| Right sized and scalable | |
| “The future roadmap of the chosen infrastructure is also important to understand what impact that future plan will have on the existing or proposed infrastructure” |  Triangle Ian Browne, senior IT infrastructure consultant |
| Converged infrastructure is becoming the de facto standard platform for enterprises to implement in their datacentres. The success of collapsing multiple operating systems onto one server has spread to the storage and network realm. An organisation planning to implement such a solution should ensure they have a thorough understanding of the impact such a shift will have on their ability to provide their services. Hardware independence is important in the initial choice of a converged system in order to avoid being locked in.Implementing the solution in conjunction with existing infrastructure means that there are enterprise support and integration concerns. Ensuring that the chosen platform is right sized for the environment workload that is running on it but also scalable for future expansion of that workload needs consideration.
Once operational the management of the infrastructure does not increase the operational overhead significantly or else it will just become a burden. The future roadmap of the chosen infrastructure is also important to understand what impact that future plan will have on the existing or proposed infrastructure. The points noted here provide a glimpse of the complexity that present day datacentre IT environments have scaled to, regardless of the detail of the workload on them. As a result, while implementing such a fundamental change to the platform needed for IT services, it is essential that such change is thoroughly understood to ensure that any migration is done with minimal downtime and impact of those services.
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| Start small | |
| “Over a period of time the converged infrastructure will become the ‘Normal’ deployment and not the ‘Exception’ deployment within the organisation” | 
Asystec Kevin O’ Leary, solutions architect |
| The one piece of advice I would give organisations looking to deploy converged infrastructure solutions is to start with smaller, non-critical or developmental applications upfront. This allows all groups from storage, application, network and various support teams to become well versed and familiar in the management, deployment and performance of a converged infrastructure.This approach allows for the gradual movement or migration of more critical applications from an existing infrastructure to the converged setup over time. Over a period of time the converged infrastructure will become the ‘Normal’ deployment and not the ‘Exception’ deployment within the organisation. Organisations today are looking for a single infrastructure to house all internal applications from analytics to email and it now possible to have this with some of the more enterprise ready converged instances.
When choosing the correct converged infrastructure, the key stakeholders should ensure that it can both scale out and up so as to meet the ever increasing demand for resources from a compute, ram and storage perspective. There are various different flavours and models available within the converged space but try and ensure a single system, support and contact is in place. In case of issues having a single number to call greatly aids in resolution time as well as support for all components within the infrastructure. There are some organisations that do build their own instances but this is an extremely tedious, time consuming task which results a lot of the time in a more traditional setup rather than a true converged instance. As part of our extended technical team, being both EMC and VCE business partners we have just successfully deployed two vBlock 240 & 340 systems within the last 4 weeks. These were deployed in the manufacturing and services industries.
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| Understanding benefits | |
| “One of obvious benefits to converged infrastructure is the time to deployment, because all components are pre-integrated and validated before delivery, organisations can begin implementing applications immediately” | 
Comsys Stephen Bonney, senior account manager |
| My one piece of advice on converged infrastructure deployment would be to evaluate both the existing IT environment and the strategic direction of the business with regard to scale and future growth. The company’s existing applications and workloads need to be evaluated, along with any future additions with a view to understanding their scalability and business criticality. Depending on whether deploying a traditional or hyper converged infrastructure, the outcome of this evaluation will dictate which type of platform is most suitable. With any converged infrastructure, it is important to understand the benefits before beginning any deployment.One of obvious benefits to converged infrastructure is the time to deployment, because all components are pre-integrated and validated before delivery, organisations can begin implementing applications immediately. When implementing applications customers can also expect predictable performance, because converged infrastructure comes with standardised building blocks there are less variables to contend with from a performance perspective.
A key benefit of converged infrastructure is a reduction in operational costs, by converging network, compute and storage into a single system with a single point of management this leads to a massive reduction in the cost of ongoing support, training, maintenance, power and cooling. Another advantage to converged infrastructure is standardisation. Standardisation enables organisations to begin automating. Automation can reduce the amount of time resources spend provisioning and completing routine tasks, it can also create an opportunity to implement progressive commercial modelling i.e. charge back, show back or controlled self-services through a services catalogue. This can eliminate issues some organisations are experiencing as a result of shadow IT. A further advantage would be, if a customer decides to add an emerging piece of technology to their converged infrastructure. Where compatible, they can do so in the comfort of knowing this process has been tested and validated by a team of experts within their chosen vendor. Comsys over the last three years has delivered some of the latest converged infrastructure projects in Ireland, both in the public and private sector. With the converged market growing at over 33% year on year, we are ideally positioned to design, deliver, implement and manage our customer’s converged requirements with the benefit of experience and successful projects already completed in reference customers already realising the benefits on converged architectures.
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