What is Hyperscale & Why is Hyperscale Computing Important?

Hyperscale is a distributed computing environment that offers unparalleled scalability to facilitate workloads on an enormous scale.

Hyper means to go over, beyond, or above. It’s the reason we say ‘hyperventilate’ when someone breathes over a normal rate — and ‘hyperthermia’ when a person’s body temperature is below normal.

Hyperscale computing involves scaling computing over and beyond expectations. It’s a method for achieving enormous amounts of compute and storage power to handle big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing.

Let’s explore why this shift is important, how it works, and why hyperscaling solves problems for forward-thinking organisations.

We don’t need to tell you that data is big for business. The opportunity to make informed decisions, predict outcomes, and provide a better, more holistic experience for customers is an opportunity too great to be ignored.

With that opportunity comes a huge challenge. Data is everywhere, and it’s growing all the time. Businesses require data to ensure long-term growth and remain competitive.

But how can businesses leverage the possibilities if all that data is fragmented across dozens of disparate computing systems? How can they hope to remain agile in the face of new technologies when they rely on inflexible technologies to power their operations?

The volume and quality of data needed for modern organisations are so great that traditional infrastructure cannot keep up, especially with the enormous demand for enterprise web applications, cloud computing, generative AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing models. The days of an on-premises data centre powering an organisation’s needs are long behind us.

Hyperscale computing is the next logical step in meeting this growing demand. It ensures organisations have the flexibility to maintain operational efficiency and rapidly scale their workloads indefinitely. To show why hyperscaling is so impactful, let’s now examine how it works.

The core of hyperscale computing is the data centre architecture that drives it. These data centres, known as ‘hyperscalers,’ must be flexible and rapidly scalable, with large horizontal server arrays and liquid cooling designed to deploy and maintain mega-sized operations.

Hyperscalers aren’t dissimilar from a conventional data centre in terms of infrastructure, but they’re considerably larger, with vast amounts of hardware and software. In essence, this provides businesses with an almost endless supply of computing resources to meet their evolving needs.

The best part about hyperscaling is that it offers enormous flexibility. A business’s data requirements are rarely consistent. When the organisation requires more computing power usage than normal, the hyperscaler can accommodate that increase in traffic by load balancing and reallocating resources.

To achieve the benefits of hyperscaling while still upholding network security, many businesses now choose to operate a hybrid cloud solution across private and public clouds. Public cloud hyperscalers provide the capabilities for businesses to scale their workloads and respond proactively to emerging technologies. The private cloud servers allow organisations to maintain their sensitive information and vulnerable data on secure servers.

There’s no shortage of reasons businesses are looking to get involved with hyperscale computing. Here are five to consider.

1. Scalability

Hyperscale architectures offer businesses the ability to scale resources up or down depending on demand, all without major disruptions.

2. Cost

The flexibility offered by hyperscale operations also increases cost-effectiveness. Many hyperscaler data centre campuses run on pay-as-you-go models, allowing businesses to only pay for the additional resources required.

3. Resilience

Hyperscale companies are dedicated and always available, with strong redundancy features, disaster recovery, and fault tolerance systems. This improves resilience and reliability, decreasing downtime.

4. Agility

Leveraging hyperscale computing means businesses can be agile in the face of emerging technologies. They can experiment and iterate without concerning themselves with resource availability.

5. Performance

Hyperscalers deliver high-speed data processing and low latency — a must for machine learning, AI solutions, and real-time analytics.

To explore how a well-known brand has used hyperscale computing to its advantage, let’s examine a case study of Canva.

Australian brand Canva is one of the largest design platforms in the world, with over 220 million active users. The biggest challenge for the company has been keeping up with this demand. Between 2019 and 2021, Canva surged in popularity, gaining 80 million users in just three years. That’s exciting, for sure, but it also poses an enormous data challenge, especially when trying to add new AI-driven features to maintain competitiveness.

Canva made the switch to Amazon Web Services (AWS), as the company wanted to grow its user base rapidly and experiment with new products, such as the Canva Creators program — without having to worry about data management, accuracy, operability, and scalability.

The elasticity offered by a hyperscaler like AWS ensured Canva could handle user activity spikes reliably, such as when rolling out a new feature or during a marketing campaign. The service allocates resources efficiently to meet demand, eliminating the need for Canva to invest in expensive and inefficient on-premises hardware.

In particular, AWS was instrumental in the launch of Canva’s text-to-image AI feature, which was built using Amazon SageMaker. Crucially, hyperscale capabilities meant that a feature that would usually take months to deploy could be rolled out in just three weeks. This made Canva one of the earliest graphic design brands to leverage this technology in the AI race.

Hyperscaling has also helped Canva keep costs down amidst expansion. By leveraging AWS’s pay-as-you-go model alongside scalable data storage options like Amazon S3, Canva ensured it only paid for the resources it needed to keep costs low.

Canva’s hyperscale foundation leaves it in a strong position for future growth. The brand can continue to innovate in the era of AI and scale to accommodate new users indefinitely — all without incurring the enormous costs of maintaining enormous amounts of data on-site.

The benefits of hyperscale computing are no secret, but that doesn’t mean it’s without its challenges. Here are five things businesses need to know.

1. Complexity

Attempting to manage a hyperscale cloud in-house is nearly impossible without a thorough understanding of how cloud architectures work. For this reason, most businesses prefer to opt for a managed hyperscale cloud environment with a dedicated cloud service provider.

2. Hyperscale data centre security

The more vast the hyperscale infrastructure, the larger the attack surface for bad actors to exploit. This risk of cyber threats is why many businesses opt for a hybrid model, using hyperscalers for high-intensity processes while keeping sensitive data in-house.

3. Cost

While hyperscale computing is generally more cost-effective over the long term, the initial costs of migrating existing data over to a public cloud infrastructure can be a shock for some businesses.

4. Data centre requirements

The amount of data required is growing exponentially year-on-year. This will require hyperscalers to become larger and larger to accommodate these demands. This could lead to more difficult risk management and more pressing security concerns.

5. Sustainability

Hyperscale data centres require a lot of energy and produce more emissions. This significant sustainability concern has led many leading companies to pledge toward net zero.

Despite these challenges, hyperscale computing is a transformative force that offers immense opportunities. With the right strategies, such as leveraging managed services and adopting hybrid models, businesses can overcome these obstacles to achieve the benefit of hyperscale on offer.

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