| Taking the long view | |
| “Although there is typically a higher Capex cost initially, when the long term TCO of three to five years is taken into account, converged systems come into their own and the benefits have been proven time and again to exceed even ambitious initial estimates” |  Comsys : Ben McGahon, MD |
| There is little doubt that the converged systems market and products are now established for many enterprise organisations as the best infrastructure platform for their critical applications.Through working with our customers we have found that converged infrastructure provides a greatly reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and vastly increased time to delivery that traditional silo approaches simply cannot match.By having a pre-configured, pre-built, optimised and standardised platform, customers make great strides in delivering efficiencies back to the business in terms of system management and greatly reduced downtime. In some cases we see a 90% reduction in time to deliver fully configured platforms, reducing project time to delivery and crucially; reducing TCO and op-ex costs.In many cases, a large disparate infrastructure of network, server [virtualised] and storage can take six to nine months to deliver fully optimised back to the business. In converged systems, our average completed delivery and hand over process is fifty calendar days.
Furthermore, because converged systems such VCE Vblocks are so highly optimised, customers can greatly reduce their software license footprint. Without question, with converged infrastructure you can do more with less; less infrastructure, less people to manage, less data centre footprint and associated power, cooling and rack costs and greatly reduced TCO. Although there is typically a higher Capex cost initially, when the long term TCO of three to five years is taken into account, converged systems come into their own and the benefits have been proven time and again to exceed even ambitious initial estimates. 
In addition to the benefits already highlighted above, in many cases such as with financial and pharmaceutical customers, we have found that providing an ISO certified and validated converged platform we has allowed them to reduce many associated soft costs. For example, we have seen organisations achieve great savings in terms of validation and compliance. With VCE Vblocks, Comsys deliver the same equipment every time fully validated with documentation and ISO certified. This means customers no longer incur the great cost of lost man hours with highly skilled technical staff buried in a mountain of validation and documentation paperwork; thus freeing up the IT department to focus on their day jobs and being able to do more for the business with their time. As the converged or integrated market has grown the vendors are now releasing smaller versions of their converged infrastructure systems to suit a wider range of customers. This is particularly beneficial for customers who until recently may have perceived converged infrastructure to be too expensive in terms of initial CapEx. New developments around “hyper-converged” and so called “ultra-converged” web scale platforms are bringing more choices to the customer. As always, our function is to understand the business use case and put the best solution in place for that particular customer, based on a sound technical and commercial business case, regardless of whether the technology involved happens to be the latest innovation or not.
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| Building blocks | |
| “It’s clear that conventional approaches to IT are not agile enough to deliver on these new requirements” |  HP Ireland : Declan Hogan |
| With the rapid changes in the business world the IT department is now required to move to a ‘new style of IT’ to meet the business requirements. It’s clear that conventional approaches to IT are not agile enough to deliver on these new requirements. Converged systems consisting of servers, storage, networking and management can help customers meet their next-generation requirements.Converged systems will improve IT agility and drive speed, efficiency, and simplicity, all while reducing risk. This will enable the IT department to move away from IT silos to a new level of convergence, with blocks of scalable infrastructure viewed as pools of resources; these are optimized for application and workload requirements. As a result the IT department can reduce complexity, speed time to deployment and fully retain manageability in the IT environment.Based on the most recent IDC Worldwide Quarterly Integrated Infrastructure and Platforms Tracker, HP is the fastest growing integrated infrastructure architecture provider, growing at 215% year-over-year and at a rate of 3.6 times the market compared to competitors.The latest HP Converged System portfolio takes convergence to the next level with a full range of Converged Systems to meet every application specific workload – Server virtualisation, Desktop virtualisation with Citrix XenDesktop, SAP HANA, Cloud and the Microsoft Analytics Platform. All are managed by HP OneView for single pane of glass management. A recent introduction has been the latest in ‘hyper convergence’ with a hyper-converged building block based on HP infrastructure with VMware’s EVO:RAIL.
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| Business priorities | |
| “Flexibility allows workloads to be moved depending on the change in business priority… moving from test and development to production” |  Asystec : Stephen Keohane, technical consultant |
| The nature of converged infrastructure is to reduce complexity, leveraging virtualisation to abstract the hardware from the OS gave us the virtual machine. This concept has been ported to all components in the data centre delivering a converged infrastructure.CIs can be provisioned in a number of ways, pre-engineered systems like the VCE VBlock, reference architectures such as VSPEX from EMC, a DIY system that can be put together by the onsite infrastructure staff and, lastly, a public cloud offering. The different options require different levels of investment and time from the business and provide different support experiences.
VCE pre-test all patches and updates to ensure that they all work together. They are released as a bundle reducing potential outages due to incompatible patches. Taking it to the next level with EMC Hybrid cloud, you deliver a self-service catalogue to the business allowing users to provision their own services, depending on the performance levels required, and if it is provided on-premise or on the chosen public cloud. Flexibility allows workloads to be moved depending on the change in business priority, eg moving from test and development to production. Add to this the chargeback facility and IT is no longer a cost centre it is a business unit and becomes a broker of services throughout the business. Include EMC ViPR SRM for a full end to end data path monitoring solution that will provide metrics to help customers accurately predict when upgrades would need to be delivered, based on growth rates in the environment. By leveraging these technologies customers can reduce overall human support costs, be proactive, have a better insight into their business IT costs and have the ability to scale fluidly.
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