Modern business today depends on IT infrastructure as its backbone. Organizations can exploit it to expand into new, fast-growing markets. It’s also critical to launch new customer services and key to leverage data and utilize data analytics within business processes.

Traditional IT vs. Highly Virtualized IT
The value of the IT organization in today’s marketplace is closely measured by business executives. They need assurances that the organization is enabled by IT operations to meet and support specific business objectives. Over the past few years, IT organizations have started on a journey of transformation of the traditional IT, where it took months to deploy a single system or application, to a highly virtualized IT, where businesses expect a new system or application to be deployed in days, if not hours or minutes.

Converged Infrastructure Benefits
One of the current plays that is growing in popularity to meet these expectations is Converged Infrastructure. The advantage for the IT organization is a simpler, more efficient environment. Converged systems are designed and delivered in a preconfigured bundle that integrates compute, storage, and network resources with virtualization software and infrastructure management software into a pre-tested platform.

The Key benefits are:

• Ease of deployment and increased IT agility: converged systems are pre-engineered, pre-integrated, and pre-tested to reduce time when deploying
• Simplified on-going maintenance: software upgrades and new code releases on individual components are typically tested and pre-validated to eliminate infrastructure inter-operability problems for a more stable environment
• Increased automation: Converged systems provide increased automation through dynamic partitioning and automatic load balancing to support different business applications with different workload characteristics
• Lower IT costs: decreased operating and capital costs resulting from higher utilization, fewer network connections, and reduced labor via automated data center management and consolidating storage/networking management infrastructure
• Infrastructure Cost Savings: associated costs to aging infrastructure that has been replaced by converged systems, which no longer requires being refreshed or maintained are eliminated. Growth requirements will not need more infrastructure acquisition but rather will be met by automated provisioning.
• Ease of management: centralizing the management of server, network and storage simplifies day-to-day management tasks
• Support made simpler: as converged systems typically involve a single SKU, this translates into a single support call to a single vendor for any issues/problems

Addressing the needs of Cloud Infrastructures
Virtualization technologies at the Compute, Storage, and Network ‘layers’ have enabled huge advances in efficiency and flexibility through consolidation and software automation. But these IT stack layers are still largely separate today, with little end-to-end visibility for even management and monitoring, much less automated provisioning, elasticity, or user self-service. In order to realize true Cloud Computing features and benefits, the infrastructure must operate as a fully-virtualized, fully-integrated entity, with awareness of each layer and integration/coordination between them.

That is where Converged Infrastructure makes its case as it leverages the virtualization capabilities of each layer, integrates them into a single unified infrastructure, and wraps end-to-end management/automation/orchestration software around the entire stack to enable automated application and business-process-centric provisioning of coordinated IT resources.

The cure for complex IT environments
Converged Infrastructure Solutions deliver extreme advances in infrastructure efficiency, flexibility, and responsiveness therefore allowing you to service your business’s IT needs faster, easier, and less expensively than ever before. This can be the cure for complex IT environments by eliminating the bottleneck to your organization. CIOs are always looking for ways to simplify complex IT environments and improve their overall computing agility. A converged infrastructure can do this for them.

Interested in learning more about vendors for Converged Systems?

View: Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems

This is Gartner's term for converged and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions. Find out who’s in, who didn't make the list.

For more information: visit Sentia's Converged Systems Resource Center.

As experts in Server/Compute, Network, and Storage Virtualization, Sentia can fully support your organization’s Converged Infrastructure initiatives.