Converged infrastructure play a vital role in improving IT infrastructure and providing high flexibility level to enterprises. It comprises of a variety of components including servers, data storage devices, networking equipment, and software for IT automation, management, and orchestration. It helps in decreasing system complexity, faster and easier deployment, and minimize cooling and power. By utilising a single integrated IT management system, it increases the cloud computing system’s ability of handling huge data sets, boosting efficiencies of data centres.
Future Market Insights (FMI), in its recent report, has delivered a detailed insight on the global converged infrastructure market. Some major drivers for converged infrastructure include soaring demand for enhancing IT operational efficiency, improving data protection, and reducing IT cost. Cloud-based converged infrastructure solution provide several opportunities for enterprises. This is expected to fuel the demand for converged infrastructure in the near future. In addition, converged infrastructure enables innovation for IT businesses by offering a simplified path to cloud, where it can be experimented by business and utilise the vast & growing array of innovation, coupled with specialized software & services. On the other hand, high implementation costs, and lack of awareness on converged infrastructure are some factors impeding the demand for converged infrastructure.
Significance of Storage in Converged Infrastructure
Storage is an indispensable part of converged infrastructure, and the future of technology is expected incur huge changes to storage. Most notably, new opportunities will be provided by converged infrastructure for secondary storage environments. This is attributed to the ability of converged infrastructure in removing siloed solutions causing unnecessary management complexity and redundant copies of data. Consolidation of every use case of secondary storage can help enterprises to take complete advantage of IT resources. By reducing costs, providing complete scenario of data sets, and increasing efficiencies, converged infrastructure helps in eliminating secondary storage data points. Converged infrastructure promises higher flexibility and scalability in applications coupled with streamlined operational processes, providing more productive and a brighter future for the stakeholders.
Some latest Developments in Converged Infrastructure Include
- Hyper-converged Infrastructure– Hyper-convergence incorporates networking, compute, virtualization, and storage functionality in commodity hardware box from single vendor. The solutions of hyper-convergence comprise storage controller functions operating as a service in a cluster on each node for improving resilience, agility, and scalability. Hyper-convergence basically uses IT resources, which already exist, and enhances them. This approach offers business & economic benefits. However, the functionality benefits render higher prevalence to hyper-convergence. In a simplified manner, hyper-convergence provides the ability of managing a complex infrastructure seamlessly, getting the most from IT resources.
- Converged Stacks– The prevalence of converged stacks is increasing and is likely to generate fair share of the products & services of converged infrastructure. Integrated or converged stacks are pre-configured bundles of products of storage, servers, and networking for specific use cases. Simplifying management of IT infrastructures, converged stacks enable cost reduction in deployment of IT infrastructures, making them a viable alternative for current cost-conscious organisations. Converged stacks are costlier, but they overcome do-it-yourself solutions and help cutting down the infrastructure TCO. Some benefits of converged stacks include single point support, faster deployment, and ongoing maintenance & service. However, lack of component choice and fixed configurations are some disadvantages of converged stacks.
- True hyper-convergence– This approach is considered to be the highest wave of this technology. It is characterised by hyper-efficient utilisation of resources, centralised management, ease of scale, delivery & support, and single vendor design. While other characteristics include native data protection, software-centric design, and VM-centricity. True hyper-converged solutions manage whole stack, from virtualisation software to storage. This helps in eliminating conflicts, producing economic benefits, and increasing efficiencies of data centres.
The information presented here is sourced from Future Market Insights latest report. A sample of this report is available upon request.
Author: Abhishek Budholiya is a tech blogger, digital marketing pro, and has contributed to numerous tech magazines. Currently, as a technology and digital branding consultant, he offers his analysis on the tech market research landscape. His forte is analysing the commercial viability of a new breakthrough, a trait you can see in his writing. When he is not ruminating about the tech world, he can be found playing table tennis or hanging out with his friends.
