Beyond the myths of converged infrastructure
Said Akar, Regional Director at VCE, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East region

Beyond the myths of converged infrastructure

Tell an organisation that they would be better served by consolidating their entire IT estate to a single vendor’s solution and you are likely to see some understandable trepidation. A single point of failure, a single source of innovation, a unified point of vulnerability, and a feeling that the organisation may be tied down to one supplier for future maintenance and upgrades. What is the upside, asks Said Akar, Regional Director, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa and Middle East – VCE, the converged platforms division of EMC.

Like with any other disruptive force, the application of converged infrastructure is marred by myths that hinder business and IT leaders from understanding just how this technology could benefit not just their IT operations but also the business.

Here are the top three myths and clear reasons why your business should ignore them:

Myth 1: Converged infrastructure requires an ‘all or nothing’ approach

One of the most popular myths surrounding converged infrastructure suggests that any move towards convergence means operating in a homogenous environment, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Every organisation starts its move to next generation infrastructure at a different point, driven by different workloads, yet facing similar pressures to establish efficiency, agility and control. We see convergence as a journey, rather than a specific destination – you don’t have to move everything in one fell swoop.

Converged infrastructure does not require the immediate replacement of ALL existing infrastructure resources. On the contrary, in its initial stages, convergence can focus exclusively on using existing resources through consolidated management and automation.

Myth 2: Legacy applications don’t play well with converged infrastructure

There’s a theory that converged infrastructure doesn’t interoperate with legacy applications which again; is far from the truth.

Converged infrastructure is built on the realisation that most IT infrastructures are built on a considerable portfolio of legacy applications which deliver the same – or similar – functionality. The key is to build an IT strategy that gives special consideration to these systems and also their value to the business. Having a converged infrastructure in place just means that organisations now have a roadmap for phasing applications to new technology platforms.

The platform is inherently built for scale in a virtual compute context – allowing organisations to spin up capacity effortlessly to respond to pressures from across the business that support departments initiatives, running whatever legacy operating systems they need to support older applications.

Myth 3: Converged infrastructure constrains innovation

People and organisations often think that working with multiple vendors allows a best of breed approach, built using the multiple and varied innovation programmes of individual vendors. In theory, this approach might hold water, but in the debate around converged infrastructure, it falls short.

Traditionally organisations with legacy infrastructure, need to spend a considerable amount of time looking at the impact, which different innovation cycles will have on their existing infrastructure, and more importantly the impact it would have on a team that is increasingly stretched too thin as they are expected to both maintain existing systems while enabling new innovations for the business.

Whether it is a new application that calls for new server technology or a successful customer service launch that needs the team to reassess network requirements; by working with an integrated platform rather than multiple technology stacks, organisations can leverage the scale needed to meet the most demanding applications whilst still being able “spin out” small-scale computing environments for business applications. The entire process of deploying infrastructure is simpler and easier: planning, purchasing, installation, upgrades, troubleshooting, performance management, and vendor management. So too are the business-critical processes around security and continuity.

Just as importantly, the simplicity in the management plane of converged infrastructure makes it easier for business to innovate for themselves in a number of powerful ways. For example, if software developers have computing environments on demand, they can experiment more, prototype more, and discover other solutions. This all takes time; when IT isn’t purely focused on maintaining a platform it has more room to experiment with other innovations.

The benefits of unifying the infrastructure and management planes for IT cannot be overstated. The impact is transformative: simply put, deploying a converged infrastructure has allowed organisations to move from thinking about maintenance to thinking about innovation, and how technology can support the broader business objectives like working more collaboratively and improving customer satisfaction.

The move to convergence comes from well understood business drivers – efficiency, scale, availability, etc. In a context where businesses are gearing up for growth once again, IT teams cannot have a case in which the “computer says no”.

IT has to deliver innovation rather than maintenance and converged infrastructure is the only way to go for a strategic CIO.

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