“Converged Infrastructure or Integrated Infrastructure provides the much needed flexibility and scalability for businesses to grow dynamically while optimizing their IT investments.”
Transforming the technology infrastructure of an organization to meet up with the growing demands of businesses and to reap the benefits of cloud computing needs diligent analysis, deliberation, and a progressive approach. It is also crucial to determine the strategic impact of the current environment, operational processes and technology infrastructure.
The industry is moving towards Datacenter consolidation to meet up with the new challenges. Converged Infrastructure or Integrated Infrastructure provides the much needed flexibility and scalability for businesses to grow dynamically while optimizing their IT investments. Converged infrastructure is nothing but a computing box with two or more technology components are grouped together, and orchestrated to deliver high performance output.
Converged infrastructure uses a preconfigured, factory tested computing solution provided by one or more vendors. It is primarily designed to provide centralized management of IT infrastructure, where all components and resources are managed through a single control panel.
Gartner defines “integrated systems” or “converged infrastructure’ as “combinations of server, storage and network infrastructure, sold with management software that facilitates the provisioning and management of the combined unit.” The goal of an integrated infrastructure is to reduce compatibility issues and simplify the management of servers, storage systems and network devices while reducing the costs for cabling, cooling, power and floor space. This is also sometimes referred as unified computing, datacenter-in-a-box or infrastructure-in-a-box. The main purpose of integrated infrastructure is nothing but to share all the resources and deploy the services quickly.
The challenges are many with the traditional data center approach, right from the capacity sizing, system design through implementation and continue with the day-to-day operations and management. Choosing several components from various vendors and making them work together in synergy is always a mammoth task for all the IT Managers. More the difficulty is when the process and testing is continued every time when there is a patch or version upgrade is applied.
According to market analysts, the converged infrastructure is growing more than 50% year after year and have created some of the world’s fastest growing IT companies such as VCE.
Converged infrastructure is a unified data center where several information technology components such as servers, storage devices, networking equipments and infrastructure management applications are assembled and tested together for high performance computing requirements.
The converged infrastructure vendors typically assemble the various components at their factory, test them together and shipped directly to meet the endpoint computing requirements. This will drastically reduce the time required for the data center commissioning from months to a few weeks or even days and will substantially reduce the costs and resource requirements.
This will benefit all the stakeholders as an End-Users will get reliable, faster and un-interrupted service, whether they are on a local or closed network, accessing through Cloud or service models irrespective of the devices they used to access information. It allows the IT Managers to have more control with a simplified infrastructure management. The CIOs will be happy as it will offer them a consolidated system with secure and reliable data while reducing costs and risks.
As the industry is moving mostly towards cloud offerings, integrated infrastructure will be the most suitable platform for enabling services on public or private clouds or for sharing services such as ‘Infrastructure as Service’ or ‘Platform as a Service’ or ‘Software as a Service’.
As we enter into the world of Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) with billions of connected devices generating Petabytes, Exabytes and Zetabytes of data from all sources simplified platforms and centralized management of integrated infrastructure can be a big relief to all.
