Converged systems are coming to the fore of IT spend within Irish businesses, according to a number of industry experts. Among them is Dell enterprise solutions director Niamh Townsend, who said this trend is an “evolutionary” one resulting from customers looking to protect existing investments rather than a “big revolutionary shift”.
Asystec technical consultant Stephen Keohane is of a similar mind, saying the increasing popularity of converged systems is the result of many organisations being “heavily virtualised” and as a result of this move “customers are seeing the benefits of having a fully configured system delivered”.
Declan Hogan, head of the hardware enterprise group at HP Ireland, was another in little doubt that an interest in converged systems for application-specific workloads is increasing in the Irish market. “Organisations are looking for a more converged solution that is fully integrated and speedy to deploy to meet these workloads,” he said. “Non-converged solutions are typically not capable of delivering on the requirement for simplicity, reduced deployment time and modularity. As a result customers are looking at converged systems as the solution to these requirements.”
Converged environments
Turning the clock back slightly, Francis O’Haire, director for technology and strategy with Data Solutions made the point that the benefits promised by virtualisation have been hampered by the growing complexity of the underlying infrastructure – especially the storage layer. While “first generation” converged infrastructure solutions have attempted to hide some of that complexity behind a multi-vendor packaged solution, these solutions have also been reserved to a great degree for “larger projects”.
However, O’Haire continued, organisations are now crying out for “the level of simplicity and scalability experienced by web-scale companies, such as Google and Facebook”.
Rob Paddon, who acts as solutions director at Trilogy Technologies, noted that converged systems can be defined in different ways. “If we assume that a converged system includes all three core components – compute, storage and networking – plus a converged system-specific unified management console, then we have seen very few customers go down this route,” he told TechPro. “What we have seen is a lot of people starting to move towards converged environments by deploying some components of the stack initially depending on what aspects of their existing infrastructure is aging and what has been recently refreshed, but with a view to migrating to converged architecture over a period of time.”
Continuing, Paddon noted that practicalities will often rule where investment goes in this area. “Very few companies can justify decommissioning 12-month-old servers (for example), so true converged system deployment to be for more green field sites or service providers. The other issue is that many organisations have enterprise-wide standards and operational management tools, and integrating a converged system’s automation or management console into the corporate monitoring, management and operations infrastructure may be an issue.”
Selling point
For those who are in a position to plunge into the converged systems market, Townsend said the big selling points are ease of management and subsequent savings on operational costs. From “the most basic point of view” she said, it brings a reduced complexity of cabling to the advantage of one single pane of glass for complete systems management. Systems on the market such as Dell’s OpenManage offer the ability to manage the complete infrastructure solution “with the scope to manage all client systems through the same interface, including existing assets.”
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