There have been some big shifts happening in the world of cloud, the data center and the personnel who support it all. First of all, there is now a direct tie between the business and IT—the silos have been broken down, for the most part. In fact, an organization’s competitive advantage depends on the technologies the data center can deliver.
Business that focuses on and is driven by infrastructure and cloud continues to grow. Consider this: Global spending on IaaS is expected to reach almost $16.5 billion in 2015, an increase of 32.8 percent from 2014, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019 forecast at 29.1 percent, according to Gartner's latest forecast.
The folks spending this kind of money on their next-generation data center are also the ones looking to hire intelligent team members who can support it.
According to the latest State of the Data Center Report, managers have had challenges filling the following top three roles:
- Data Center Facility Technicians, Engineers, and Operators: 42%
- IT Systems and/or Applications Personnel: 20%
- Network and Telecommunications Personnel: 19%
Engineering requirements have changed. Traditional, isolated data center mindsets are quickly becoming a thing of the past, as more managers are looking for young administrators capable of thinking--quite literally--outside the data center.
This is where converged infrastructure comes into the conversation. Converged infrastructure systems intelligently couple core data center resources under one management environment. This means new considerations for data center engineers, including resource controls, policy deployment, and decisions around when and where to extend into the cloud. The evolving data center environment will require engineers capable of managing and working with various types of virtualization, cloud and convergence technologies, which means they need to be adept at:
- Managing virtualization. Today’s converged infrastructures support many critical virtual workloads sitting on a virtualization platform. Administrators must know how to manage VMs and their requirements, develop deployment strategies and make a virtual environment more efficient. Ultimately, this translates into creating converged infrastructure policies that can positively impact a virtual ecosystem.
- Controlling cloud and data center requirements. Converged infrastructure management will require engineers who know what a distributed architecture looks like and how it can be controlled over the WAN. These requirements revolve around creative IT professionals capable of creative data center solutions. Skills in WAN architecture and design will be in much higher demand.
- Understanding how converged infrastructure impacts cloud. IT professionals must know how the cloud environment can help an organization become more agile. Even more important will be their ability to utilize cloud solutions to help an IT department evolve with the needs of the business. For many companies, converged infrastructure acts as the foundation for a cloud ecosystem. When convergence is coupled with cloud, you begin to see many great benefits. It will be up to the next generation of IT professionals to know and recognize these benefits for a given organization.
The biggest point to understand around convergence is the unification of resources and management capabilities. This type of architecture gives organizations the ability to deploy diverse workloads across very distributed locations. From there, you can support business initiatives like mobility, disaster recovery and business continuity, and call center operations.
This is why it’s so important for engineers and managers to see the big picture: With converged infrastructure, resources are intelligently shared via policy, control and orchestration capabilities. It will be up to the engineers and architects to understand how converged infrastructure impacts a data center and in what ways it can positively impact the business.
Underwritten by HPE
Part of HPE’s Power of One strategy, HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers infrastructure as one integrated stack. HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers proven, repeatable building blocks of infrastructure maintained by one management platform (HPE OneView), built and delivered exclusively by qualified HPE Channel Partners. This methodology saves considerable time and resources, compared to the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach.
Based on a complete HPE stack consisting of HPE BladeSystem with Intel® Xeon® E5 v3-based HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blades, HPE 3PAR StoreServ all-flash storage, HPE Networking, and HPE OneView infrastructure management software, the HPE Converged Architecture 700 can be easily modified to fit within your existing IT environment.
