HP’s Hogan said that in his experience the biggest selling point is that fact that the solution is “fully integrated and tested, racked, configured” to suit the workload and is “ready to just power on”. It’s something, he said, which obviously reduces deployment time significantly, as well as shrinking the skillsets required, in addition to minimising risk. It also, he said, ensures as much as possible that the environment is built to the correct standard to host the application-specific workload.
Ongoing support
Those assurances were key for Paddon too, who said the promise that “all components are designed to work together and the operational systems deliver easy change management through automation and/or single console,” can certainly help sway a decision for a business in this area.
With, as Hogan mentioned, deployment more easily configured, Paddon said that from the outset “ongoing support of the system should be easier and hopefully cheaper” having gone down this route.
Elsewhere, O’Haire told TechPro the tipping point towards investment for companies comes with reassurance of a “predictable” pay-as-you-grow model of scaling costs without the need to pay up front for a rack of pre-bundled servers and storage sized for a projected three years of growth “only to discover that it runs out of steam after a year-and-a-half”.
Barriers
Of the barriers to investment though, Townsend said the high cost of initial capital investment – as many solutions have traditionally been aimed at mid-size to large enterprises – is most prominent. That, however, is becoming less of a problem due to the scalable options mentioned previously. Paddon said the general approach to investment “seems to be to look at networking and storage and to worry less about the compute component, but this varies depending on where in the investment lifecycle each customer is”.
Of the products catching the eye among Irish businesses, Townsend said that Dell’s FX architecture and VRTX solution are popular choices. Hogan, meanwhile, said the Converged Systems for Cloud, Virtualization and SAP HANA have “proved to be the most popular deployed systems to date”. There has also been interest “in the Converged System for Microsoft Analytics Platform (MAP) and we expect increased interest in the hyper convergence areas in the coming months with the Converged System for VMware’s EVO: RAIL”.
Asystec’s Keohane said he is predominantly seeing interest in the “pre-engineered and pre-validated” VCE proposition which, he said, removes much of the effort on customers’ IT teams in its design and deployment. He said he’s getting traction in a reference architecture option from EMC called VSPEX. This option, he noted, has “most of the benefits “of the per-engineered option but with greater flexibility for the customer in the choice of compute and network hardware.
Co-operation and vision
Whatever a company chooses to invest in, Keohane made the point that “the key to making any of these systems is co-operation and vision”. A team effort between customers and partner organisations was required to explore workloads and projects. Having business stake holders involved early on always brings more detail, he claimed.
Trilogy’s Paddon was thinking along the same lines in claiming that the most important point for companies to consider is that if an IT strategy and IT architecture across the business has not been developed for converged systems, “then there is a major risk of ending up with silos of capacity”.
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