Converged infrastructure optimizes IT environment


Converged infrastructure has become the most talked about word in the IT industry over the past two years. In Western Europe and North America, it stands for the integration of computing, storage, networking and infrastructure management into an integrated system to help organizations increase efficiency, agility and IT service quality. When it comes to developing world of Africa, Latin America and Asia, it has contributed to fast pace of business growth and has resulted in transformation of the datacenters and organizations are increasingly facing challenge with the prospect of delivering applications and IT services on demand to a flexible and dynamic workforce. Converged infrastructure has been the key solution to fast delivery of IT services in countries like South Africa, Singapore and Australia by maximizing data center efficiency, and strengthening IT service quality. Last year, Gartner, a global research company estimated that in the next two years, a third of all servers could ship as managed resources integrated in a converged infrastructure because it has the ability to achieve quick time to value by rapidly configuring infrastructure to deliver desired workloads.

In addition to controlling server, storage and networking resources, the application that sits on top of that infrastructure is also managed. This means a vast amount of complexity is removed and businesses benefit from the ability to automate operations and service business requirements at the point of need by deploying reliable resources quickly. Outcome resulting from automation reduce the costs, delays and potential errors associated with current manual processes. Clearly, automation makes it much easier to quickly bring together the compute, storage, and network resources necessary to provision a new application or service. According to a Canadian data expert I spoke to, such process allows IT environment to respond automatically when an uptick in workload demand starts to create a performance bottleneck. She also informed me that automation allows resources to be released when they are no longer needed and this minimizes wastage of infrastructure capacity. A converged infrastructure solution should have system management software that collapses multiple management consoles, simplifies infrastructure configuration and drives automation and consistency

Businesses in Africa and Asia requires flexibility to effectively integrate converged infrastructure into existing IT environments and ensure that they are suited to individual business needs and workloads. Converged infrastructure solutions cut across beyond hardware, software, services and support are essential elements that provide users with an open, intuitive, automated and end-to-end foundation thus allowing IT to quickly harness the benefits of a converged solution. Converged infrastructures requires planning based on the applications and workloads that will help businesses to compete that requires pre-optimized for a broad range of workloads, including analytical, unified communications, desktop virtualization and private cloud. The solutions are accessible for customers of all shapes and sizes and those who have embraced the idea have benefited by choosing platforms that are optimized for their most important workloads and applications. This new business model has provided organization’s IT more agility to get systems up and running and has lifted financial burdens with better total cost of ownership and lower operating expenses.


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