UPDATED 12:00 EDT / SEPTEMBER 06 2016

NEWS

Is it time to stop making excuses and go hyper-converged? | #VMworld

IT vendors are coming out with simpler, more user-friendly infrastructure solutions everyday. But despite its occasional hiccups, your trusty old infrastructure is still easier to manage than the implementation of some fancy new system — right? Wrong, according to some professionals who say that chucking their old, high-maintenance systems in favor of new hyper-converged infrastructure was so easy, they only wish they’d done it sooner.

Justin Brooks, systems engineer at PITT OHIO, a transportation solutions provider, and Steven Senecal, manager of Server Engineering at Travelport, LP, spoke to Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016.

Brooks spoke about the day his team decided that enough was enough with their old infrastructure. “We got into a particular situation where we had a bug that came up in our UCS [Unified Computing System] stack, and in order to get into a supported version of firmware, there was all this x, y and z we had to do,” he said.

Saving time

Brooks added that his company’s switch to SimpliVity Corp’s hyper-converged infrastructure has made operations simpler across the board.

“Our backup windows are super small,” he said, explaining that where a backup took eight hours with UCS, it takes no more than an hour with SimpliVity. He added that having disaster recovery built in at no extra charge is also a huge plus.

Culture shock

Senecal said the greater ease of hyper-converged infrastructure is so far reaching, it changed the culture of his company. “The efficiencies are phenomenal,” he said. “It’s giving back more man hours to the infrastrucuture services team to not have to spend time going back into the legacy back up and recovery infrastructure to restore VMs.”

Senecal said that staff members are shocked by how much easier tasks have become. “They just can’t believe they can restore a VM in seconds,” he said, adding that they are democratizing operations so that OS engineers and server-compute teams can go into the VMware vCenter Server and do the recoveries themselves.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE

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