A UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPER
SEPTEMBER 2012
Five Reasons to Make the Move
to a Converged Infrastructure
This is no time for complacency when it comes to data
center architecture and operations. Only by moving
aggressively toward more closely converged and better
automated systems, storage and network infrastructure can
IT shift resources from low-value operations to high-value
innovation — and fulfill the relentlessly escalating demands
of the business.
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Five Reasons to Make the Move to a
Converged Infrastructure
This is no time for complacency when it comes to data center
architecture and operations. Only by moving aggressively toward
more closely converged and better automated systems, storage
and network infrastructure can IT shift resources from low-value
operations to high-value innovation — and fulfill the relentlessly
escalating demands of the business.
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IT has always faced the challenge of meeting escalating business demands with limited resources. In
fact, the pressure of those demands is what has
driven the advances in IT that have brought us to
where we are today.
But several factors are making it especially
important now for IT decision makers to initiate
some strategic changes in the way they architect
and manage their organizations’ data center environments, including:
The growing disparity between business
demands and IT resources. An always underresourced group, IT today faces more challenges
than ever. Business demands are relentlessly changing. The sheer volume of data that IT is asked to
store, manage, secure and analyze is growing exponentially. Customer-facing IT services drive wildly
fluctuating capacity requirements. The advent of
ubiquitous mobility is pushing IT to deliver a broader
range of always-on services, as is the explosion in
network-connected objects — from packages with
RFID tags to vehicles that report on their whereabouts and fuel consumption.
At the same time, uncertainty in global markets is inhibiting companies from growing their IT
spend in proportion to their increased IT demand.
The hiring of new staff is something they particularly want to avoid.
This combination of unprecedented unpredictability in business demand and a strong
disinclination to increase IT spending can lead to
nothing short of a crisis in infrastructure strategy.
The agility imperative. Companies also
need to be much more nimble when it comes to
provisioning new IT services and scaling existing
ones up and down. The volatility of markets and
the constant entry of new, disruptive competitors
are forcing businesses of all kinds to move faster
and change direction with greater agility. That
means IT can no longer take weeks or months to
respond to the changing needs of the business.
Unfortunately, most existing IT architectures
and operating models don’t provide adequate agility. Provisioning new services still requires multiple
IT staffers to build systems, configure storage and
administer network access. This complex, manual
process is often done differently for each new
service. Most IT organizations also tend to ensure
service levels by overprovisioning infrastructure,
which they rarely scale back when demand slows.
As a result, IT can find itself insufficiently responsive to the business — as well as more wasteful
and error-prone than it would like to be.
Disintermediation and the cloud. In their
quest for faster, less CAPEX- and OPEX-intensive
ways to fulfill their needs, business users increasingly turn to software as a service (SaaS), platform
as a service (PaaS) and other public cloud providers
for rapidly deployable, pay-as-you-go solutions.
The availability of these public cloud solutions
is a good thing on the whole, yet public clouds can
pose a variety of problems. One is that compliance
A UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPER | Five Reasons to Make the Move to a Converged Infrastructure
and other considerations limit which IT services
can be migrated to the public cloud. Another is
that when different business units engage with
different cloud providers without appropriate IT
governance, all kinds of data management and
governance issues can arise.
IT, therefore, can’t simply abdicate efficiency
and agility to external cloud providers. It has to
deliver responsive, shared services to the business
in a resource-efficient way. Otherwise, it will put
both its own relevance and the competitiveness of
the business at serious risk.
Convergence is not an all-or-nothing
proposition. You can focus on coordinating virtual
machines and disk arrays now and bring networking into
the automation mix later, for example.
Moving Toward Convergence
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Every IT organization starts its move to next-generation infrastructure at a different place. And
every IT organization has different workloads
that drive the evolution of that infrastructure. But
regardless of those differences, every IT organization facing the new pressures of efficiency, agility
and control needs the benefits that converged
infrastructure — whatever specific form it takes at
any given moment — can uniquely deliver.
“Convergence” is actually a journey, rather
than a specific destination. It describes a process
by which IT organizations begin to evolve their
environments to make them more responsive and
efficient — and then continue to evolve them over
time as business requirements change and new
technologies become available.
Convergence is characterized by several
distinct but related data center transformations,
including:
Consolidated management and allocation of server, storage and network resources.
Today, most IT organizations manage their environments as multiple separate silos. Not only do
they treat servers, storage and network resources
as separate management domains, but they also
wind up managing different sets of devices within
these domains (physical and virtual machines,
virtual machines running different hypervisors,
disk arrays from different vendors, and so on) as
siloed subdomains. This approach slows down
service provisioning and makes it difficult to adapt
quickly to changes in workloads. It also leads to
the underutilization of available capacity, because
resources in any given subdomain can’t readily be
applied to any given workload. These impediments
to agility and efficiency are commonplace despite
the rise of virtualization.
Depending on the complexity of a company’s
infrastructure and processes, unraveling the reference architectures of the past can take a lot
of time and effort. Convergence accelerates a
company’s journey by consolidating the “moving
parts” of the infrastructure — thereby simplifying
management and change.
Better infrastructure automation.
Convergence complements the pooled management of distributed resources with automation
capabilities that eliminate the cost, delays and
potential errors associated with current manual
processes. This automation makes it much easier
to quickly bring together the compute, storage
and network resources necessary to provision a
new application or service. It also allows the IT
environment to respond automatically when an
uptick in workload demand starts to create a performance bottleneck — whether that bottleneck
is in CPU cycles, server memory, storage I/O or network throughput. Just as important, automation
allows resources to be released when they are no
longer needed — eliminating the all-too-common
phenomenon of wasted infrastructure capacity.
And, it allows IT to eliminate unnecessary power
consumption.
Through this combination of pooled resources
and better automation, convergence empowers
IT to define policies that govern the relationships
between infrastructure resources and business
workloads. These policies can be driven by business priorities, service level objectives, compliance
requirements and other relevant parameters. So, in
addition to streamlining operations, IT can leverage convergence to bring coherent governance to
its day-to-day operations.
More efficient infrastructure. Convergence
isn’t just about more adaptive management of
infrastructure. It’s also about evolving that infrastructure to make it inherently more manageable
and efficient. On the server side, for example,
a move to blades can give IT the more modular, higher-density computing power it needs to
respond to shifts in business demand. Servers can
also be designed to deliver greater performance
per watt, to run at higher temperatures and to
automatically power down when they’re not in
use in order to conserve energy.
Similarly, storage infrastructure can be made
much more efficient through a more modular
approach to adding disk capacity — as well as
the more aggressive use of technologies such as
deduplication, compression and automated tiering
A UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPER | Five Reasons to Make the Move to a Converged Infrastructure
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of “hot” and “cold” data — so that IT can drive
down operational costs at the same time that it
improves its ability to adapt to shifts in demand.
Workload transportability. In addition to
automating the allocation of pooled resources to
specific service workloads, convergence enables
the flexible movement of workloads across that
environment. So, for example, a new application
workload can readily be migrated from a rapidly
provisioned development workspace to a dedicated test-and-QA domain to a limited pilot for a
user-acceptance trial and then to production — all
without the delays and manual resource allocations required in today’s typical IT environment.
This workload transportability also enables IT
to greatly increase its resiliency without the added
cost of standby servers or complex clustering solutions. That’s because workloads can quickly and
easily be moved to other available infrastructure
resources in the event of a device, rack or local
data center failure.
Essentially, convergence is the process by
which IT evolves from a disparate set of manual
operational silos to a well-governed data center
that delivers superior efficiency, responsiveness
and value — as well as other objectives such as
self-service and reduced power consumption.
Five Reasons to Start Now
Few, if any, IT organizations will find it practical or
desirable to move to fully converged infrastructure
overnight. The cost of a massive forklift upgrade
would be prohibitive — especially in today’s investment-averse climate — as would the disruption to
current operations.
Also, different IT organizations will want
to progress toward their convergence objectives
along different paths. Some may need to prioritize the converged management of physical and
virtual resources and processes. Others may need
to replace entire workload silos of compute, networking and storage with integrated, customized
private clouds.
But every IT organization can benefit from
initiating its convergence move sooner, rather than
later. Here’s why:
1. You can gain essential advantages right
away. Convergence is not an all-or-nothing proposition. You can 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 you validate
your strategy with quantifiable wins that you can
use to get broader buy-in for your longer-term
convergence strategy.
THE FIRST STEP
One great way to get your journey to
convergence jump-started is with Dell’s
Efficient Architecture Workshop. This
half-day workshop can be held at Dell
or at your location and includes:
• An assessment of your current state
and future goals
• An open discussion of how
new technologies map to your
requirements
• A proposal for next steps,
including suggestions for a staged
implementation
Dell has the expertise, services and
solutions to help you start your
convergence journey in the right
direction. Regardless of how much
or how little Dell equipment your
infrastructure uses, Dell can help you
design and execute a convergence road
map that’s appropriate for your needs
and budget.
With Dell’s assistance, you can get
better, clearer answers to your most
pressing questions about architecture,
workload provisioning, automation,
governance and an orderly, safe
evolution to the kind of hybrid cloud
environment your company needs to
successfully compete in a world where
IT is more important than ever — but
budgets just aren’t growing accordingly.
As a result, you’ll be better equipped
to make well-informed decisions about
where to focus your energies and
efforts in the near term to achieve your
longer-term goals with the greater
speed and confidence.
2. You can start with what you have.
Conver-gence does not require the 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. Your enterprise urgently needs to free
resources for innovation. The more of your IT
budget your company spends 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.
A UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPER | Five Reasons to Make the Move to a Converged Infrastructure
4. You need to retain control of IT services. Any delay in your 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,
you can minimize this leakage and bring vital
discipline to your company’s move to the cloud.
5. You have to be prepared for the
unexpected. The fact that you’re surviving
with your existing infrastructure today is no
guarantee you’ll be able to keep doing so tomorrow. 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 you to
respond in ways you can’t currently predict or
imagine. Convergence helps mitigate the risk of
these unknowns.
Given current pressures, no IT organization
can afford to remain complacent. Taking steps
toward convergence now will ensure IT’s ability
to fulfill exponentially escalating business requirements within real-world budget and staffing
constraints. The good news is that the technology
solutions, professional services and best practices
necessary for making the move to convergence are
readily available. All that remains is for IT leaders to
take the initiative and proactively pursue the right
path for their company’s future. ■
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ABOUT DELL
Dell offers convergence solutions deliver better organizational results because they uniquely improve efficiency
and agility by bringing together key IT elements: compute, storage, networking & management. They enable a
simpler IT operational model that collapses and automates critical administrative tasks to enable customers to:
• R
apidly respond to dynamic business demands with template-based infrastructure provisioning & modular
infrastructure
•M
aximize data center efficiency with automated management of pre-validated
supported by a single vendor
infrastructure platforms
• Empower greater IT success with repeatable deployment, integration, and management models
For more information click here.
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