Why Data Centers are Shifting Towards Converged Infrastructures
May 9, 2013
With more virtualization, IT consumerization and a lot more data – the data center needs a new way of deploying high-density computing platforms. In this white paper, IDC (with sponsorship from VCE) outlines the rapid growth in high-density computing needs. By downloading this paper, you can learn how IDC found that higher utilization of IT assets and operational efficiency — which results from running more virtual machines on new-generation servers — reaches a plateau and often levels out at a certain point. This happens because the shift to virtualized servers often leads to strains in other areas of the infrastructure:
Virtual server sprawl increases server/storage/network stress and the accompanying administrative burdens required to deal with this stress. This makes support/maintenance more challenging and threatens application performance.
Handling this anticipated pressure by overloading/overprovisioning storage and data network facilities forces time-consuming, costly, and often unnecessary hardware upgrades.
Application performance and recovery behaviors (data recovery and cleanup) on error conditions can vary unexpectedly, stalling plans to migrate more business critical applications to virtual environments.
The reality within the data center world is pretty direct: The infrastructure management challenge in has increased, as depicted in the "Virtualization Management Gap" in Figure 1. Furthermore, IDC and this white paper indicate how recent research shows that IT departments now spend three-quarters (76.8%) of their time and resources maintaining the environment and less than a quarter (23.2%) on value-added activities.
In this white paper, IDC outlines how the data center is entering a new business cycle in IT where customers are prepared to trade choice for both ease of installation and simplicity of management. While the majority of customers are still evaluating converged systems, over a quarter (27.4% — approximately double the previous year's percentage) are currently using or planning to use them. IDC expects adoption to increase as 44% (also double the previous year's percentage) of those considering convergence will likely adopt in the next three years.
There are direct data center technologies which help deliver high-density computing, excellent resource utilization and of course the ability to converge an infrastructure. Formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, this white paper outlines the vBlock platform and how VCE markets an integrated converged infrastructure solution for the data center. In fact, VCE develops a range of platforms and solutions for virtualized environments based on components from Cisco, EMC, and VMware. Download this white paper today to learn how VCE's goal is to accelerate the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models which prove to dramatically reduce the cost of IT while improving management and growth capabilities.
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