Over the years, IT has become an integral component in most organizations. It aids in the integration of global e-commerce, global distribution networks, and other critical business processes. The effective implementation of IT in an organization requires high levels of flexibility, cost efficiency, and performance across its IT infrastructure.
Traditional non-converged IT infrastructure cannot efficiently meet the storage requirements of organizational data and rapid application deployments. However, converged infrastructure can overcome these drawbacks by central management of an organization’s network, computation, storage, visualization, and applications.
This is a huge reason why the global converged infrastructure market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 31.3 percent during the 2014-2019 forecast period.
How can Converged Infrastructure Improve IT Departments?
According to Technavio analysts, here are the top four reasons why converged infrastructure is becoming a popular choice among enterprises:
1. Low cost of maintenance
Unlike traditional datacenters, converged infrastructure consists of consolidated servers, storage, and networking components that require minimal effort to integrate with the existing system, as well as new systems. When a new server or storage is added in traditional datacenters, an additional resource is needed to integrate, maintain, and support the newly added components as part of the existing IT infrastructure.
As a result, organizations are now facing challenges from a utilization standpoint as workloads need to be deployed in these datacenters. For example, the set of servers that are deployed to run a CRM application cannot host payroll or data backup applications; therefore, these servers would require a separate infrastructure that will be used only during payroll processing. This results in underutilization of infrastructure. However, organizations using converged infrastructure can capitalize on technology to save costs in these areas.
2. Risk-free integration
In traditional datacenters, with each new patch, organizations have to assess and validate the criticality of the patch, its relevance to each platform, and its firmware compatibility with other components. In converged infrastructure, these complications are eliminated. All firmware and patches can be pre-tested and validated on a standardized platform in a lab that has exactly the same functionality of a datacenter in an organization.
Instead of adding various updates from a multitude of vendors each year, converged infrastructure provides a single matrix that upgrades the infrastructure as a whole and is risk-free. This helps companies to replace their existing complex IT infrastructure, without the high risk of failing to upgrade the system.
3. Reduced infrastructure complexity
Organizations are increasingly implementing converged infrastructure as its network structure is less complex. It provides flexibility where vendors have clearly defined the software stacks over virtualization layers. Converged infrastructure solutions combine a bundled offering of network components making them ideal and quick to deploy and manage.
Exadata and Exalogic from Oracle, vStart from Dell, CloudSystem Matrix from HP, and PureSystems from IBM are examples of converged infrastructure solutions. These are called single stack Infrastructure and are typically marketed as all-in-one solutions. As these solutions are preconfigured, pre-integrated, and pre-tested standardized models, it would take only 30 to 45 days to deploy them from procurement to production, helping companies eliminate issues related to firmware patching, bug fixing, and updates.
4. Shared utility storage
Vendors are increasingly integrating utility storage technology that helps companies offer scalable operations and delivery of cloud services with various storage solutions for data deduplication and virtualization. This combination of services will help clients consolidate storage hardware and explosive data growth. This technology has resulted in automated storage tiering that improves performance of thin storage offerings by eliminating redundancy of data and over-provisioning.
