Tag: malaysia

18 Mar

Malaysia must evolve its IT Infrastructure

Hyperconvergence News by Editorial
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A better and more cost-effective technology infrastructure is necessary for businesses to cope with the challenges posed by the pandemic

Source: ITNews Asia
By Moti Uttam

In today’s world, accelerating the pace of innovation is key to business strategy. Technology is required to be a differentiator to accelerate service delivery, high performance data management, and simplify operations.

In Malaysia, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has been increasingly applied to virtualise all of the elements of traditional data centres. HCI is a unified system that combines all elements including storage, computing, and networking to reduce data centre complexity and increase scalability.

According to Ernst & Yong’s “COVID 19: Business Impact Survey” published in early June 2020, most companies — limited liability companies (LLCs) and SMEs — highlighted their difficulties in online connectivity and communication with customers or suppliers, and having connectivity disruption during work from home amongst their employees. This demonstrates that companies need better technology infrastructure to cope with the challenges of the pandemic.

Earnst & Young, June 2020 – COVID 19: Business Impact Survey

The demand for connectivity has been drastically increased during the movement control order (MCO) in Malaysia, resulting in businesses strongly requiring cost-effective, simple, and secure infrastructure to connect their apps, legacy storage, and cloud as well.

The Malaysian government, in its Budget 2021, reiterated its commitment to progress its digital transformation plan by setting aside RM 9.4 billion (US$ 2.3 billion). Out of which, RM 500 million (US$ 120 million) is to be allocated for High Technology Fund provided by Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), RM 150 million (US$ 37 million) for SME Digitalisation Grant Scheme and Automation Grant, and RM 42 million (US$ 10 million) is to improve internet connectivity in 25 industrial areas to attract investment under the Jendela plan. With the digital strategy in place, businesses can now fast track their digital transformation of their IT infrastructure for business recovery and growth.

Connectivity is now regarded as the third utility in Malaysia and an economic imperative. Business applications with complex siloed and legacy storage will need to be reviewed, and infrastructure for businesses’ service level objectives (SLOs) enhanced. Business leaders should start looking into evolving the legacy infrastructure to HCI. Here are the benefits to achieve SLOs for business sustainability:

Accelerate critical applications, consolidate workloads

For businesses to unlock analytical insight and monetise data, faster access to data is important. Performance-intensive use cases, such as relational databases, online transaction processing (OLTP), real-time analytics and workload consolidation, can potentially amplify revenue-generating possibilities.

HCI can streamline IT setups and shorten the data path and eliminate I/O bottlenecks to deliver vastly improved latency and efficiency. It also helps reduce IT cost and speed the search for data, enabling business leaders to make right business decisions, faster.

Secure desktops anywhere for your remote workforce

A seamless workspace experience is required to access all employees across devices and locations, but existing mobile workplace solutions are not easy to scale. Security, compliance and rapid recoverability are strongly requested. To ensure all users have always-on, quick and reliable access to desktop and apps, while also maintaining integrity and security of company data, HCI makes a great foundation for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution to deliver an excellent experience for all users.

Seamless, device-independent collaboration drives up employee productivity while ensuring full visibility and control over corporate data with role-based authentication, retention and legal hold at the file or profile level and policy-based data protection.

Reduce cost and complexity for business priorities

Explosive growth of data volumes is making businesses want easy scalability and simplified administration of compute and storage systems. HCI also is known as ease of acquisition, which can speed up business processing and provides faster access to data for business leaders to analyse, enrich and monetise the data. It doubles transactions per minute and delivers higher responsiveness while lowering the cost. With this modern IT infrastructure, historical data can be unleashed on the same centrally managed platform that delivers scalability and business availability.

Moreover, after HCI deployment, no specialised storage skill was needed. Business leaders are able to add capacity with simple drag-and-drop action, and have automatic load balancing across a cluster which makes IT infrastructure cost-effective and reduce complexity.

As companies are still reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic, business leaders should be able to realise the needs of enhancing IT infrastructure to address the challenges. Evolving the technology infrastructure would make business sense as business agility, recovery, sustainability will create new business opportunities for the next level of growth.

Moti Uttam is the Managing Director at Hitachi Vantara (Malaysia)

6 Mar

HCI: An Alternative to Cloud-Based Computing

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HCI can combine key functions into a single IT cluster while boosting an institution’s scalability and speed.

Source: EdgeTech
By Doug Bonderud

Rapid cloud adoption paved the way for post-secondary schools to navigate the pandemic. While the road hasn’t been smooth or easy, the availability of secure and scalable cloud services has made it possible for higher education to deliver learning content anywhere, anytime.

It’s not a perfect framework — lawsuits are ongoing from student groups who argue that online learning was a poor substitute for in-class interaction and want their tuition refunded — but it helped schools bridge the gap.

Yet as schools shift back to in-person learning, there’s a growing recognition that cloud isn’t the answer for everything. Instead, some institutions are implementing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to keep resources closer to home without losing the power and performance offered by the cloud.

So, what exactly is HCI, and how does it benefit higher education? Let’s dive in.

What Is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

Despite the increased adoption of HCI, confusion remains about how it differs from the cloud. This confusion partly stems from the similar capabilities of both solutions, and it’s partly tied to how vendors erroneously use these terms interchangeably when looking to build their client base.

Put simply, HCI virtualizes computing, network and storage solutions and subsequently combines them under a single, software-defined umbrella. In practice, HCI deployments function as a single large cluster composed of smaller server and storage “nodes” and networking technologies that can be scaled and managed on demand.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. the Cloud

Two key aspects are critical to understanding where HCI and cloud computing overlap and where they differ: characteristics and composition.

When it comes to functional characteristics, the cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure are remarkably similar. Both offer the ability to access computing power on demand, making it possible to scale up (or down) as necessary, and both provide inherent reliability.

The technologies diverge when it comes to composition. Whether schools use on-premises private clouds or offsite public options, cloud services leverage discrete computing, storage and network hardware solutions that are connected using a logical abstraction layer and managed using a hypervisor.

Meanwhile, HCI combines and virtualizes the entire hardware stack but keeps resources on-premises to reduce latency and increase visibility. Hyperconverged infrastructure is the logical next step in the evolution of data centers. First was traditional infrastructure, which saw discrete network, server and storage architecture. Next came converged infrastructure, which leveraged software-defined networking to help virtualize storage and network management. Now, HCI makes it possible to combine the key functions of computing, storage and networking technologies as a single IT cluster.

How Hyperconverged Infrastructure Can Benefit Higher Education

Making the move to HCI offers several benefits for postsecondary schools:

  • Simplicity: Thanks to its node-based approach, HCI frameworks are easy to deploy and simple to manage. This sets them apart from more traditional cloud solutions, which can quickly become complex as schools expand cloud environments with new providers and services. The unified and virtualized nature of HCI makes it naturally simple to manage and expand.
  • Spend Management: HCI can also improve cost control. Where cloud services can quickly sprawl, causing spending to increase exponentially, hyperconverged environments exist entirely under the auspices of university IT teams. Convergence can also help reduce the time and cost required for software upgrades and hardware replacement thanks to built-in failover capabilities.
  • Scalability: HCI nodes are effectively preconfigured building blocks, making it easy for IT teams to quickly scale resources up or down, on demand and with minimal effort. It is worth noting, however, that HCI deployments have specific limits when it comes to the number of nodes added per cluster, and resources must be deployed in specific increments. On the flip side, while the cloud can scale indefinitely, this isn’t always a good thing. Given the disparate nature of public and private cloud deployments, unlimited scaling potential can lead to significantly increased complexity.
  • Speed: The node-based approach of HCI also increases deployment speed, regardless of resource type. From storage to computing, networking or security, new solutions can be integrated on demand and without risk of interoperational conflict.

The New Normal: Embracing Data Center Modernization

For schools to succeed in a post-pandemic world, they need IT infrastructure capable of delivering both on-premises and offsite education without sacrificing speed or compromising security.

At the center of this next new normal is data center modernization — the ability to collect, curate, use and scale data-driven resources on demand to meet evolving staff and student expectations while ensuring personal and professional privacy.

Hyperconverged infrastructure forms a key pillar of this modernization approach. Along with solutions such as high-performance computing to drive research initiatives and core network upgrades to provide necessary bandwidth backbones, it’s now possible for post-secondary schools to create functional frameworks capable of staying ahead of the curve.

12 Feb

Study Shows Australia Leads The World On Multicloud Adoption

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Source: scoop.co.nz

Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, has announced the Australian findings of its fourth Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report. It showed Australian adoption of multicloud technologies has already reached 39 percent, beating the global average of 36 percent and set to soar to 66 percent this year.

Security remains both the main driver and challenge to achieving multicloud triumph in Australia, contributing to a 64 percent surge in investment into security systems in Australia. And while 92 percent named hybrid multicloud as the ideal IT operating environment, 27 percent of Australian organisations remain wedded to a single public cloud provider – compared with 16 percent globally – amplifying security concerns and limiting Australia’s cloud skillset development, according to Nutanix Australia and New Zealand Managing Director Jim Steed.

“Australia is in an interesting position on the global cloud field,” said Steed. “On one hand, it’s a true multicloud leader, ahead of the pack on building tomorrow’s preferred IT environment. On the other, we see too many businesses wedded to one public cloud provider to manage their infrastructure. What happens when that provider has an outage? How can IT leaders manage sovereignty concerns when the vast majority of the market belongs to multinational providers? IT engineers also need variety, not myopia, in the cloud skillsets they develop.”

Survey respondents were asked about their current cloud challenges, how they’re running business applications now and where they plan to run them in the future. Respondents were also asked about the impact of the pandemic on recent, current, and future IT infrastructure decisions and how IT strategy and priorities may change as a result.

Other key Australian findings from the report include:

  • Apps on the move: Every Australian respondent has moved applications between IT environments in the past year, with a need to increase the speed of app development the primary reason. However, 83 percent said it was costly and time consuming.
  • Full-time office all but gone: The 2021 report’s prediction that only 2 percent of staff would return full time to the office in 2022 is coming to fruition – only 3 percent of enterprises maintained a full-time office policy when restrictions permitted in the last year, and most organisations have between 50 percent and 100 percent of their staff working remotely.
  • Top challenges in current IT infrastructure: 85 percent of Australian respondents said cost control was their biggest challenge; followed by data security, privacy, and compliance (74 percent); and the ability to support remote workers (73 percent).
  • Australian IT teams better at staying within budget: While 24 percent of Australian respondents said they spent over their annual IT budget, this was well under the global average of 37 percent as IT spend continues to surge worldwide.
  • Important skills still lagging: 82 percent of Australian organisations lack some of the internal IT skills required to meet business demands, with automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and containerisation the top skills businesses want to grow.
  • IT’s organisational value continues to surge: In the last report, 78 percent of respondents saw IT as more strategic to the business – this has risen to 82 percent in this report as IT increasingly becomes an essential function to drive business activity in a more digital economy.

For the fourth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,700 IT decision-makers around the world in August and September 2021. The respondent base spanned multiple industries and business sizes in Australia, other parts of Asia-Pacific, the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

To learn more about the Australian report and findings, please view the full global report, see here.

About Nutanix

Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software and a pioneer in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, making clouds invisible, freeing customers to focus on their business outcomes. Organisations around the world use Nutanix software to leverage a single platform to manage any app at any location for their hybrid multicloud environments. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on social media @nutanix.

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