Complex issues in IT infrastructure and a shortage of skilled IT talent in local markets have made it challenging for SMB’s in the APAC region to maintain their IT facilities in high-growth markets like Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. Head of Innovation for Park Place Technologies, Paul Mercina, reminded readers of computerweekly.com that the implementation of HCI in leu of a traditional datacentre can cause issues if not conducted correctly. “Rather than needing storage specialists, for example, the enterprise may want more generalists with an understanding of the various HCI ‘ingredients’,” says Mercina. “Such a shift in human resources isn’t usually a flip-of-the-switch endeavour, culturally or from a recruitment perspective, especially in a tight job market with a big IT talent gap,” he says.
This talent gap has led to several reoccurring issues in the implementation of Hyperconverged Infrastructure which, according to Gartner, “…is set to grow rapidly, from $371.5m in 2014 to nearly $5bn this year.” Businesses need a simplified and immediate HCI solution which doesn’t center around a 24/7 rotation of highly-skilled IT engineers. Let’s take a look at a few of the issues faced by APAC companies who implemented HCI and how they resolved them.
Storage
Bank of China Ltd. has a massive presence in Singapore, with 80 years of experience while offering Singapore’s first RMB services to Singaporean customers. All of Bank of China’s servers were running in physical mode without shared storage, meaning a single point of failure, no effective failover or backup solution. After implementing HCI supplied by Sangfor Technologies, existing server storage capacity was leveraged as a backup destination and native HA was built-in to ensure business continuity.
Infrastructure Needs
Businesses with poorly performing network infrastructures often experience high degrees of latency. When Budget Mart, one of the Philippines prized supermarket chains, experienced several hours of downtime causing huge losses, they decided to implement an HCI solution to boost business continuity. "The concept of Sangfor impressed me. We didn’t have to schedule separate maintenance windows for our system patch or hardware health checks. What amazed me more was that Sangfor could virtualize all the elements of our DC like compute, storage and even security. This is was a shortfall of other HCI vendors.” said Budget Mart executive Mr Gonzales.
Scalability
Scalability is all about future planning and anticipation. Organizations who don’t plan for future growth will be completely unprepared if they do happen to grow. When Indonesian fisheries and poultry company, PT Sinta Prima Feedmill (SPF) decided to implement an HCI solution to assist with future expansion for storage and RAM, they chose Sangfor HCI, which allows for future expansion by simply adding a hard disk and memory to their existing server – allowing them to reduce cost and scale-up simply.
Customer Service
Partnership with a vendor is like a marriage, and considering the compatibility, flexibility and overall day-to-day partnership with vendors is important when implementing HCI. When the Philippines based BayLeaf Hotel and LPU Manila University decided to implement HCI to combat a poorly performing legacy datacentre, high CapEx and OpEx costs and lack of DR & backup, they were disappointed with local and international vendors who had the HCI solution they needed, but offered no continuing partnership and support beyond the sale of the product. “There were a few bumps in the first week of implementation.” said Bayleaf Hotels ICT Director Julian Lilio. “The Sangfor team along with the local partner were quick to resolve them.” Sangfor localizes their products and services with 24/7 customer services and immediate trouble-shooting services, eliminating the need to chase after vendors for the help they need.
Why Sangfor?
Founded in 2000 and a publicly traded company as of 2018 (SANGFOR STOCK CODE: 300454 (CH)) Sangfor Technologies is the global leading vendor of IT infrastructure solutions specializing in Network Security and Cloud Computing. Visit us at www.sangfor.com and get in touch with Sangfor Technologies today to see what we can do to custom build IT solutions and keep you moving.
