What VARs should know about converged systems
Wayne Gratton discusses the drivers and benefits of converged systems sales
We have noticed customers are now looking at how to get the expenditure in their datacentres in the opex column, and are increasingly searching for ways to move towards the private cloud. Much of this may be driven by what customers are seeing in the public cloud – with instant provisioning of IT services – and indicates that they are expecting the same in their own datacentres.
Customers are demanding ways to handle changing workload levels. This may involve forays into areas such as desktop virtualisation, business analytics, ERP systems or even new application services.
We believe that companies are increasingly considering ways of centralising and consolidating their IT systems to streamline company information and improve cost efficiency. Pools of resources must be deployed quickly to enable the implementation of secure, manageable and cohesive application estates.
I think part of the answer at least involves converged systems, which are becoming more appealing to vendors – including HP, Cisco, Oracle, and IBM. So, what are converged systems and what are the benefits?
A converged system is a pre-integrated, vendor-certified system. It can contain: servers, data storage devices, networking equipment, middleware, OS and application software, in addition to software for IT infrastructure management, virtualisation, automation and orchestration.
You may also see them described as unified computing, fabric-based computing or dynamic infrastructure. They may accelerate the transition to IP storage to assist in building cloud-ready infrastructures.
Converged systems are a step up from reference architectures. They are typically sold as pre-integrated solutions, even a SKU.
Converged infrastructure addresses the problem of siloed architectures and IT sprawl by pooling and sharing IT resources through open source architecture. Rather than dedicating a set of resources to a particular computing technology, application or line of business, converged infrastructures create a group of virtualised servers, storage and networking capacity that is shared by multiple applications and lines of business, making it more streamlined and easier to manage.
Both technical and business efficiencies can result, stemming from the pre-integration of technology components, the pooling of IT resources and the automation of IT processes. They can help address the key challenges of management of evolving workloads and big data.
Customers benefit from ease and speed of deployment, lower operating expenses, improved security, greater resource utilisation, ease of management, improved application performance and application availability – among other things.
Such systems simplify the deployment and optimisation of application environments by integrating hardware, software and services. The full potential of virtualisation, cloud and next-generation applications, such as real-time analytics, can be realised more quickly as a result.
It also helps to accelerate the consolidation of legacy applications, data and infrastructure that can free up the customer's operation for growth.
Whatever the ultimate outcome, we can be confident that datacentre components will increasingly be designed to be integrated and expected to work in concert, delivering greater automation.
Wayne Gratton is EMEA SolutionsPath business development director at Avnet