Converged infrastructure will be a major avenue of investment for companies around Ireland in 2014 according to a number of industry experts.
With number of vendors delivering new offerings into the marketplace over the past 12 months, HP’s enterprise storage, servers and networking (ESSN) converged infrastructure specialist, Siobhan Foley cited the area as a “major factor in enterprise IT during 2014 and beyond”.
Nigel Moulton, EMEA chief technology officer with another of the industry leaders, the Cisco, EMC and VMware-created company, VCE, talked of a recent “surge of interest” in the area from companies large and small.
Moulton said that at this point “most companies will be well versed in these technologies”, but added that, “while how converged infrastructure is conceptualised isn’t new, what is new is how it can be delivered”.
HP’s Foley said converged infrastructure is now the most widely accepted approach for solving legacy data centre constraints, bringing together server, storage, networking, facilities, and management. All, she said, with the aim of achieving “interoperability that utilises common resource pools based on a common platform”.
Complexity
“IT organisations are managing more data and more complexity than ever before, they are under pressure to continually improve efficiencies while remaining agile and responding to the speed of business change,” said Foley, adding that converged infrastructure addresses “all of these challenges”.
David Kinsella, senior technical lead with Datapac, said the case for the converged model is being helped by fact that “IT departments are coming under increasing pressure as the sheer number and scale of applications continues to increase” within their network. “For most businesses,” he said, “it can be quite a challenge to provide seamless network performance for their employees and customers.”
MD of Comsys, Ben McGahon was one of a number of industry experts who focused in on how the concept is no longer seen as the preserve of “very large customers with very large environments” as well.
“There is a change of view and converged infrastructure is being considered by many organisations who are looking for a better way of deploying new infrastructure,” maintained McGahon. It’s a trend, he said, which is being accelerated by the developments of new converged solutions by an increasing amount of vendors and some doing so “at a lower price point than before”.
“IT organisations are managing more data and more complexity than ever before, they are under pressure to continually improve efficiencies while remaining agile and responding to the speed of business change — converged infrastructure addresses all of these challenges,” Siobhan Foley, HP
Affordable
Indeed, according to IDC, organisations around the world spent over €2.4 billion on converged systems in 2012, with overall spend said to to have increased by 20% in 2013 and similar growth is expected this year.
Fujitsu’s Andrew McDade, who is the company’s enterprise product marketing manager, said that up until recently there was “certainly” a number of organisations at SME-level in particular who were “previously put off by price and complexity but who are now looking towards converged infrastructure”.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers