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CHAPTER 1 Understanding Enterprise IT Challenges 11 These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. number to call for any support need in the environment. That's a fantastic benefit because it can reduce, although it may not elim- inate, vendor finger-pointing when issues arise. Introducing hyperconverged infrastructure A funny thing happened on the way to the datacenter. Suddenly, what once required dedicated hardware became a software com- ponent. This change was due in large part to companies like Intel releasing processors packed with more and more cores every year. What once used to be single instruction pipelines quickly became massively parallel and provided servers with an incredible amount of computing power. At the same time, the storage market began a decade-long upheaval as businesses sought to rid themselves of overly com- plex and slow storage in favor of newer, simpler storage solutions that featured flash technology. This shift resulted in the introduction of software-defined stor- age and a related technology that has come to be known as hyper- converged infrastructure (HCI). HCI effectively eliminates storage as a tier of infrastructure in the datacenter. Rather than existing as a separate resource, storage and compute resources are added to server hosts and managed by software. They simply become additional resources to be con- sumed by the business as needed. Like most modern workloads, HCI leverages virtualization tech- nology. In fact, the hypervisor is an integral part of each node in a HCI cluster. In short, HCI consolidates servers, storage, the hypervisor, and some network functions into a software-centric solution deployed on commodity hardware. Finding the hybrid cloud sweet spot HCI has emerged as an integral component in the hybrid cloud. Why? Simply put, HCI is about as cloudlike, from an infrastruc- ture perspective — it offers rapid, on-demand scalability, inter- operability, and elasticity — as you can find in an on-premises environment. With the right HCI solution, you'll find that the on- ramp to the hybrid cloud becomes easier to navigate than you ever thought possible.