Today, officials in Columbus, Ohio are pleased to have adopted hyperconverged infrastructure, an investment that paves the way for the future, according to the city’s Department of Technology.
“We decided to take a completely different approach to how we provision infrastructure,” explains Columbus CTO Sam Orth. “The goal was to modernize, to become nimbler — to be able to stand up infrastructure on demand.”
The department moved to a hyperconverged infrastructure environment built around Dell EMC’s HCI product, VxRail, Orth says. The software-defined platform, which Dell developed with VMware, sits atop the city’s two data centers to combine and virtualize existing servers and storage.
“What it does is put everything into one integrated system, so instead of having to manage the server and storage environments separately, you do it all through a single pane of glass,” Orth says.
Furthermore, the HCI architecture makes it easy to add capacity. “One of the challenges we have as a government IT service provider is that we can’t always predict what systems we’re going to acquire down the road. With HCI, when we need to grow, instead of having to make a large capital investment to rebuild our entire infrastructure, all we have to do is buy another brick or node,” Orth says.
“For a lot of agencies, and over the past year especially, HCI has become their fast-track on-ramp into modernization,” says Christian Perry, a senior research analyst with 451 Research, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. The main reason for increased HCI adoption? “Ease of scaling,” he says. Officials can easily expand storage, compute and networking all in one place with HCI solutions.
Many cities had already developed IT modernization plans before the pandemic, but COVID-19 accelerated them. “The pandemic forced their hand,” Perry says. “They realized they needed to get those strategies in gear, and a lot of them decided hyperconvergence was the way to go.”