Converged Architecture Provides Greater Virtualization Leverage

Creating enterprise computing environments that support flexibility and growth has become one of the IT department’s key charters. Virtualization plays a big role in this endeavor today, enabling IT departments to spin server instances up and down as needed. The next challenge is making more sophisticated use of virtualization in order to effectively meet increasingly time-sensitive and complex business challenges.

“Virtualization of the data center has proven to be a true IT game changer that provides increased flexibility and control in not only building but also managing IT infrastructures and mission-critical data assets,” said Paul Zeiter, president of Zerto, a company that designs disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. “The cost savings are substantial, as [is] the improved ability to right-size infrastructures as business needs change over time.”

Virtualized systems’ ease of configuration allows IT to adjust server instances as necessary in support of the enterprise’s changing needs, but with an increase in virtualization there can be an increase in complexity and incompatibility.

“The primary challenge to it all is ensuring that key systems supporting various requirements, including compliance-related and other business needs, are easily and quickly deployed,” said Zeiter. “However, the issue with this fast and easy deployment vision is the all-too- frequent experience of incompatibility between systems, which dramatically hinders an organization’s ability to scale software and complete solutions as needed.”

IT needs to consider whether employing a piecemeal approach that combines a variety of equipment types rather than choosing converged architecture will deliver the expected advantages.

“Capacity management is a common problem because workloads have been constrained within the physical layer rather than using the more innovative approach of virtualized technologies,” said Zeiter. “Virtualization helps organizations better manage their data and applications across multiple systems, which improves the efficiency of IT organizations. This same approach also helps improve IT workforce productivity, thereby improving ROI and revenue performance.”

With that said, as systems are scaled to meet computing needs, the increase in the number of compute instances demands an increase in attention and management.

“As virtual infrastructures grow,” says Zeiter, “seamless management of it must be supported through intuitive interfaces that guide users, including non-experts, to help ensure that resource constraints can be overcome. This is essential as IT leaders look to make better use of their team’s resources to help increase the value they deliver to their organizations.”

Systems that simplify and organize management responsibilities can be leveraged to ease maintenance and deployment issues inherent in virtualized systems. Converged architecture systems and their integrated management tools can make the difference between having a system that simply addresses the need for storage and computing capacity and one that truly enables the enterprise to experiment, support new initiatives and grow.

Replacing disparate computing devices with converged architecture systems, deployed with intuitive management utilities, can make a significant difference to enterprises that are growing and changing. (And isn’t that the “good problem to have” that every enterprise wants?)

Underwritten by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Converged Infrastructure through the new HPE Composable Infrastructure:  Enables IT to operate like a cloud provider to lines of business and the extended enterprise. It maximizes the speed, agility, and efficiency of core infrastructure and operations to consistently meet SLAs and provide the predictable performance needed to support core workloads—for both today and tomorrow.

HPE ConvergedSystems:  Integrates compute, storage, and networking resources to deploy pre-validated, factory-tested configurations, from HPE, in weeks instead of months.  HPE ConvergedSystem gives you lower cost of ownership and greater flexibility to meet more business demands.

HPE Converged Architecture:  A flexible and validated reference architecture, 100% fulfilled through HPE channel partners. Based on best-in-class HPE compute, storage, and HPE OneView infrastructure management software, this architecture delivers interoperability with a choice of third party top-of-rack networking switches and hypervisors from leading industry vendors.