The new normal

As the world continues to mount a courageous and defiant stand against the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all driven to reconfigure the way we think, conduct business and live in a society in transition.

The normalcy of everyday life has been interrupted. Albeit temporary, the worldwide quarantine has highlighted not only the absolute need for seamlessly integrated and efficiently managed data centre technologies, but also its extension to the edge. Nowhere is this need met more completely than hyper-converged infrastructure. So much so that a case for hyper-converged infrastructure being "the new normal" is emerging.

Like almost all marketing terms and buzzwords before it, "hyper-convergence infrastructure" or HCI created much excitement in the ICT industry.

For the very few in the dark about what the term means, HCI is a software-defined data centre infrastructure that virtualises all of the elements of conventional "hardware-defined" systems. Simply put, HCI combines compute, storage and networking elements in a single system, which can either be a vendor-specific or a hardware-agnostic solution. The question is: how does HCI change the proverbial price of bread?

First, let's all agree that the tectonic plates of the business landscape have shifted. The pandemic has brought to light the agility, flexibility and crisis readiness of businesses, supply chains, industries, markets and entire nations. The once-bustling meeting rooms, offices, corridors and metropolises of commerce now look and feel like deserted islands. The new normal doesn't seek to fill these spaces with warm bodies, but provide said bodies with solutions that enable them to derive and deliver value, even in the age of social distancing. Suddenly, everyone in every business needs more of everything, all the time.

Moreover, essential services that operated on basic infrastructures and even analogue systems require digitised platforms and virtual environments that are easier to deploy, scalable and cost-effective. Remote execution of court hearings and doctors' consultations; public and private classrooms are virtual; social grants have increased in quantity and amount; and the implementation needs to be seamless.

The new normal provides a better answer to these concerns. It is an enhanced way to deploy robust, scalable systems that are integrated and easy to manage. In the new normal, we combine the management of applications and the servers that host them. In the new normal, workloads are treated like customers whose needs must be satisfied. The new normal empowers the IT department to build and scale-up systems using servers as building blocks. The new normal is anti-silos and composable. It appropriates resources and delegates them to their respective pools.

Recently, Nutanix appointed Axiz as the distributor for sub-Saharan Africa. Commercially, the appointment sees the region's largest distributor take this emerging but powerful tech into markets that need it the most.

Nutanix AOS offers, arguably, the industry's most advanced hyper-converged infrastructure. Nutanix aggregates and virtualises the storage of each node of the HCI cluster, creating a fully distributed storage fabric that protects the organisation's critical data while providing enterprise-class capabilities like data tiering, deduplication, backup, compression, data encryption, snapshots and cloning. Nutanix AOS supports all popular hypervisors and can run all enterprise applications.

As its distributor, Axiz will leverage its extensive partner network to provide cost-effective hyper-converged infrastructure solutions. It is how Axiz remains ahead of the curve and provides partners and their customers with a solution-driven environment of tried and tested technologies.

That is the new normal, value or transactions. In addition to this new normal technology, Axiz supports its partners with a full range of technical support services, and MSP practice-building tools.