Changing times see growing demands at speeds which most businesses cannot match. The heart of today’s changing business models is undoubtedly the ability to innovate quickly. The past decade has seen information technology (IT) evolving from being a back-office business processes-enabler to being the very foundation of a modern business. Businesses expect their IT investments to accelerate their pace of innovation, provide flexibility to meet new demands, and continually reduce the costs of operations.

Enterprises need diligent analysis, deliberation and a progressive approach to transform its technology infrastructure. To met some of the challenges, the industry is moving towards Datacenter Consolidation. Often known as Converged Infrastructure or Integrated Infrastructure, it provides the much needed flexibility and scalability for businesses to grow dynamically while optimizing  their IT investments.

Gartner defines “integrated systems” or “converged infrastructure’ as “combinations of server, storage and network infrastructure, sold with management software that facilitates the provisioning and management of the combined unit.” The main purpose of integrated infrastructure is nothing but to share all the resources and deploy the services quickly.

The goal of an integrated infrastructure is to reduce compatibility issues and simplify the management of servers, storage systems and network devices while reducing the costs for cabling, cooling, power and floor space. Converged infrastructure is nothing but a computing box with  two or more technology components that are grouped together, and orchestrated to  deliver high performance output. This is the reason it is also  sometimes referred as unified computing, datacenter-in-a-box or infrastructure-in-a-box. Converged infrastructure uses a preconfigured, factory tested computing solution provided by one or more vendors. It is primarily designed to provide centralized management of IT infrastructure, where all components and resources are managed through a single control panel.

The challenges with a traditional data center approach begin right from the capacity sizing, system design through implementation and continue with the day-to-day operations  and management.  Choosing several components from various vendors and making them work together in synergy is always a mammoth task for all the IT Managers. Challenges come up yet again when the process and testing is continued every time a patch or version upgrade is applied.

According to market analysts, the converged infrastructure market is growing more than 50% year after year and have created some of the world’s fastest growing IT companies such as VCE with VMWare, Cisco and EMC² coming together.

Various components are assembled at the factory of the infrastructure vendors, they are tested together and then are shipped directly to meet the end-point computing requirements. The time required for the data center commissioning reduces drastically from months to a few weeks or even days and thus reduces the costs and resource requirements substantially.

This benefits all the stakeholders as end-users get reliable, faster and un-interrupted service. It allows the IT Managers to have more control with a simplified infrastructure management, whether they are on a local or closed network, accessing through Cloud or service models and irrespective of the devices they use to access information. The CIOs are happy as it offers them a consolidated system with secure and reliable data while reducing costs and risks.

With a converged Infrastructure, IT leaders have the flexibility to reduce costs, enhance service delivery, shift IT focus towards delivering business value versus maintaining infrastructure and meet the evolving expectations of a tech-savvy, mobile workforce. A good converged infrastructure system will transform the IT environments of an enterprise to become more agile, reliable, and cost-effective.

Converged infrastructure is essential for many companies to ensure that their datacenter infrastructures can meet today’s challenges. There are decided advantages to using converged solutions, like lowering costs, increasing levels of utilization, and reducing downtime.

Converged infrastructure improves IT agility by reducing the time needed to deliver applications and services with a faster time to market for new services/products. It facilitates business innovation as IT staff spends more time on innovation projects including mobile and analytics. Staff focus on core activities, thus increases performance driving higher levels of customer services and satisfaction.There will be higher levels of cost-effectiveness, scalability, and reliability in the technology infrastructure.

The effective use of converged infrastructure is a key enabler of business flexibility. Enterprise datacenters around the world are resorting to converged infrastructure deployments as their primary method of implementation for any new capacity in their way forward. Furthermore, the strategic thinking behind deploying converged infrastructure is also changing.

Till recently, most businesses were increasing utilization and reducing operational costs around managing compute, storage, and network environments separately. While those benefits are still relevant, companies are now going beyond this rationale because converged infrastructure also provides significant benefits in terms of enterprise agility and time to market. Enterprises recognize business benefits such as improved organizational agility, faster application development, increased innovation, and improved employee productivity.

As the industry is moving mostly towards cloud offerings, integrated infrastructure will be the most suitable platform for enabling services on public or private clouds or for sharing services such as ‘Infrastructure as Service’ or ‘Platform as a Service’ or ‘Software as a Service’.

There are still some challenges to deploying converged infrastructure in an enterprise.Coming up with the financial flexibility to support the up-front investment may present a challenge for some organizations. Some IT organizations prefer a best-of-breed approach, sourcing servers, storage, and networking from separate vendors, each according to the strengths of their underlying offerings. Getting all these under a single converged infrastructure umbrella undermines the ability of customers to pursue  strategies at cost lowering by pitching vendors for getting a competitive cost. Inspite of all these challenges, there are huge opportunities that are evident.

As we enter into the world of Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) with billions of connected devices generating Petabytes, Exabytes and Zetabytes of data from all sources,  simplified platforms and centralized management of integrated infrastructure is the way forward and can be a big relief to all.