The advantages of setting up a converged infrastructure

As you can see from these case studies, the potential benefits of CI are many and interrelated. To appreciate the variety, and to anticipate what benefit streams your organization most wants to capture, look at the benefits through nine lenses:

• Simplicity. In many business endeavors, from customer relationships to product offerings to technology management, IT can be challenged with runaway complexity. That’s when simplification can be transformative. Many of the benefits of CI stem from the simplicity and standardization of working with an integrated platform rather than multiple technology stacks.
• Performance. CI can dramatically improve both utilization and reliability of infrastructure. In a highly virtualized environment, server utilization may already be high. CI extends this efficiency to storage and network port utilization and enables better performance optimization of the overall infrastructure.
• Availability. Greater (sometimes near-perfect) reliability means higher availability of infrastructure, applications, and services. CI enables IT to meet its service-level agreements and the business to meet its performance promises to customers. CI has helped organizations make the leap to 24/7 business operation.
• Speed. Infrastructure can be deployed in record time. An IDC study found that CI cut the time to market for new services in half. If the new infrastructure is for applications development (DevOps), it can be “spun up” almost instantaneously, which means that developers can do their jobs faster. IT can respond to business requests with, “You can have it now,” rather than, “You can have it in a few months.” And the business can accelerate time to market of technologybased offerings.
• Scalability. With CI, it’s also easier to expand or shrink available resources with changing workloads and the peaks and valleys of business transaction volume. If your organization wants to leverage the resources of what IDC calls the “third platform”—Internet, cloud, mobility, social media, and big data — then scalability is a business necessity.
• Staffing. CI requires less IT staff to operate and manage it. You can capture that benefit as labor cost savings. You can capture it as cost avoidance through the ability to support business and infrastructure growth without adding staff. Or you can capture it as an opportunity to redeploy IT resources.
• Risk. CI reduces infrastructure supply chain risk through procurement control, the testing and certification of equipment, and the fact that the vendor has a lot of “skin in the game.” CI reduces operational risk through robust and comprehensive tools for infrastructure control, including security, plus automation to minimize human error. CI also reduces risk to business continuity through high availability and reliability, less disruptive upgrades, and a solid platform for disaster recovery.
• Innovation. With CI, a company enjoys technological innovation as the vendor builds in technology advances and keeps the platform up to date. More important, CI facilitates business innovation in two powerful ways: One, it provides a simplified path to the cloud, where a business can experiment with and use a vast and growing array of innovative and specialized software and services. Two, when software developers have computing environments on demand, they can experiment more, prototype more, iterate with their business partners, and discover superior business solutions.
• Cost. The cost advantages of CI can be sliced and diced many ways, but you should expect to realize and measure savings in four basic areas.

If you review all the other benefits from a financial perspective, you find that CI can drive down business cost as well as infrastructure cost. For example, it will be harder to measure, but put some round numbers on the revenue opportunity and cost avoidance associated with better business continuity, as well as the value of expanded innovation capacity and faster time to market of systems-based products and services. If you look at the benefits of speed, scalability, staff redeployment, and innovation capacity together, you will find in CI a superior platform for business agility.