The world of modern IT infrastructure can be complex and difficult to manage. Typically, infrastructure is a mixture of servers, data storage platforms, a backup solution and networking switches . Right now, these different pieces of the IT puzzle, live in separate, expensive and hard to manage silos. This is traditional infrastructure at its worst. With expanding business requirements and shrinking budgets, it creates a set of challenges which are all too familiar to today’s IT administrators and business owners.
Converged solutions solve the challenges of traditional IT infrastructures, by putting all of the separate pieces together. They combine compute, storage and networking into a single server, which dramatically simplifies the infrastructure stack.
Benefits over traditional IT infrastructures
Simplified management
Converged infrastructures administration requires a much smaller staff than traditional architectures. This allows an organization to reallocate its IT staff resources and expand its ability to serve its customers in different ways
Reduce your total cost of ownership
Initial deployment is faster and much less expensive than traditional architectures. While the cost of shifting from a silo solution to converged infrastructures may be initially higher than simply expanding an existing silo, the long-term operating cost of converged infrastructures is far lower.
Dramatically reduce downtime
Traditional infrastructures require every part to be configured and deployed separately. This makes 10-hour recovery times common. Converged infrastructures benefit from built-in vm-centric backups, replication and in some cases, DR units. This makes recovery times much faster vs. traditional infrastructure.
Decreased maintenance
Because there aren’t as many pieces of hardware, maintenance demands are significantly decreased from traditional architectures. Data center automation tools work especially well in converged environments. By centralizing server and network management, day-to-day maintenance will take significantly less time.
Avoid Lock-in
Converged platforms are exactly that, a platform. It enables the use of multiple hypervisors, on commodity hardware with intelligence in software so that you’re business isn’t forced into forklift hardware upgrades when extending your infrastructure, or changing to a new hypervisor layer.
GUI Driven Management
Converged platforms provide a GUI based interface to manage your infrastructure through, across all of your infrastructure nodes, as well as supporting the tools that are available within virtualisation platforms such as VMware.