A UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPERSEPTEMBER 2012

Brought to you by

Five Reasons to Make the Move to a Converged Infrastructure

This is no time for complacency when it comes to data center architecture and operations. Only by moving

aggressively toward more closely converged and better automated systems, storage and network infrastructure can

IT shift resources from low-value operations to high-value innovation — and fulfill the relentlessly escalating demands

of the business.

2

Five Reasons to Make the Move to a Converged Infrastructure This is no time for complacency when it comes to data center architecture and operations. Only by moving aggressively toward more closely converged and better automated systems, storage and network infrastructure can IT shift resources from low-value operations to high-value innovation — and fulfill the relentlessly escalating demands of the business.

IT has always faced the challenge of meeting esca-lating business demands with limited resources. In fact, the pressure of those demands is what has driven the advances in IT that have brought us to where we are today.

But several factors are making it especially important now for IT decision makers to initiate some strategic changes in the way they architect and manage their organizations’ data center envi-ronments, including:

The growing disparity between business demands and IT resources. An always under-resourced group, IT today faces more challenges than ever. Business demands are relentlessly chang-ing. The sheer volume of data that IT is asked to store, manage, secure and analyze is growing expo-nentially. Customer-facing IT services drive wildly fluctuating capacity requirements. The advent of ubiquitous mobility is pushing IT to deliver a broader range of always-on services, as is the explosion in network-connected objects — from packages with RFID tags to vehicles that report on their where-abouts and fuel consumption.

At the same time, uncertainty in global mar-kets is inhibiting companies from growing their IT spend in proportion to their increased IT demand. The hiring of new staff is something they particu-larly want to avoid.

This combination of unprecedented unpre-dictability in business demand and a strong disinclination to increase IT spending can lead to

nothing short of a crisis in infrastructure strategy.The agility imperative. Companies also

need to be much more nimble when it comes to provisioning new IT services and scaling existing ones up and down. The volatility of markets and the constant entry of new, disruptive competitors are forcing businesses of all kinds to move faster and change direction with greater agility. That means IT can no longer take weeks or months to respond to the changing needs of the business.

Unfortunately, most existing IT architectures and operating models don’t provide adequate agil-ity. Provisioning new services still requires multiple IT staffers to build systems, configure storage and administer network access. This complex, manual process is often done differently for each new service. Most IT organizations also tend to ensure service levels by overprovisioning infrastructure, which they rarely scale back when demand slows. As a result, IT can find itself insufficiently respon-sive to the business — as well as more wasteful and error-prone than it would like to be.

Disintermediation and the cloud. In their quest for faster, less CAPEX- and OPEX-intensive ways to fulfill their needs, business users increas-ingly turn to software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and other public cloud providers for rapidly deployable, pay-as-you-go solutions.

The availability of these public cloud solutions is a good thing on the whole, yet public clouds can pose a variety of problems. One is that compliance

and other considerations limit which IT services can be migrated to the public cloud. Another is that when different business units engage with different cloud providers without appropriate IT governance, all kinds of data management and governance issues can arise.

IT, therefore, can’t simply abdicate efficiency and agility to external cloud providers. It has to deliver responsive, shared services to the business in a resource-efficient way. Otherwise, it will put both its own relevance and the competitiveness of the business at serious risk.

Moving Toward ConvergenceEvery IT organization starts its move to next-gen-eration infrastructure at a different place. And every IT organization has different workloads that drive the evolution of that infrastructure. But regardless of those differences, every IT organiza-tion facing the new pressures of efficiency, agility and control needs the benefits that converged infrastructure — whatever specific form it takes at any given moment — can uniquely deliver.

“Convergence” is actually a journey, rather than a specific destination. It describes a process by which IT organizations begin to evolve their environments to make them more responsive and efficient — and then continue to evolve them over time as business requirements change and new technologies become available.

Convergence is characterized by several distinct but related data center transformations, including:

Consolidated management and alloca-tion of server, storage and network resources. Today, most IT organizations manage their envi-ronments as multiple separate silos. Not only do they treat servers, storage and network resources as separate management domains, but they also wind up managing different sets of devices within these domains (physical and virtual machines, virtual machines running different hypervisors, disk arrays from different vendors, and so on) as siloed subdomains. This approach slows down service provisioning and makes it difficult to adapt quickly to changes in workloads. It also leads to the underutilization of available capacity, because resources in any given subdomain can’t readily be

applied to any given workload. These impediments to agility and efficiency are commonplace despite the rise of virtualization.

Depending on the complexity of a company’s infrastructure and processes, unraveling the ref-erence architectures of the past can take a lot of time and effort. Convergence accelerates a company’s journey by consolidating the “moving parts” of the infrastructure — thereby simplifying management and change.

Better infrastructure automation. Convergence complements the pooled manage-ment of distributed resources with automation capabilities that eliminate the cost, delays and potential errors associated with current manual processes. This automation makes it much easier to quickly bring together the compute, storage and network resources necessary to provision a new application or service. It also allows the IT environment to respond automatically when an uptick in workload demand starts to create a per-formance bottleneck — whether that bottleneck is in CPU cycles, server memory, storage I/O or net-work throughput. Just as important, automation allows resources to be released when they are no longer needed — eliminating the all-too-common phenomenon of wasted infrastructure capacity. And, it allows IT to eliminate unnecessary power consumption.

Through this combination of pooled resources and better automation, convergence empowers IT to define policies that govern the relationships between infrastructure resources and business workloads. These policies can be driven by busi-ness priorities, service level objectives, compliance requirements and other relevant parameters. So, in addition to streamlining operations, IT can lever-age convergence to bring coherent governance to its day-to-day operations.

More efficient infrastructure. Convergence isn’t just about more adaptive management of infrastructure. It’s also about evolving that infra-structure to make it inherently more manageable and efficient. On the server side, for example, a move to blades can give IT the more modu-lar, higher-density computing power it needs to respond to shifts in business demand. Servers can also be designed to deliver greater performance per watt, to run at higher temperatures and to automatically power down when they’re not in use in order to conserve energy.

Similarly, storage infrastructure can be made much more efficient through a more modular approach to adding disk capacity — as well as the more aggressive use of technologies such as deduplication, compression and automated tiering

A UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPER | Five Reasons to Make the Move to a Converged Infrastructure

3

Convergence is not an all-or-nothing

proposition. You can focus on coordinating virtual

machines and disk arrays now and bring networking into

the automation mix later, for example.

of “hot” and “cold” data — so that IT can drive down operational costs at the same time that it improves its ability to adapt to shifts in demand.

Workload transportability. In addition to automating the allocation of pooled resources to specific service workloads, convergence enables the flexible movement of workloads across that environment. So, for example, a new application workload can readily be migrated from a rapidly provisioned development workspace to a dedi-cated test-and-QA domain to a limited pilot for a user-acceptance trial and then to production — all without the delays and manual resource alloca-tions required in today’s typical IT environment.

This workload transportability also enables IT to greatly increase its resiliency without the added cost of standby servers or complex clustering solu-tions. That’s because workloads can quickly and easily be moved to other available infrastructure resources in the event of a device, rack or local data center failure.

Essentially, convergence is the process by which IT evolves from a disparate set of manual operational silos to a well-governed data center that delivers superior efficiency, responsiveness and value — as well as other objectives such as self-service and reduced power consumption.

Five Reasons to Start NowFew, if any, IT organizations will find it practical or desirable to move to fully converged infrastructure overnight. The cost of a massive forklift upgrade would be prohibitive — especially in today’s invest-ment-averse climate — as would the disruption to current operations.

Also, different IT organizations will want to progress toward their convergence objectives along different paths. Some may need to priori-tize the converged management of physical and virtual resources and processes. Others may need to replace entire workload silos of compute, net-working and storage with integrated, customized private clouds.

But every IT organization can benefit from initiating its convergence move sooner, rather than later. Here’s why:

1. You can gain essential advantages right away. Convergence is not an all-or-nothing propo-sition. You can focus on a specific pain point such as the coordination of virtual machines and disk arrays now and bring networking into the automation mix later. This incremental approach lets you validate your strategy with quantifiable wins that you can use to get broader buy-in for your longer-term convergence strategy.

2. You can start with what you have. Conver-gence does not require the immediate replacement of any existing infrastructure resources. On the contrary, in its initial stages, convergence can focus exclusively on leveraging existing resources through consolidated management and automation.

3. Your enterprise urgently needs to free resources for innovation. The more of your IT budget your company spends on supporting exist-ing applications and services, the less it can devote to real business-enhancing IT innovation. But that kind of innovation has become a life-and-death issue in today’s fast-moving, digitally enabled mar-kets. So the time to start driving down OPEX is now.

A UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPER | Five Reasons to Make the Move to a Converged Infrastructure

4

One great way to get your journey to convergence jump-started is with Dell’s Efficient Architecture Workshop. This half-day workshop can be held at Dell or at your location and includes:

• An assessment of your current state and future goals

• An open discussion of how new technologies map to your requirements

• A proposal for next steps, including suggestions for a staged implementation

Dell has the expertise, services and solutions to help you start your convergence journey in the right direction. Regardless of how much or how little Dell equipment your infrastructure uses, Dell can help you design and execute a convergence road map that’s appropriate for your needs and budget.

With Dell’s assistance, you can get better, clearer answers to your most pressing questions about architecture, workload provisioning, automation, governance and an orderly, safe evolution to the kind of hybrid cloud environment your company needs to successfully compete in a world where IT is more important than ever — but budgets just aren’t growing accordingly. As a result, you’ll be better equipped to make well-informed decisions about where to focus your energies and efforts in the near term to achieve your longer-term goals with the greater speed and confidence.

THE FIRST STEP

A UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPER | Five Reasons to Make the Move to a Converged Infrastructure

5

4. You need to retain control of IT ser-vices. Any delay in your move to convergence will just add to the time during which services will “leak” to inadequately governed external cloud services providers. By demonstrating to the busi-ness that IT can be more responsive to its needs, you can minimize this leakage and bring vital discipline to your company’s move to the cloud.

5. You have to be prepared for the unexpected. The fact that you’re surviving with your existing infrastructure today is no guarantee you’ll be able to keep doing so tomor-row. Sudden, unforeseen changes — whether in social/mobile technology, in the global economy, in M&A activity or in the appearance

of disruptive competitors — may force you to respond in ways you can’t currently predict or imagine. Convergence helps mitigate the risk of these unknowns.

Given current pressures, no IT organization can afford to remain complacent. Taking steps toward convergence now will ensure IT’s ability to fulfill exponentially escalating business require-ments within real-world budget and staffing constraints. The good news is that the technology solutions, professional services and best practices necessary for making the move to convergence are readily available. All that remains is for IT leaders to take the initiative and proactively pursue the right path for their company’s future. ■

ABOUT DELLDell offers convergence solutions deliver better organizational results because they uniquely improve efficiency and agility by bringing together key IT elements: compute, storage, networking & management. They enable a simpler IT operational model that collapses and automates critical administrative tasks to enable customers to:

• Rapidly respond to dynamic business demands with template-based infrastructure provisioning & modular infrastructure

• Maximize data center efficiency with automated management of pre-validated infrastructure platforms supported by a single vendor

• Empower greater IT success with repeatable deployment, integration, and management models

For more information click here.

© 2012 UBM TechWeb, a division of UBM LLC. All Rights Reserved.