Hi All, let us recap from my previous blog, we are moving away from traditional storage and heading towards Converged Infrastructure.
Converged Infrastructure: Compute, Network and Storage are combined together as a unified product and supported by a single vendor. This helps customer to reach out to single vendor for above three technologies instead of multiple vendors. CI provides pre-configured combo of hardware and software in a box by the single vendor and its collaborators.
CI solution provides guaranteed capacity and performance developed by industry’s best architects, developers and engineers. Customers can make right investment and procure exactly according to their capacity and performance required from CI. This avoids over-budgeting or under budgeting for the infrastructure hardware, software and support requirements.
CI is best suited for customers who wants to launch new services in shorter span of time and build new data centers or planning to migrate from existing traditional setup. CI ensures reduced cost, shorter deployments and lesser carbon foot print, cooling, power and rack space.
Please find below Gartner converged infrastructure magic quadrant:
VCE is the industry leader followed by some good competitors like Cisco-Netapp and Oracle placed under ‘Leaders’ quadrant. HP, IBM and Nutanix with its stack running on Dell servers are leading in the ‘Visonares’ quadrant followed by Simplivity.
Regardless of the vendors / products, compute, storage and networking are tightly coupled into a single rack of shared resources that can be pre-configured to customer needs. This helps customers to reduce their time for go to market or launch new infra setup in a days not weeks or months.
Though CI is good for greenfield and new DC’s, CIO’s handling old infra can’t get attracted to this solution. Since existing product life-cycles are vary from product to product that they have procured in their infrastructure setup. Also, there is high risk of losing ROI and TCO. Some of the architects are supporters of best of breed products which does not aid them to look at these type CI vendors / collaborators.
There is no doubt that these CI’s are more flexible, scalable and redundant which assures service and data availability. They are the next big thing in future data centers. Single-pane-of-glass management consoles, reference architectures and proven use cases helps customer to bring down cost in managing these converged infrastructure.
CI vendors like VCE are matured and doing well in the market because they have well defined approach and uses cutting edge technology in all three platforms. The secret of success for any CI product to Win the customers is to ensure that the product has the best interoperability between compute, storage and network which in-turns deliver scalability, high performance and data protection.
I request and encourage to share your views or discuss on this emerging technology platform by leaving your comments below.
Finally, if customer can get all such good things from converged infrastructure products then why do we need “Hyper” converged infrastructure products?
I’ll try to find out answers in my upcoming blog on Hyper Converged Infrastructure. Till then stay tuned for the next blog!!!