Jimmy Sheahan, technical director with Ergo meanwhile made the case for the “complete, engineered systems optimised for virtualisation, cloud, and big data” that are HP’s Converged Systems portfolio. In addition, Sheahan recommended HP’s infrastructure management tool OneView as the key to getting the most from Converged Systems. “The unified view and feel that it gives you is unparalleled in my experience,” he said.
Citing the opportunities for lifecycle management and an easy to use dashboard as two main selling points, HP’s own Foley said the company’s Converged Systems offer “innovations, like dynamic caching, intelligent orchestration, and HP Flat SAN connect help solve the intractable problems of a siloed infrastructure, providing faster service delivery, higher application performance, and dramatic reductions in material, power and operating costs.”
Processing hours
While elsewhere, Brendan Healy, infrastructure architect with Triangle, felt that those looking to invest in a converged offering this year could also look towards “a combined solution using VMware’s vCloud suite integrated seamlessly into IBMs’ pure infrastructure platform”.
“Combining this with public cloud offerings which can be managed by the same platform will move IT departments to become brokers of infrastructure services and enable them to become strategic partners to the business,” said Healy.
The delivery method of converged infrastructure is another talking point for those in the industry. A reliance on a physical solution is generally favoured, though a ‘processing hours’ model where you buy the performance rather than the kit is also an option.
HP’s converged infrastructure specialist Foley, said options are now available to “offer users capacity ahead of demand by providing immediate access to required infrastructure and the opportunity to pay for only what they use”.
They can, she added, provision server, storage, networking capacity and software to meet business demand. Foley said this model meant customers get the “required server, storage or network capacity” while “only paying only for the actual capacity” they need.
“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. 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,” Andrew McDade, Fujitsu
Optical matrix
Addressing the issue, Ed Ronayne, technical director with Strencom said, “I feel there are a couple of options here.” Saying that “per time slice” is a methodology which “ties in well with some of the new generation optical matrix switches”, Ronayne mentioned troubled Irish company Intune Networks as one of the innovators in this space.
“On-board or key activation is another method of allowing vendors to get products into customers’ data centres under the guise of Ethernet fabric. This allows the customer to upgrade to converged infrastructure when required,” said Ronayne.
Triangle’s Healy said that for him “convergence heavily relies on service-based IT delivery”. This will, he said, inform organisations how IT is delivered to the end user and where the benefits of moving to a converged model can be measured. “At the infrastructure layer it is important that the correct software platform is deployed to manage the environment which will deliver ‘processing hours’ to the business irrespective of where it is delivered from,” he added.
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