The race to find the digital data fabric required for the future digital workforce has been hard-fought. But with the current push to get remote working systems up to speed and to be able to manage multiple cloud environments, HCI (hybrid cloud infrastructure) is a clear winner.

According to Comstor sub-Saharan Africa, in a recent report by MarketsAndMarkets.com, the global HCI market size is expected to grow from US$7.8-billion in 2020 to $27.1-billion by 2025, at a compound annual growth rate of 28.1%. This is not only being driven by its ability to reduce capital and operational expenditure but also for its support for robust disaster recovery environments and its increased use as the premise for modern applications, EUC, VDI and ROBO applications.

“Businesses have found it exceptionally difficult to scale applications with consistency during the forced work from home situation created by the global pandemic,” said Lyndsey Chiinze, NetApp product manager at Comstor Sub-Saharan Africa. “It is not easy to meld clouds, scale remote working and ensure disaster recovery when you are still sitting with an ageing three-tier architecture.

“Over the past few months, we have seen an explosion in demand for HCI solutions that provide end-user customers the elasticity they need to extend and grow their EUC and VDI instances while still providing the same consistent application environment they have when in the office,” she said.

Beyond just flexibility and scalability, end users also require solutions that can fit a shrinking budget. With the NetApp HCI solution, Comstor customers can deploy a EUC and VDI solution that delivers consistent performance, even for power users, supports all devices, enables 24/7 access and provides a seamless experience from their on-premises environment to the cloud.

Data fabric

NetApp HCI helps you unleash the digital workspace with a data fabric that delivers high performance for everyone, even as IT adds applications, users and desktops to a hybrid multi-cloud environment. Today, HCI flattens your bare metal needs and brings together storage and compute in a simplified software-defined stack that creates a single experience for the customer by extending the same performance and reliability across the entire environment.

“HCI is born out of the needs of the Web-scale environments of the large hyperscalers. It’s very role was to reduce the data centre footprint, lessen the impact of power and hardware costs, while still delivering lightning-fast performance. Now that it is enterprise-grade, it is taking this power and extending it across clouds to offer customers the consistent experience they need for their EUC and VDI instances – without eroding performance.

“In short, NetApp HCI is the very foundation of the modern virtualised business, only better. Not only does it offer the consistency of experience, but it can help you roll out desktops and applications at speed and scale within just a few clicks,” said Chiinze.

About Westcon Comstor
Westcon-Comstor is a leading international distributor of business technology. Our solutions from the world’s leading vendors make businesses more secure, productive, mobile and connected. We specialise in the technologies essential to every business: security, collaboration, infrastructure and data centre. We translate our solutions into real value for our partners through our unrivalled expertise in global deployment, digital distribution and services. Technology is our business, but our story is our people and our partners, and we deliver results together.