How the Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) in NetDocuments Ensures Peak Performance

As technology providers we strive to create tools that deliver real, tangible benefits to our customers. Our experience has shown us time and again that the secret to delivering on our promises is leveraging the latest technology to increase the effectiveness of our systems which maximizes growth for both ourselves and our clients.

One piece of technology that we rely on to provide the best in document and email management services is hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI. True to our roots, we didn’t implement HCI solely for ourselves—in truth, HCI has significant implications for our customers.

What is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

A hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, is an integrated, software-defined solution that replaces compute, storage, and networking hardware. By combining them into a single system, HCI delivers a simpler, more efficient alternative to traditional servers as well as stronger platform performance.

NetDocuments Is Growing Fast

It’s a fact: More and more law firms and legal teams are adopting NetDocuments. As a result of this growth, the platform load has been doubling every 18 months.

That’s a lot of data center space. Or, it would be.

Thankfully, HCI enables NetDocuments to scale quickly and accommodate exponential growth—all while shrinking our data center footprint.

In recent interview with BizTech Magazine, Scott Barnhill, SVP of Cloud Operations at NetDocuments said, “I can’t imagine dealing with that the way we were doing it before,” says Scott Barnhill, SVP of Cloud Operations at NetDocuments, “The old infrastructure just wasn’t going to sustain that kind of growth.”

How HCI Improves the NetDocuments Customer Experience

So what’s the big deal? As much as we love what HCI does for us, there are numerous benefits that we’re able to pass along to our customers:

• Faster Implementation: The agility afforded by HCI allows us to deploy cloud services to customers even quicker.
• Superior Search: Our high-traffic, high-volume search engine runs considerably better on HCI than it did on previous hardware. This means you can count on quick, effective search results.
• Simplicity: Rather than separate teams managing network, hardware, and storage, HCI allows a single small team to take care of the global platform. This translates to better maintenance and uptime.
• Reduced Risk: With the previous architecture, hardware failures lead to service interruptions. HCI isn’t dependent on potentially faulty hardware—which is great news for customers.
• Cost Savings: HCI is a more cost effective solution than traditional servers, which reduces the cost of service for NetDocuments customers.
• Cloud-Friendly: Because HCI is software defined, it plays nicely with cloud-based platforms like NetDocuments. For our customers to enjoy all the benefits of the cloud, it’s critical that the systems we rely on work effectively in and around the cloud.

When our team asked Barnhill to elaborate on our move to HCI he said, “Between how well it ran and all of the administrative and risk management benefits, jumping in with HCI was a no-brainer. In fact, we went in deeper and faster than we ever intended to after we realized all the benefits it offered for not only our business, but our customer’s experience as well.”

We’re Working Smarter—So You Can Too

Exponential growth is thrilling, but we’ve never lost sight of our mission to provide industry-leading document and email management to each and every customer.

Our customer’s experience is a point of pride for us; luckily, thanks to our focus on the future, we’re confident we can continue to provide excellent products and service to our customers no matter our growth. Using HCI is just one way we’re leveraging technology to make sure your experience stays exemplary.

Learn more about how Scott Barnhill, SVP of Cloud Operations at NetDocuments, leveraged hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to support business growth.