For many people who are not versed in the intricacies of IT and technological infrastructures, smart cities seem like a concept from science fiction. Could it really be possible for a city to run just like a company? Can technology take care of a city’s resources, citizen satisfaction and optimize its strategic goals?
For those who are familiar with the topic, it’s evidence that smart cities have come a long way from Sci-Fi and these concepts are already introduced in our communities. Of course, just like any other cutting-edge technology, it’s making huge strides by the day, and within a year it’s possible to achieve massive progress.
Due to these facts, the Internet of Things (IoT), hyperconvergence and smart cities are among the top buzzwords of technological development in the 2010s and will continue to be well into the 2020s. These principles are believed to be the future of the way we do business, connect and share data.
John Abbott, an analyst at 451 Research,defines hyperconvergenceas “software that can be loaded to standard x86 servers and alter them into a clustered, scalable pool for computing and storage.
Gartner defineshyperconverged infrastructure as a “platform that offers common technological and storage resources based on software-defined storage, software-defined computing, hardware, and a unique management interface”.
Given that traditional data storage has become too complex, expensive and rigid for higher demands towards company data centers,software-defined storagewas accepted as a dominant standard for storing data in business. IT managers are now taking the next logical step by applying the software-centric paradigm to the SDS model into the data center as a whole. This new approach is called hyperconvergent infrastructure (HCI), which is the way to a completely software-defined data center.
Even though hyperconverged infrastructure appeared back in 2012 or so, today it’s one of the fastest-growing segments in the IT market. According to Gartner, the market for hyperconverged infrastructures will grow to 8.6 billion dollars by 2020.
Managers of smart city solutions, project managers and system architects recognized the opportunity for a significant reduction in cost and complexity with the use of hyperconverged infrastructures. When connected to traditional operational modes of today’s data center, HCIs will provide an increased rate of flexibility and agility that’s a must for smart cities to work seamlessly. In other words, HCI will be the bedrock of flawless smart cities.
Smart cities are the definition of a highly complex system juggling an unimaginable amount of data every second. That’s why the tech cornerstone of development for these solutions has to be more efficient, cheaper and faster than anything we knew so far in terms of data storage and computing. You guessed it – this is where hyperconvergence comes in.
