The role of IT within organizations is evolving rapidly. Today’s business environment demands that IT be able to react quickly to change and to deliver information assets and services flexibly and efficiently. That’s difficult to accomplish in an IT environment built from discrete components that must be painstakingly tuned and integrated to achieve desired results.
But that’s precisely how many existing data centers were constructed. In the traditional IT model, core infrastructures are assembled using best-of-breed systems for each function. As these infrastructures evolve over time, new technologies are added to further optimize and secure the environment. The net result is an almost overwhelming complexity that limits IT’s ability to respond to changing business requirements.
Convergence can help relieve this complexity and create a more agile IT environment. Converged infrastructure solutions tightly integrate compute, storage and network resources with unified management to deliver an application-aware, highly automated technology environment. Convergence enables a shared-service computing model that maximizes hardware utilization, improves availability, contains management costs and reduces time to deployment.
Converged infrastructure solutions improve enterprise agility by simplifying deployment and speeding IT delivery. These offerings reduce IT sprawl and turn technology assets into interoperable, shared pools of resources with a common management platform. With pools of shared services that can be leveraged on the fly, organizations can increase the flexibility of their environments and focus on innovation and efficiency.
Transforming IT
The push to transform IT operations accelerated during the recession as organizations sought to drive down costs and create a more scalable environment. Now the movement toward IT efficiency has itself been transformed by increasingly dynamic market forces. Cloud computing and mobility are redefining how organizations operate. Enterprises must adjust instantly to meet the changing needs of users, customers and other constituencies by driving innovation and agility through technology.
Recent research conducted on behalf of HP found that 95 percent of private- and public-sector executives consider agility important to the success of their organizations. Plus, more than two-thirds of C-level executives believe that enterprise agility is driven by technology solutions. Yet complexity and sprawl is crippling IT’s ability to keep pace with enterprise demands.
For years, IT organizations have been adding servers, storage and network devices to support a growing number of applications and the terabytes of data they generate. Server virtualization has been embraced as a means of improving data center efficiency, but the rapid provisioning of virtual servers has further accelerated data growth and network traffic. High-tech research firm IDC says most organizations have underinvested in systems management and automation tools relative to their virtualization investments. As a result, many data centers employ labor-intensive management processes that add to staffing burdens.
The net result that is that IT organizations use up to 70 percent of their IT budgets on basic operations and maintenance, leaving just 30 percent for business innovation. That’s simply not sustainable in today’s business environment.
Combine and Conquer
Converged infrastructure solutions support innovation by providing a common architecture, management and security model across virtualization, cloud and dedicated application environments. The server, storage and networking components are already pre-figured and pre-tested, cutting a significant amount of time out of the implementation process.
In many cases, organizations are asking IT to deliver new applications in months rather than years — and without hiring additional staff. One way to do that is through cloud services. But moving to the cloud takes a significant amount of time as well, and isn’t always an option. A converged infrastructure solution with pre-built systems and management that cuts across the IT stack enables IT to deploy new applications rapidly and with a high degree of confidence.
Converged infrastructure solutions offer other benefits as well. Generally, these solutions are architected to support virtualization. They are also consolidated to eliminate redundant components and minimize cabling. The result is a reduced data center footprint and greater energy efficiency.
Converged infrastructure solutions also help relieve storage challenges. Legacy storage architectures were designed to address predictable workloads, structured data and dedicated access. Today’s requirements are exactly opposite, with unpredictable workloads such as cloud, virtualization and big data applications. The changing relationship between storage, servers, networks and applications requires a new level of integration across the enterprise.
A converged architecture fundamentally changes how data is accessed by integrating scale-out storage software with converged server and storage hardware platforms. This in turn helps speed IT service delivery.
Evolution, Not Revolution
It might seem like an insurmountable challenge to move from a traditional data center assembled from “best-of-breed” components to one built on converged infrastructure solutions. The good news is that there is no need to change the entire IT environment all at once. Converged infrastructure solutions can be deployed incrementally to support individual applications and new initiatives.
Because converged infrastructure solutions bring together server, storage and networking components along with systems management, it’s important to choose a manufacturer with best-in-class products across the IT stack. It’s also important to ensure that the converged infrastructure has been architected using industry-standard components and interfaces, and that the solution has been thoroughly tested with specific applications. Finally, organizations considering a converged infrastructure solution should ensure that it will work with the provisioning and automation tools already in place within the data center.
Converged infrastructure solutions can go a long way toward improving IT agility and better aligning IT with business goals. By providing pre-configured and integrated components that are VM-ready with management built in, converged infrastructure solutions enable rapid deployment of new applications and services to meet business demands. These standardized IT building blocks can be added incrementally yet create a cohesive data center that is inherently flexible.
Certain applications and services are always going to stay on-premises, so IT needs to begin evolving the data center infrastructure to reduce sprawl and complexity. Converged infrastructure solutions help do that by providing optimally configured components that are dense, green and managed in a unified fashion.
