Still watching the converged infrastructure market from the sidelines? You're a bit late to the early adopter game -- especially in the midmarket -- but there's still time to wrap your arms around the opportunity before it shifts to mass-market adoption.
Converged infrastructure takes servers, storage and networking and places them into an integrated data center package. The options, according to Gartner and IDC, include:
- Integrated Workload Systems: Server, storage and network integrate with database and/or software to provide appliance or appliance-like functionality.
- Integrated Infrastructure Systems: Server, storage and network integrated to provide shared compute infrastructure.
- Integrated reference Architectures: Products in which predefined, pre-sized components are designated as options for an integrated system, where by the user and /or channel can make configuration choices between the predefined options.
The benefits, according to StorageServers, include:
- Reduced energy consumption
- Accelerated IT service department
- Increased efficiency across the entire IT services lifecycle
- Converged management
- Less vendors to deal with when worrying about technology road-maps and technology going forward
Of course, that also means potential vendor lock-in. But many midmarket customers value the clear roadmaps and integrated product designs.
True believers include Energy Future Holdings, a Texas-based utility -- which is leaning heavily on VMware and VCE converged infrastructure.
The company spent 2009 through 2014 focused on the virtualization era -- consolidating the Texas utility's physical server infrastructure by 38 percent and reducing from three data centers to two, according to statements at EMC World 2015. At the same time, virtualized servers increased seven-fold, and virtualized storage increased eight-fold, according to Paul Reyes, VP of infrastructure management and operations, told me.
