5 Converged Architecture Don'ts

There’s a lot to like about converged architecture, but, as with any technology, careful planning and implementation is needed in order to get the most bang for your buck. It’s also important to make sure that your use case for the technology makes sense.

Here are five things not to do when rolling out converged architecture at your organization.

1. Don’t use converged architecture technology for workloads that may fluctuate—especially downward.

 As with salt in cooking, you can add capacity to a converged architecture system, but you can subtract it. Converged architecture is best used for workloads that are specific and well-known, and that will be used consistently over time.

2. Don’t underestimate the importance of a smooth data migration.

As noted above, companies should be thinking about converged architecture systems for mature, mission-critical workloads. For example, they may decide to run their SharePoint platform on the technology. This makes sense, as the workload is well-understood, and converged architecture has the resiliency and scalability companies demand for their most important applications. But you also have to consider how you are going to moving your applications over to converged architecture systems. To put it plainly, there is no room for error—or downtime, or compromise, or … You get the idea. Most converged architecture vendors will provide advice on and support for making the move.

3. Don’t over- or under-provision.

It’s easy to get a little cocky with converged architecture systems and to forget that their capacity is finite. Administrators must adopt good practices in managing and working with their physical resources. It’s important to plan out a VM or server prior to deploying it. You should be thinking about sizing, database considerations and the type of workloads that will be hosted on your converged infrastructure platform. Testing workloads and understanding how VMs or physical hosts will be utilized prior to deploying them will help in delivering the right amount of resources.

4. Don’t rely on “manual labor.”

Converged architecture systems can scale massively—an HPE Converged Architecture system, for example, can scale to 9,000 VMs. Any kind of manual process, or even a more automated process that works in a small environment but would be time-consuming across hundreds of systems, will bog your IT staff down—way down. When you think about converged architecture, think automation of as many tasks as possible.

5. Don’t overestimate the resiliency of hardware—any hardware.

It’s true that converged architecture systems are resilient, and it’s also true that one downed component can be easily swapped out. However, no hardware can protect completely against data corruption, malware and administrator errors. Backup is also necessary for compliance and general administrative reasons.

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 HP OneView infrastructure management software, the HPE Converged Architecture 700 can be easily modified to fit within your existing IT environment.