Arrow Electronics will showcase a range of next-generation hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), flash storage, software-defined infrastructure, and advanced security solutions from leading technology vendors at the upcoming edition of the GITEX Technology Week. Research indicates that the HCI market is emerging as one of the fastest growing and most valuable technology segments in the industry. In fact, the International Data Corporation expects new data centre investments will leverage converged or hyper-converged infrastructures to support both public and private cloud deployments across the Middle East and Africa market, with a forecast growth rate of 12 percent in 2016.

“We continue to see the HCI approach garnering attention of IT leaders and business stakeholders as they strive to transform data centre infrastructure into a more agile, scalable, and predictable platform, while operating under budget and resource constraints to meet ever-changing business requirements,” said Vimal Kocher, managing director for the Middle East region of Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions business. “In addition to the assessment study, we will also be hosting a series of technical workshops, lunch-and-learns, and cost-and-benefit analysis sessions at the in-house lab and Proof-of-Concept Solution Centre at the Arrow Dubai office in the coming months. We aim to provide consultative advices and practical solutions to help customers and partners realise transformative benefits delivered by HCI in addressing many IT challenges.”

Designed as a hybrid and agile IT infrastructure, HCI employs software-defined technology to integrate compute, storage, networking and virtualisation resources into one centrally managed console, or cluster. HCI creates a pool of unified virtual infrastructure that can be shared by multiple applications and lines of business, allowing for dynamic scaling and reduced complexity and fragmentation. HCI can also improve backup and recovery capability. The financial benefits of HCI include not only savings on capital expenditures but also lower total cost of ownership and operational expenses.

Among the innovative technology solutions on display at Arrow’s booth (Hall 2, G2-1) will be Dell EMC hyper-converged appliance VxRail™ and its industry-leading flash products. “Based on VMware’s vSphere and Virtual SAN, and Dell EMC software, VxRail is the only integrated, preconfigured, and pre-tested VMware hyper-converged infrastructure appliance on the market. VxRail enables faster, better, and simpler management of consolidated workloads, virtual desktops, business-critical applications, and remote office infrastructure. It provides a predictable and scalable path to an automated, software-defined infrastructure environment,” said Havier Haddad, Channel & Alliance director for Turkey, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa of Dell EMC.

More than 30 technology specialists from Check Point, Dell EMC, F5, Forcepoint, Intel Security, Netscout, RSA, and Trend Micro will join a team of Arrow’s business solution consultants at the GITEX Technology Week to provide insights to solution providers and enterprises on emerging trends including virtualisation, software-driven infrastructures, and clouding computing, to name a few.

Arrow will also launch a study to help enterprises evaluate their current data centre capability, and assess which HCI solutions and best practices can help them transform their data centres to meet complex business needs in the digital economy.