Taking steps toward convergence now will ensure IT’s ability to fulfill exponentially escalating business requirements, writes S. Sridhar
Converged Infrastructure does not really need an introduction. A technology concept that is set to change the landscape of enterprise IT, it combines compute, storage, networking, and infrastructure management into an integrated system that provides general-purpose virtualized resource pools for applications, Virtual Desktop infrastructure (VDI) and private clouds.
A good way to explore this concept is to consider the customer paradigm. Generally, organizations are looking to custom-design their data centers on their unique enterprise architecture requirements. But this requires lengthy procurement, custom integration, custom validation and testing, and, ultimately, custom management. But how necessary this is, is something to ponder about.
Successful IT organizations in the future will share information with their vendors on workload, application or general use case, and purchase a pre-integrated platform, or leverage a well thought out reference architecture, to run them.
This might mean employing a high-end platform to run SAP, a mid-range platform with extra storage to run SharePoint or a robust general virtualized platform to run the multitude of applications with more general requirements.
These platforms will more than likely have similar underlying infrastructure components, but the real value will be in the way they are optimized to tackle a particular use case.
The following are 5 reasons to make the move to a converged infrastructure:
1. Gain essential advantages immediately: Convergence is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It can enable focus on a specific pain point such as the coordination of virtual machines and disk arrays now and bring networking into the automation mix later. This incremental approach lets an organization validate their strategy with quantifiable wins that they use to get broader buy-in for longer-term convergence strategy.
2. Start with existing infrastructure: Convergence does not require immediate replacement of any existing infrastructure resources. On the contrary, in its initial stages, convergence can focus exclusively on leveraging existing resources through consolidated management and automation.
3. Enables free resources for innovation: The more a company spends its IT budget on supporting existing applications and services, the less it can devote to real business-enhancing IT innovation. But that kind of innovation has become a life-and-death issue in today’s fast-moving, digitally enabled markets. So the time to start driving down OPEX is now.
4. Retain control of IT services: Any delay in a company’s move to convergence will just add to the time during which services will “leak” to inadequately governed external cloud services providers. By demonstrating to the business that IT can be more responsive to its needs, companies can minimize this leakage and bring vital discipline to a company’s move to the cloud.
5. Expect the unexpected: Surviving an existing infrastructure today does not guarantee a similar outcome in the future. Sudden, unforeseen changes — whether in social/mobile technology, in the global economy, in M&A activity or in the appearance of disruptive competitors — may force responses in ways which can’t be predicted at present. Convergence helps mitigate the risk of these unknowns.
S. Sridhar is Director of Enterprise Solutions Business at Dell India.
