The need for a Converged Infrastructure

Managing corporate information technology infrastructure has long centered on the challenge of getting the pieces—servers, storage, networks—to work together. With converged infrastructure (CI), that work is done ahead of time and behind the scenes. So it can be easier to install, deploy, update, and manage infrastructure, as well as to optimize its performance, minimize its cost, and maximize its business value. IT organizations can rescue skilled staff from “keeping the lights on” and focus them on realizing new technology-enabled business opportunities.

The evolution of corporate IT has a defining theme: Do less by way of commonplace or “commodity” activities and spend more time and energy enabling the business to capitalize on information systems. This shift happened in a big way in applications development with the availability of integrated software (from SAP, Oracle, and others) for common business functions. IT was able to get out of the commodity software development business and focus on smaller, specialized applications that differentiate the enterprise and its performance for customers.

Now it’s infrastructure management’s turn. Most technology vendors have been concentrating on their respective “stacks”— computing, storage, network—and on helping customers integrate across the stacks. However, until recently, no one was bundling the components into simplified and integrated solutions. No one was providing "infrastructure in a box".

That’s really what converged infrastructure is. It’s a disarmingly simple concept with very sophisticated engineering under the hood. CI packages the basic components—computing/servers, data storage, networking equipment, and the virtualization and other software for infrastructure management—into integrated and optimized units. CI arrives on-site already configured, tested, and certified, so CI solutions are easily installed and maintained. CI goes hand-in-hand with virtualization: Computing resources are pooled, shared by applications and other workloads, and optimized with the help of a hypervisor and other control software. That’s the “what” part of the definition.