Cloud computing has revolutionized the way organizations design, manage, and operate their data centers. The revolution has been swift, disruptive, and sweeping. And it’s brought about unprecedented growth across almost all IT dimensions – data, equipment, security challenges, and virtual machines among them.
Not to mention the growth of cloud computing itself. According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index, while overall data center workloads will more than double by 2019, cloud workloads will more than triple over the same period.
With that growth in workloads comes increasing IP traffic in and out of the data center. In fact, Cisco reports that global cloud IP traffic will more than quadruple, to account for more than 83 percent of total data center traffic by 2019.
Growth on this scale has thrown down the gauntlet for IT leaders. One emerging way to respond – and thrive – is through a converged infrastructure approach. Converged infrastructure – and its big brother hyper-converged infrastructure – rolls compute, storage, and networking into a self-provisioning pool of shared resources, sometimes with a hardware appliance, sometimes abstracted into software.
The intersection of convergence and cloud computing offers an attractive path for IT leaders to grow and manage their cloud deployments. Matthew Finnegan, writing in CIO magazine, says: “The growing interest in hyper-converged infrastructure highlights a wider point: not all customers are keen to push workloads out to the public cloud with security and performance concerns persisting.”
IT teams are trying to modernize their in-house architectures in a move toward a private cloud, Finnegan writes, adding that hyper-convergence may offer an easier way of doing it. It’s “modular, supports new application models, is cheaper than traditional big systems, and easier to scale,” he writes.
“Organizations across all verticals are changing the way they control and distribute resources, which includes looking for more efficient ways to create a scalable data center ecosystem,” writes Bill Kleyman in WindowsIT Pro.
And the numbers show that IT leaders are getting the convergence message loud and clear: According to a 2016 survey from 451 Research, 79% of respondents plan to spend more on converged infrastructure (CI) in 2016. In addition, “spending on hyper-converged infrastructure will be particularly strong in 2016, with 86% of respondents planning to increase spend and over 32% planning a major server and storage refresh project.”
As these cloud deployments become more prevalent, IT risks losing a battle in its longstanding war against complexity. For many, an ally – a trusted partner – is an indispensable asset in the effort to fight complexity.
Part of that complexity includes breaking down silos – and converged infrastructure has the opportunity to change this game by flattening data center architectures for compute, networking, and storage systems.
However, in order for convergence infrastructure to succeed, it must also be internalized as design concept. Otherwise the siloes will persist, making it difficult to realize the full value of CI across the enterprise.
Connection’s converged data center practice team offers high-performing converged infrastructure solutions that deliver unsurpassed simplicity and efficiency optimized for virtual applications. New levels of performance, protection, compliance, and ease of management let organizations close the gap between maintenance and innovation budgets to deliver relevant, operationally efficient, and fiscally sound solutions for your organization.
