It's the big IT infrastructure challenges that keep IT leaders awake at night. There are no easy answers when it comes to guaranteeing availability and performance for a demanding business, while keeping the cost of virtualised workloads under control.
As greater digital functionality and sophistication creates opportunities, you need to maintain oversight and control of escalating numbers of tools, systems and data. It takes more and more time and resources to manage and transform your IT.
Step forward HCI, a well-conceived and elegantly simple technology solution that enterprises are embracing to help tackle these perennial challenges.
“The move toward HCI adoption often comes down to operational efficiency and ease of management. Organisations struggle with increasing costs and the threat of a serious security breach. As such, organisations are seeking to reduce IT complexity wherever possible.”
Techtarget report, 2023
HCI makes your IT life easier through simplification and common sense. It allows IT functions to avoid being held to ransom by hyperscalers with a 100% public cloud solution. Instead, they can optimise their infrastructure with a hybrid approach.
There's also the potential for a surprising power shift through a partnership between HPE and ProCloud. Their remarkable HCI technology and performance guarantee is handing control and - crucially - peace of mind back to IT decision-makers.
Let's take a look at how it works and what it means for enterprises and for the HCI marketplace.
The value of HCI for enterprise IT leaders
Adopting HCI is a great way to bring ageing back-up, disaster recovery and data infrastructure and storage up to date with the latest technology.
With HCI, you can collapse your entire tech stack into a single, software-defined solution that's densely constructed, robust and high-performing. You get built-in resilience, backup and disaster recovery. Inline deduplication and compression enable fast processing speeds.
HPE's best-in-class SimpliVity HCI solution brings even more benefits, flexing public and private cloud resources to give you optimal performance and cost efficiency, plus cutting out on-premise energy costs from legacy systems. You manage everything via a single, familiar interface.
At HPE, they're so confident in their market-leading product that they offer a technology guarantee. And that's already a reason for IT leaders to feel some of their day-to-day tension easing.
But who you work with to get your HPE solution implemented is a crucial decision, if you're to maximise the benefit and achieve the performance, control and peace of mind that you crave.
Unpicking the traditional IT services partnership approach
As an IT leader, you'll be used to signing up to IT services contracts with tightly defined conditions, exclusions and clauses. Once you've decided to go with an IT services supplier, they effectively negotiate to constrain you.
To us, this seems a counter-intuitive approach to apply to HCI, which is meant to make life easier and give control and value back to enterprise IT departments.
HCI is based on commonly understood VMware principles, making it accessible and operable by the widest community of IT professionals. It offers the best of both worlds in switching between private and public cloud storage to suit your organisation's precise needs.
If it's such a good technology, why do traditional IT services firms front-load their efforts into winning HCI business and the initial deployment steps, without focusing on the longer-term potential to clients?
HCI reimagined, with a focus on the IT manager's needs
Let's look at it a different way. Here we have an excellent technology solution that's flexible and designed to help enterprises get the most from their IT investment, to power business success.
If it's designed and implemented effectively, it should be easy for everyone to use, manage and maintain, including the IT service provider. So what's the problem with making a commitment to sustained value and efficacy for the customer?
That's where the ProCloud performance guarantee comes in.
The ProCloud / HPE 5-year HCI performance guarantee goes against the grain of typical IT services contracts. It's a proactive promise to sustain HPE SimpliVity’s day one efficiency and cost-savings in a way that changes the game for IT leaders.
This approach gives you control back. And when you're in control, it takes away a lot of stress. It's the antithesis of most IT services contracts, which specify a minimum service level guarantee in tightly defined circumstances. We're holding ourselves accountable for making sure your HCI solution will perform optimally for your business over 5 years.
Why peace of mind is the new metric for HCI success
At ProCloud we see this guarantee as an opportunity for us to achieve trust, collaboration and loyalty. We want to make it easier for your business to grow and give you access to value that's tangible and makes an impact on your everyday operation.
The five-year guarantee is about even more than these metrics. It's about what it gives you - peace of mind for five glorious years in your core infrastructure. You can relax and focus on other priorities because we are your willing captives to uphold performance and quality. It's easeful for you personally and gives your organisation a foundation of trust.
Over-delivery and scope creep are ProCloud’s hallmarks, so our stretch guarantee is almost business as usual. But it's not surprising that we're trailblazing with a specific commitment for HPE HCI, because we've seen the value of hyper-converged cloud from the start.
We also feel relaxed shouldering this potential burden of risk (as other IT suppliers might see it), because of our experience. We're the only supplier in Ireland with a proven track record of delivering HPE SimpliVity to enterprise clients, so we know exactly what we can help you achieve. We will deliver a repeatable, cost-efficient standard HCI architecture within six weeks.
Timing is everything when it comes to HCI
So, what are you waiting for? There's nothing to lose and everything to gain, so what's stopping every enterprise IT leader signing up for the ProCloud HCI performance guarantee?
Of course, it's not quite that straightforward. As we all know, there's typically a five-year lifecycle to major IT solutions and infrastructure, before refresh or replacement is needed.
You may not be at the tipping point of your five-year lifecycle expiry right now. However, it's well worth thinking ahead, so when the time comes you know exactly who to trust with your next big technology refresh.
If you're not on the verge of an HCI decision today, you've got time to try out a small project with your prospective partner to test them out and establish whether the working relationship is what you want.
Summary: The game-changing value of guaranteed HCI performance
A 100% commitment to public cloud is losing its shine for successful enterprises, because of the stranglehold that hyperscalers have over the market. Hybrid cloud infrastructure offers them the best of all worlds and gives IT leaders more control over their spending.
HPE and ProCloud together are disrupting the market even further, with a combined SimpliVity technology and performance guarantee that makes five-year peace of mind a tangible reality for enterprise IT decision makers.
Our ProCloud thoughts are worth listening to, as Ireland's leading HPE expert with over 50 successful projects delivered and 100% client retention. We're making this work for global and multi-site clients in a sustainable way for everyone, and we can show you the evidence.
Why not join the HCI peace of mind revolution? Let's talk about what you need from your infrastructure and how you can plot a path to guaranteed success from wherever you're standing today.
