Why Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure provides a more manageable path to hybrid cloud and edge computing

One type of infrastructure that has gained popularity is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Interest in HCI and other hybrid technologies such as Azure Arc is growing as enterprise organizations embrace hybrid and multi-cloud environments as part of their digital transformation initiatives. Survey data from IDC shows broad HCI adoption among enterprises of all sizes, with more than 80% of the organizations surveyed planning to move toward HCI for their core infrastructure going forward.

“Hyperconverged infrastructure has matured considerably in the past decade, giving enterprises a chance to simplify the way they deploy, manage, and maintain IT infrastructure,” Carol Sliwa, Research Director with IDC’s Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies Group, said on a recent webinar sponsored by Microsoft and Intel.

“Enterprises need to simplify deployment and management to stay agile to gain greater business benefit from the data they’re collecting,” Sliwa said. “They also need infrastructure that can deploy flexibly and unify management across hybrid cloud environments. Software-defined HCI is well suited to meet their hybrid cloud needs.”

IDC research shows that most enterprises currently use HCI in core data centers and co-location sites, often for mission-critical workloads. Sliwa also expects usage to grow in edge locations as enterprises modernize their IT infrastructure to simplify deployment, management, and maintenance of new IoT, analytics, and business applications.

Sliwa was joined on the webinar by speakers from Microsoft and Intel, who discussed the benefits of HCI for managing and optimizing both hybrid/multi-cloud and edge computing environments.

Jeff Woolsey, Principal Program Manager for Azure Edge & Platform at Microsoft, explained how Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI and Azure Arc enable consistent cloud management across cloud and on-premises environments.

“Azure Stack HCI provides central monitoring and comprehensive configuration management, built into the box, so that your cloud and on-premises HCI infrastructure are the same,” Woolsey said. “That ultimately means lower OPEX because instead of training and retraining on bespoke solutions, you’re using and managing the same solution across cloud and on-prem.”

Azure Arc provides a bridge for the Azure ecosystem of services and applications to run on a variety of hardware and IoT devices across Azure, multi-cloud, data centers, and edge environments, Woolsey said. The service provides a consistent and flexible development, operations, and security model for both new and existing applications, allowing customers “to innovate anywhere,” he added.

Christine McMonigal, Director of Hyperconverged Marketing at Intel, explained how the Intel-Microsoft partnership has resulted in consistent, secure, end-to-end infrastructure that delivers a number of price/performance benefits to customers.

“We see how customers are demanding a more scalable and flexible compute infrastructure to support their increasing and changing workload demands,” said McMonigal. “Our Intel Select Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI have optimized configurations for the edge and for the data center. These reduce your time to evaluate, select, and purchase, streamlining the time to deploy new infrastructure.”

Watch the full webinar here: 

For more information on how HCI use is growing for mission-critical workloads, read the IDC Spotlight paper.