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CHAPTER 2 Defining and Extending Hyperconverged Infrastructure 17 These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Realigning IT silos toward business outcomes Today, companies are seeking to minimize their reliance on deep technical skills to maintain their datacenter infrastructure. They'dratherinvestinITstaffresourcesthatcanfocusonstra- tegic initiatives and deliver digital transformation projects that add business value. The set-it-and-forget-it simplicity of next-generation HCI can be a boon in such environments because it removes the shackles that force IT so often to be an infrastructure-centric entity and enables an IT organization that is more squarely focused on busi- ness outcomes. Expanding beyond Storage Virtualization Although HCI began as a storage virtualization solution, it has evolved,andexpandedtoincludecapabilitiessuchasfileand object storage for unstructured data, cloud-native persistent storage for containers, deeper application integration (for exam- ple, copy data management for databases), advanced networking and security functionality, automation and orchestration leverag- ingartificialintelligence(AI)andmachinelearning(ML). Solving the unstructured data management problem Have you ever considered what would happen if you took a stor- age architecture that was designed to store terabytes of data and increased the requirements by three to four orders of magnitude? The rapid growth of unstructured data on legacy storage infra- structure, which represents 80 percent of all stored data, is creat- ingjustsuchaproblem:IDCpredictsthatby2025therewillbe fivetimesmoredataworldwide. Massivedatagrowthbreaksoldstoragemanagementmethods and requires new thinking. Next-generation HCI brings the ben- efitsofcloudtoyouron-premisesstoragewithasimple,scala- ble,andintelligentsolutiontoconsolidatefile,block,andobject storage.Withaunifiedmanagementplanetomanageallstorage services and simply scale out or scale up capacity, next- generation HCImodernizesyourstoragesetupandsimplifiesoperations.