Unplanned network outages due to natural disasters, system failures, cyberthreats, or human error are on the rise, with 90 percent of organizations reporting they’ve had at least one such outage in the past year. While there are a number of strategies to consider, implementing hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) as part of your disaster recovery (DR) processes can reduce your risk.

At their core, HCI systems essentially collapse the traditional three-tier data center architecture of compute, networking and storage into a single server platform with a hypervisor for creating and managing virtual machines (VMs). With its all-in-one architecture, HCI makes it relatively simple to replicate production environments on VMs which can be quickly brought online in the event of an outage.

Most HCI systems also come with built-in DR features, including advanced automation for recovering applications and data, support for multisite disaster recovery (DR), and synchronous replication for workloads running on VMs. Many systems also include so-called “instant recovery” capabilities that make it possible to achieve recovery point objective (RPO) times in just a few seconds.

Although HCI was conceived as a virtualization platform that would enable infrastructure consolidation, more and more organizations are recognizing its DR potential. In a recent Evaluator Group survey, “data protection and disaster recovery” ranked as the fourth most common business use case for HCI, behind infrastructure consolidation, desktop virtualization, and server virtualization.

Here are a few of the ways HCI can improve an organization’s disaster preparedness:

Instant recovery. HCI appliances create backup snapshots of a VM. In the event of an outage, you can restart the VM from the backup almost instantly. Once the problem has been resolved, the workload is redirected to the original VM. Because the recovery occurs behind the scenes, users don’t know that anything unusual has happened.

Cloud integration. HCI and Cloud platforms virtualize resources in similar ways, and many vendors now integrate cloud gateways, management platforms, and cloud service metering to create a tighter link between the two. In this way, HCI systems can send backups to public, private, or hybrid clouds for heightened data protection. Management dashboards and automated discovery enable administrators to orchestrate on-premises and cloud workloads and streamline recovery in the event of an outage.

Remote work. HCI supports desktop virtualization by enabling operating systems and applications to be hosted on VMs running in the data center. In the event of a disaster, end-users can access a personalized environment via a wide range of devices from any location. This also improves data security and simplifies the process of updating applications, distributing security patches, and onboarding new employees.

Easy scalability. HCI architecture makes it simple to add appliances, or nodes, to an HCI cluster. The scale-out architecture allows organizations to quickly introduce additional storage, compute, networking, and virtualization resources as needed during a crisis. This eliminates the need to overprovision resources as a safeguard.

Reduced cost and complexity. Because HCI appliances are preconfigured, tested and ready to deploy, they eliminate the need to design, implement and integrate data center infrastructure from scratch. As a result, network technicians don’t need any specialized skills to use HCI to back up, clone, and restore VMs quickly, easily, and cost-effectively.

Speed and simplicity have always been among the hallmarks of hyper-converged infrastructure — and those are the same characteristics that make HCI a valuable tool for disaster preparedness. HCI gives organizations the ability to coordinate cloud and on-premises workloads from a central dashboard, failover to multiple sites, and rapidly restore workloads in a crisis. Give us a call to explore ways to improve your business resilience by integrating HCI into your data center environment.