Delving Deep into the “Build” to “Buy” Continuum

Authored by Niladri Saha, Director & General Manager, Modern Infrastructure, India, Dell EMC

Digital transformation has already been assimilated into organizational DNA. While there are different aspects of digital transformation if taken from a broader business perspective, IT transformation is a major part of this entire transformation story. IT agility and IT flexibility are two major tenets in IT transformation, which hinge much on hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI)—the fast track to convergence that delivers all benefits of a converged infrastructure but is simpler to deploy, manage, and scale while accelerating time to value and checking infrastructure costs, both Capex and Opex. 

Growing preference of customers for the simplification of radical infrastructure has been proved to be a major catalyst behind the rapid growth of HCI amongst big and mid-size organizations. And as predicted by IDC, the market for HCI solutions is expected to surpass $7.6 billion by 2021.

Leading the game with our strongest HCI portfolio 

At Dell EMC, we are leading as the fastest growing vendor in the HCI segment, driven by our impressive yet strongest HCI portfolio with Dell EMC VxRail Appliances and VxRack Systems. VxRail is the one-of-its-kind fully integrated, pre-configured, and tested HCI appliance that comes with a simple, cost-effective hyper-converged solution that addresses several challenges faced by customers and takes care of almost any use case, comprising tier-one applications as well as mixed workloads. 

As revealed in a recent research paper of the Edison Group*:

• Deploying VxRail is almost 95% faster and needs 86% lesser steps as compared to deploying the single rack server 
• Further, as compared to deploying extra rack-mounted servers, deploying all the subsequent VxRail Appliances is almost 96% faster 
• Not only that, it needs almost 99% fewer steps as compared to deploying extra rack-mounted servers 

HCI Ways Forward: “Build” to “Buy” Continuum 

Two HCI options are now emerging, including the “build” to “buy” continuum. 

• Build: Software led + open ecosystem hardware 
• Buy: Integrated Systems 

The main distinction between the two models is – while “build” choices ensure improvements on whatever you do now – and you are responsible for how it works; “buy” choices signify an entire transfer of this responsibility to somebody else. 

A leading HCI software-led vendor, for example, is changing how they tend to compensate their present field solely on software – enabling customers to select hardware from an open ecosystem. They focus more on the fact that they can gain access to a broad ecosystem, opting for the hardware vendor they have or like. 

On the other hand, integrated or “Buy” systems are not just bundling the software-led and open hardware ecosystem. Instead, they are an end-to-end set of intellectual property, engineering and support mechanics, and software tools, which denote that there is no such distinction between hardware and software. 

While addressing the much-talked-about "Build" to"Buy" continuum, I am referring to Chad Sakac’s article where he breaks down the ‘Build to Buy Continuum’ http://del.ly/61828Jqnu and focuses on 5 important points related to the continuum: 

Reference Architectures: Come with more flexibility, de-risking all multi-product deployment customers who are building their stuff themselves entirely. 

Bundles: Pave the way for commercial acquisition and simplify as well as standardize the procurement process. 

Validated Systems: Take bundles, make configurability, build different processes, including loading software, stack/rack, and make possible a few fundamental onsite automation. 

Engineered Systems: The core idea behind Engineered Systems lies in the component-level details, in addition to lifecycle as well as responsibility, which entirely shift to the vendor from the customer. No doubt, they provide business outcomes. 

Platforms: Going beyond the infrastructure, they focus more and more on what customers want. 

A case in point is Dell EMC’s VxRail appliance, which enables organizations to take end-to-end control of their IT operations. While talking about its benefits, our partner Vasudevan Subramaniam, Managing Director at NewWave Computing Pvt. Ltd told us that “Dell EMC’s VxRail appliance is helping our customers take control of their IT operations spanning across deployment, virtualizing a range of applications and managing the overall output. The end-to-end support offering with a single point of contact for both hardware and software is making it easier and manageable for our customer’s IT teams.” 

Our other partner, Sanjay Patodia, CEO, Galaxy Office Automation highlighted the benefits to customers by using the VxRail and shared, “By implementing Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, our customers are seeing an amazing performance with their existing applications. They are able to better streamline the management and monitoring with one console as it allows their IT teams to concentrate on new technologies to enhance their business. Single point support is helping them leave all their worries to us while focusing on future storage expansion and compute.” 

Path Forward: Build or Buy 

The path forward is clearly to ‘simplify’ HCI and bring one contact support to customers. IT transformation becomes so much simpler if somebody else is taking care of it instead of you, isn’t it? 

To know more about our HCI portfolio, feel free to join us at our first-ever Dell Technologies Forum. 

*https://www.dellemc.com/resources/en-us/asset/analyst-reports/products/converged-infrastructure/edison-roup-vxrail-tco-study.pdf