With the trend towards cloud, companies are cutting hardware deployments to the fullest while reducing operating expenses to the bare minimum. In essence, enterprises are opting for a converged infrastructure or all-in-one computing that reduces cost, simplifies deployment and eases maintenance.
As a result, the market for converged systems is increasing at nearly 55 percent annually, which should result in a market value of $17.8 billion by 2016, according to market research firm IDC (News - Alert). The study shows that this is growth is being driven by both the traditional enterprises looking to enhance existing infrastructure, and new groups of cloud providers who are struggling to ensure they can meet service level requirements for clients with constantly expanding data loads.
“In both cases, the choice between bricks-and-mortar data facilities consisting of complex, labor-intensive infrastructure. or sleek, highly scalable converged systems is quickly becoming a no-brainer,” wrote Arthur Cole in a blog post on ITBusinessEdge site.
Despite a no brainer, there is some resistance to convergence. And it is based on myth rather than facts, Zenoss’ Deepak Kanwar pointed it out to Cole. According to Kanwar, the chief fear is that the converged systems will prove inadequate for some applications because there is only one pool of shared resources. “But provided there is adequate monitoring and applications have been configured properly for user demands, this should not be a problem – or at least, it can be easily rectified should resource contention start to hamper performance,” Kanwar told Cole. Plus, unlike traditional infrastructure, converged systems come from a single vendor, so you know whom to call should any issue arise, added Kanwar.
The blog post also highlights comments from Dell’s (News - Alert) Antonio Gallardo, who thinks the choice of individual components within the platform can have a significant impact on performance. For example, he adds, blade storage arrays offer broad scalability and are easily managed, even in automated virtual environments. And, they provide enterprise-class data protection features like snapshots and replication, as well as automated tiering and workload management. In addition, the Dell executive thinks blades require limited cabling and enable simplified switching environments to help reduce costs.
Similarly, for some proponents like HP’s Jim Ganthier, converged infrastructure is actually seen as a stepping stone to more advanced virtual environments. At the recent HP Discover event in Las Vegas, Ganthier told the attendees that HP’s Project Moonshot is in fact part of a larger strategy surrounding the software-defined data center. The blog post indicates that HP is expecting this to be a crucial step for web-facing and hosted operations that are already trying to deal with millions of hits per day using traditional silo-based infrastructure.
“As infrastructure convergence becomes the norm, unification of management and other middleware functions should allow organizations to maintain their Web presences more efficiently and effectively,” stated Ganthier.
Edited by Rich Steeves