What are some of the key benefits of hyperconvergence for K12?
Hyperconvergence is going to save schools money. The deployment is very easy, and the biggest driver of all is ease of use. School districts often have limited resources and IT specialists, so hyperconvergence is really about being able to take an infrastructure and allow for an IT generalist to be able to manage the infrastructure.
Talk about managing complicated systems with limited resources as school districts face budget cuts.
This is where ease of use and simplicity of a hyperconvergence solution really comes into play. I describe it as the smartphone experience, but for IT infrastructure. The first time that you put your hands on a smartphone, you just start pushing buttons. That’s the idea here. You can be out of the box and up and running within 15 minutes. You can be deploying applications in seconds, and those applications will be available and scalable. It is everything one would expect out of a modern infrastructure, but without all the complexity. Someone who had previously exposure only to managing Windows desktops can easily slide in and manage the whole infrastructure, where previously you might have needed certifications and extra training. Having this automation in place is really helpful.
Where can school districts embrace cloud and hypercloud computing on a level where they see the scalability, agility, modernization and cost-saving benefits?
The cloud can appear on the surface as though it is the answer to a lot of problems. In reality, that may or may not be the case. The allure of the cloud is that school districts don’t have to manage IT infrastructure anymore. Outsourcing everything to the cloud though can become very pricey, which is counter to where budgets are headed these days. The real answer is to think about individual applications and whether or not they might make more sense in the cloud or on premises. For example, using email in the cloud makes a lot of sense. Organizations can use Gmail inexpensively. There’s a huge economy of scale on the back end with Google. On the other hand, there are a lot of applications that are not so turnkey into the cloud, in which case it could make more sense to run that on premises. A lot of schools should really be in a hybrid cloud environment, where some applications can run in the cloud, and other applications run on premises. From a manageability standpoint it all feels like one thing. It can be optimized from a cost and performance and practicality standpoint.
Describe how next-generation technologies like NVMe will transform infrastructure.
NVMe is new storage hardware. NVMe enables a processor within a server to communicate directly with the storage hardware and with the devices. Previously, all communication went through a controller, usually a physical piece of hardware. NVMe processes are multi-threaded, meaning they have multiple simultaneous communication channels, or multiple connections into the storage hardware at the same time. Bringing all these things together is really one of the promises of hyperconvergence. It is not just servers and storage—but hybrid cloud, NVMe technologies and a good system should make all that easy and transparent.
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