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CHAPTER 3 Supporting Workloads Anytime, Anywhere 27 These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Enabling Mission-Critical Workloads In the early days of HCI, there was concern about whether or not the use of hyperconverged infrastructure would become a hin- drance and negatively affect workloads. This concern quickly faded as the technology proved itself and particularly once nodes started being outfitted with all-flash storage. Organiza- tions began deploying mission-critical workloads on HCI, such as electronic medical records (EMR), customer relationship man- agement (CRM), e-commerce, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Organizations are deploying their most critical applications on next-generation HCI solutions today to leverage the robust- ness and simple scalability of hyperconverged clusters in these solutions. They're being supported by the vendor, as well. That's the key. Applications like SAP and other ERP tools are often deployed based on very specific requirements. Next-generation HCI is fully supported by most critical applications today and the solution can provide a less expensive and more efficient operating environ- ment, helping organizations save money while realizing better outcomes. How Next-Generation HCI Solves the ROBO Challenge As technology pervades every corner of the organization, an interesting phenomenon has occurred. The datacenter is no lon- ger the only place where data exists, and neither is the cloud. Specifically, remote office and branch office (ROBO) environ- ments are key areas in need of improvement. ROBO environments include branch sales offices for large corporations, doctor's offices and urgent care clinics, restaurant chains and coffee shops, retail outlets and mall kiosks, gas stations, and more. These locations all need computing power and storage capac- ity, but typically not as much as the headquarters location. In the past, these ROBO locations often had full stacks of three-tier