“It’s more affordable,” he continued, “if you take a look at a typical infrastructure project based on enterprise technology, there would usually be four stages that companies involved will go through — first up is design, then you have integration and testing, before finally there’s implementation. That cycle can typically take anything from three to 18 months depending on the size of the project. You have costs associated with software, hardware, but also time and resources.
“Going down that DIY approach, the thing to remember is that there’s a huge element of risk — whether it’s from design errors, time delays or whatever else. In today’s environment people are finding that by buying converged infrastructure they’re getting, pre-validated, and pre-tested solutions. They can ‘de-risk’ those projects to a degree.”
Datapac’s Kinsella said choosing the right converged infrastructure option will depend largely on the “unique compute, network and storage requirements of any individual business”. Current and future requirements need to be weighed up with the Kinsella recommending “a cohesive managed service solution [put] in place with stringent SLAs and consistent reporting” to ensure value for money.
Stephen Kelly, systems group manager for IBM Ireland, said that solutions “have to be designed with a very clear view of what’s coming down the line so as a customer invests now, in two three years’ time it won’t become an issue for them”.
New breed
“It’s about breaking down the silos out there,” said Kelly of the main advantages to the new breed of converged infrastructure offerings, “the network team, storage team, compute team — how do you leverage them as an ‘infrastructure team’ where you can cross-fertilise skills and therefore companies can make more use of those groups.”
This was a point with which EMC country manager in Ireland, Gerry Murray, agreed with saying that “collapsing of the skills” in these various silos “into one layer — and even we’re seeing now that security is another area that’s coming on board — mixing everything together” is the big selling point for many companies as they look to make an investment in this space.
“CI is no longer the preserve of very large customers with very large environments. 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,” Ben McGahon, Comsys
Added Murray, “Once you start automating you can start to do more analysis of what’s happening in the environment, things become more predictable, it almost becomes a self-managing environment.”
In terms of the converged infrastructure products now circulating the market, McGahon pointed towards VCE’s Vblock System, where “the compute, storage, and network devices are tuned together for high performance across multiple workloads” as one worthwhile option. The ability to centralise management of all the IT elements — even across multiple racks or aisles within the data centre — being a one of the major plusses according to McGahon.
Increased or decreased
Solutions director with Trilogy Technologies, Rob Paddon, said that the clients he has dealt with lately seem to be favouring the combined efforts of NetApp and Cisco, with their FlexPod and ExpressPod systems. “The nice thing about the FlexPod approach is that each of the components can be increased or decreased in performance or scale,” said Paddon. “With some other solutions there are only a set of pre-built systems so if you happen to need more storage, for example, you have to buy the bigger system in its entirety.”
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