Why Converged Infrastructure is the Future of Cloud

We’re seeing a shift happen within the data center and business world. Organizations are now directly tying  their business and IT strategies together. That means more virtualization, and cloud deployments, as well as accommodations for the ever-mobile user.

The evolution around application and workload delivery has dictated a change in data center design and the economics supporting the architecture. Administrators have been tasked with creating more efficient systems capable of handling greater levels of security and multi-tenancy. These demands, coupled with the demands of the cloud, have necessitated a new kind of architecture—one that avoids the kind of disjointed systems that often rise up in “answer” to new data center demands.

Modern types of converged infrastructure aim to reduce complexity and fragmentation with both the business and IT ecosystem. It’s not just about changing the way we deliver apps and desktops—we’re changing data center economics during the process. Cloud computing, in particular, requires highly efficient systems capable of supporting diverse business goals and a very mobile user.

With all of this in mind, here are four reasons why converged infrastructure is the future of the cloud.

1. Greater levels of design and architectural efficiency

We’re supporting greater numbers of users and workloads, all under the same IT architecture. Converged infrastructure not only supports more users, it also gives them a better experience. From the administrative perspective, your critical resources are under one management plane. Most of all, direct integration with the hypervisor allows you to literally create a bridge into the cloud. On-premise converged infrastructure solutions can scale into the cloud, or even other private data center solutions. The point is that you have the architectural freedom to design your environment around the growing needs of your business.

2. Innovation through software and hardware

Converged infrastructure is all about hardware and software intelligence--creating powerful profiles capable of dynamically provisioning and de-provisioning critical resources. Basically, converged infrastructure help you create cloud consumption models. Alerts, thresholds, specific policies and even hypervisor-level controls are all enabling easier management of a complex ecosystem. Through convergence, you can rapidly deploy new business units, test out new pieces of technology and push workloads into the cloud directly from the management layer. This allows for the greatest amount of flexibility around the logical layer and the physical layer it supports.

3. New business and data center economics

You’re not just deploying a new piece of technology into your data center; you’re deploying a business tool designed to help the organization grow and introduce more efficiency. Converged infrastructure is a means to replace older pieces of hardware, consolidate resources and reduce the entire data center footprint. Often, pushes into the cloud require better economics to support more users and applications. Older server, network and compute technologies--sitting fragmented--could never achieve the level of scale that converged infrastructure could provide. So, by reducing data center footprints with convergence, we’re not only unifying critical resources, we’re also potentially reducing operating costs.

4. Competitive advantage

Cloud computing allows business to be a lot more competitive. They can offer new kinds of services, support more users and even compete with larger organizations. Converged infrastructure, meanwhile, allows businesses to be extremely agile and to shift with market demands. Proactive resource allocation is further enabled by powerful logical and hypervisor-level controls that directly integrate into the hardware layer. Fast control over VMs, applications and even entire user segments helps IT teams manage their ecosystems much more effectively. All of this allows the business to develop strategies around the capabilities of their converged infrastructure solution. Most of all, when a business is agile, it can compete more effectively.

The future data center will be one that’s built around truly efficient technologies. These systems will be able to integrate with all core resources like servers, graphics, virtualization, applications, users, and, of course, the business. They’ll be easier to manage and provide greater levels of multi-tenancy for your users. The overall goal will be to create an IT ecosystem that allows the business to be agile in an ever-evolving market. Converged infrastructure simplifies the delivery of critical resources and truly supports the growing demands of today’s organization. Look to convergence to help enable your cloud.

Underwritten by HPE

Part of HPE’s Power of One strategy, HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers infrastructure as one integrated stack. HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers proven, repeatable building blocks of infrastructure maintained by one management platform (HPE OneView), built and delivered exclusively by qualified HPE Channel Partners. This methodology saves considerable time and resources, compared to the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach.

Based on a complete HPE stack consisting of HPE BladeSystem with Intel® Xeon® E5 v3-based HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blades, HPE 3PAR StoreServ all-flash storage, HPE Networking, and HPE OneView infrastructure management software, the HPE Converged Architecture 700 can be easily modified to fit within your existing IT environment.