Is Your Organization In Need of a Converged Infrastructure?

Until a few years ago, IT infrastructures would respond to new challenges by increasing budgets, staff, equipment, and outside services. This was the way IT projects were handled for more than two decades! For the short term this solution worked, but in the long term it’s creating more problems with various disparate IT systems, vendors, and tools. As new and more demands come in from users, IT teams are increasingly falling behind as they try to respond to requests and they are slower to deploy new projects because of the inflexibility of their IT infrastructure.

CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE BRINGS IT ALL TOGETHER

Converged infrastructure (CI) operates by grouping multiple IT components into a single, integrated package. Components of a CI may include servers, data storage devices, networking equipment and software for IT infrastructure management, automation and orchestration.

We don’t have to be reminded that IT budgets continue to shrink even though workloads and expectations are growing exponentially, and just thinking about how much a new solution would cost can be overwhelming. Who wants to spend even more money? The good news is that the initial costs associated with a CI solution can be recouped later in the operational and management costs you’ll save by automating management, and centralizing and consolidating the overall infrastructure.

Your organization needs a CI solution if your goals include:

  • Responding faster to new business applications and projects, and shortening times to provision.
  • Reducing operational and management costs over time.
  • Improving infrastructure and operations with single-point-of-contact support, increased interoperability, and improved security, disaster recovery, risk management and compliance.

Shopping for a CI solution is also daunting if you are unsure where to start, so we’re providing five requirements that are must-haves for any essential converged system solution:

  • Needs to be ready to use and flexible enough to meet your needs.
  • Should offer comprehensive support for both virtualized and non-virtualized environments within a single converged track.
  • Employs extensive automation across all system elements and a wide range of functions.
  • Supports mission-critical applications and can achieve a high level of performance and scalability with those applications.
  • Supports an open architecture that is designed to integrate with different hypervisors.

REAPING THE BENEFITS OF A CI SOLUTION

The future of IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly more reliant on the cloud; however, many large organizations need the security of a private-cloud. CI can be a good solution for those looking for a private cloud system or something similar. It’s also important for an organization to look forward and anticipate if a CI solution will meet their future needs as well.

With the adoption of a CI solution, your organization can expect:

  • Simplified management and deployment
  • Support for high-performance mission-critical applications
  • Increased uptime
  • Pre-tested, pre-validated, and pre-integrated solution
  • Better support for internal and external customers
  • Faster, easier maintenance
  • Private cloud capability

 SAY NO TO THE SILO! THE TIME FOR CONVERGENCE IS NOW!

If you’re ready to meet and exceed your business’ demands, it’s time to start looking at a CI solution that will increase efficiency, reliability, and agility of your IT systems. The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) solution family features prebuilt, certified solutions that can accelerate the applications you use the most, and help you realize both business efficiency and business value. UCP is:

  • A preconfigured, tightly integrated turnkey solution.
  • Built with best-in-breed Hitachi Data Systems servers and storage and industry-standard networking.
  • Configured using industry-leading Hitachi storage, server and Cisco or Brocade network switches.
  • A series of pre-validated reference solutions to support a wide range of top-tier applications.
  • An innovative Hitachi UCP Director software integrated natively with VMware vCenter for automated management and orchestration.

For more information, check out Hitachi’s whitepaper, The Future of Convergence.

DSN Group designs, implements, and supports converged infrastructure solutions with the best available hardware and software to meet your organization’s needs. DSN Group uses a five step approach to deliver a consistent, reliable, and predictable converged infrastructure solutions. If you’re interested in getting the most out of your virtual, unified data center contact DSN Group at 888.445.2919 for more information.

Has your organization transitioned to a converged infrastructure? If so, are you happy with the results?

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