what costs your capital expenditure project will actually incur over the entire lifecycle?”

“Do you always have objective information at your fingertips about whether your infrastructure project is still on track?”

“Do you know which factors determine the success or failure of an international rollout?”

Anything can be written on a piece of paper, but it does not make it a true reflection of reality. Those who think calculating the total cost of ownership for technology infrastructure is a trivial matter involving adding up the numbers in quotations and price lists will be in for a shock at the end of the year. It is not only the acquisition cost that is critical but also factors such as usage patterns, servicing requirements, loss or damage, and location-specific influences. Creating lasting transparency is anything but trivial.

Medium-sized businesses and international corporations should not simply accept a ‘good price’ per PC, for smartphones, or for the printer fleet. The same goes for the management of material handling vehicle fleets and for capital expenditure on medical equipment. It is important to consider all the costs over the entire lifecycle of the assets, including all internal and external resources for operation, servicing, and remarketing. This is the only way to be sure of making well-informed decisions about acquiring and operating assets, obtaining funding, and finding partners. Ultimately, this is the only way to put the facts on the table that will convince the CFO.

The key to TCO is maximum, verifiable transparency. This can only be provided by an independent organization that has in-depth market knowledge. That has robust benchmarks. That is not tied to particular suppliers or service providers. That operates worldwide and has local expertise. That develops financing concepts that will not put a strain on the balance sheet. That uses a technology and service management system providing centralized, transparent information, even about complex, decentralized projects.

Efficient Technology Management® that meets your requirements – this is what we offer. Contact us now and you will know what is actually going on rather than having to believe what the piece of paper says.

For more information please visit our website: www.chg-meridian.be