There is a lot of conversation about converged infrastructure and how it impacts the modern data center. Today, these conversations are evolving into enterprise use-case and deployment scenarios.
Businesses across all verticals are seeing the benefits of tight integration of critical resources, all under one management layer. Converged infrastructure reduces the complexity and fragmentation of managing resources sitting on heterogeneous systems; it can reduce data center footprints; and it can greatly reduce deployment risks with validated deployment architectures. There’s clear demand in the market, as well. According to the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems report, “Hyperconverged integrated systems will represent over 35% of total integrated system market revenue by 2019.
Still, there are some organizations that are hesitant to make the move until they get more real-world evidence. With that in mind, let’s look at how organizations are deploying converged infrastructure and when it makes sense.
Converged infrastructure is a good fit for:
- Enterprise, tier-1, applications: Your critical enterprise applications require a platform that is resilient, replicated, and one that can support high levels of demand. Converged infrastructure balances resource utilization, and allows applications to perform optimally and in a resilient state. If your organization wants to improve the infrastructure on which enterprise applications reside, converged platforms are a good bet.
- Virtual workloads (apps and desktops): Virtualization is directly enabled by converged infrastructure systems. In fact, if you’re looking to achieve greater levels of virtualization and virtual workload density, working with converged infrastructure absolutely makes sense. You can control how resources are delivered to virtual systems, manage access into virtual resources, and allow virtual workloads to scale between converged infrastructure nodes.
- Disaster recovery and resiliency strategies: Converged infrastructure is deployed as building blocks within the data center. These are put in place quickly and very efficiently. Furthermore, converged infrastructure comes in validated, reference architecture, designs and options. This means fast deployment with a lot less risk. You can put in place disaster recovery sites or have high availability systems capable of fast failover for your critical workloads.
Once organizations understand what converged infrastructure can help them with, they need to know how to implement it. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Capacity planning and sizing is critical: Measure twice; cut once. When working with converged infrastructure, you must size your environment properly. What are you deploying? Heavy applications or lightweight Web portals? Are you supporting virtualization with high levels of user density, or are you running databases supporting business functions? Each scenario will dictate specific requirements.
- Create good monitoring/management practices: There are a lot of great ways to monitor and control you converged infrastructure ecosystem. In addition to native tools, you can integrate with hypervisor technologies to increase visibility into the workloads living on the converged infrastructure system. Keeping your converged infrastructure architecture healthy means creating proactive monitoring and alerting. Make sure to catch problems before they become major issues.
- Plan for the future from day 1: Deployed in a building block model, converged infrastructure is fairly easy to expand as business requirements evolve. Still, this needs to be planned for and budgeted. Make sure you plan for growth and are deploying a converged infrastructure architecture that can support your business.
A good converged infrastructure solution can help you create a truly agile business environment. These platforms help you create better management capabilities while still allowing your data center to scale. There are a number of benefits to deploying converged infrastructure. You can improve data center and business economics, deploy new types of applications with rich experiences, and positively impact user experiences by tightly controlling critical resources. But to realize these benefits, you have to deploy converged infrastructure the right way--with best practices as a guide.
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.
