Technology innovation has been responsible for the development of all sorts of extraordinary productivity tools in the legal profession and has sparked the creation of amazing new ways for legal professionals to collaborate. It's also forced us to learn a whole new vocabulary. Even the most technophobic law firm partner now walks around dropping terms such as “gigs” and “the cloud” — words that had much different meaning to us as recently as a decade ago.

Well, brace yourself for another addition to that burgeoning techie vocabulary, because law firm IT is about to be transformed by a new approach to the way that your computers, servers and data storage operations are managed. This new generation of enterprise IT is known as hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). It might not roll off the tongue with ease, but HCI is not as mysterious as the name would suggest.

HCI is a breakthrough, software-centric approach to cloud infrastructure that has been growing by triple-digits since 2015, according to an IDC report. HCI combines hardware known as “x86-based servers” with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure options with a new, turnkey IT system. This new approach is called “hyperconverged infrastructure” because it integrates servers, data storage and end-to-end systems/operations management in one IT framework.

The key to HCI is the integration of compute functions and something called software-defined storage technology, which essentially aggregates all of your law firm's existing hard drives within a cluster and represents them as a single, highly redundant storage capacity pool. If one node goes down, data is still available for the rest of the cluster, so workloads will continue running without disruption. This configuration also dramatically improves server availability and performance—as well as storage scalability — since it is no longer limited to legacy infrastructure frameworks. HCI brings together both compute and storage into a single solution that is managed by a single converged team. Since there are fewer moving parts, it can be deployed faster and operated with minimal disruptions.

HCI is a true breakthrough for law firm IT professionals because it makes it easier to launch new cloud services, supporting enterprises that want to easily package and migrate new workloads. In fact, early adopters have discovered that HCI helps cut deployment down to a matter of minutes.

There are three major reasons that HCI can transform the way that law firm IT professionals manage the infrastructure for their firms:

1. Reduced management burdens

The simplified deployment of HCI means that a law firm's technology solutions can be up and running with the fewest possible steps. In addition, the high level of automation built into HCI allows for non-experts to manage storage and compute as a single integrated system, making deployment faster and systems monitoring easier.

Due to this reduction in management burdens, the law firm's IT staff is able to achieve significant gains in productivity. For example, an IDC study found that HCI deployment resulted in an average of 61 percent IT staff time needed to deploy, manage and support the IT infrastructure—an approximate value of $1 million per organization.

2. Lower costs

The commodity pricing of x86 servers—the core building blocks of HCI—represents a tremendous opportunity to drive down hardware costs. Moreover, by eliminating the need for dedicated storage systems, there is another opportunity for firms to reduce traditional IT costs. Finally, the scale-out of the architecture allows for less expensive initial deployments that can be scaled over time.

For example, HCI enables cost savings to law firms in specific IT areas such as maintenance, power, facilities, licensing and disaster recovery. The result is 39 percent lower IT infrastructure costs, on average, for customers of the Nutanix HCI Platform, an industry leader.

3. Increased agility

An additional benefit of the scale-out architecture used in HCI allows IT departments to quickly scale compute and storage resources by adding more nodes to existing clusters, all without taking applications offline. This significantly increases the agility of a firm's IT infrastructure over legacy approaches.

This increased agility also drives business value to law firms because it serves an important risk mitigation role for IT. HCI reduces unplanned outages and enables faster resolution of incidents when they do occur.

These three transformational benefits of HCI are important because they support the evolution of the law firm IT function. Law firm IT professionals are under rising pressure to spend less time and money on the firm's infrastructure and more of those valuable resources on specific technology applications that drive value to the business. HCI will help the legal industry take a giant step forward by assisting the law firm IT function with its transition away from a focus on “keeping the lights on” and toward a focus on leveraging the power of technology applications to drive enterprise value to the law firm's bottom line.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure—as techie and mysterious as it sounds—may just be the next driver of profitability for your firm.

Tagg Madden serves as the director of strategy and architecture for Managed Technology Services (MTS), an HBR Consulting solution. He manages a team responsible for designing computer network solutions and leads the team to support MTS clients with developing technology solutions from pre-sales to detailed design. For more information, please visit www.hbrmts.com.