All your apps are in the cloud(s) now.  It’s OK.  Photo: Paul VanDerWerf, Potts Harbour, Hartswell, ME.  CC license. 

Hyperscale computing (HC) may sound like something only NASA and Google need.  But any business doing any kind of commerce with web sites can potentially benefit, as can brick and mortar companies who are highly dependent on 24 x 7 x 365 operations and no longer want to buy and maintain servers.

Hyperscale computing is computer processing power and storage that can be scaled up or down instantly, in large amounts.  Hyperscale computing relies on distributing computer tasks to multiple servers (distributed computing). You could do this on your own, duplicating your server environment and buying extra servers and the software needed to distribute tasks, but all of this is already available in the cloud, by many reputable firms, at costs that are not only low but predicted to go lower.

Why should you care?  Here are two scenarios where you might benefit:

1. Your product is sold at brick and mortar stores as well as your own web site.  Your retail customers (stores) use your primary site to place orders and as a selling tool in their stores.  You frequently promote your products to generate sales, so traffic and transactions on your site fluctuate a lot.  In this case you have to manage high traffic in a high- responsive way, and you need alternatives for backup if your primary servers fail.  Again, you can manage the hardware physically, but the most efficient way will be to virtualize your servers with scaleability built in, which is the whole purpose of hyperscale computing.
2. You don’t sell a thing online but your 24 x 7 x 365 operation is highly dependent on e-commerce with other companies and your own ERP system, the hardware for which is hosted by you or by an external company. Most companies have redundancy backup internally, or they make sure that apps or services they use are hosted by firms that also have redundancy backup.  But what if your vendor has the traditional one or two server backup, and one or both of those fail?  As companies more and more adopt SaaS for applications solutions, they can’t just assume that their SaaS vendor has adequate backup/scale-up capability.

Think of it this way, in simple terms: what you used to think of as big computers in some refrigerated room running all your stuff is now available online, not only in the quantity that you want, but with much more capacity and speed and at much lower cost; but more importantly agile enough to expand instantly as needed, or failover automatically — both data and software — to a redundant environment in cases of disaster, virus, or overload.