The Future of IT is a Converged Future

 This post is brought to you by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP’s Make It Matter.

The business world today is one of constant change and growth. No where is that more visible than within the data center. Today, the CIO and IT group are working harder than ever to keep their data center running efficiently and optimally. Not only is IT working to keep their data center running to cover business needs for today, but they’re also tasked with delivering delivering new technologies and systems that the business will need in the future.

Delivering today’s requirements and building for tomorrow’s needs is nothing new for the IT group. That’s part of the job, but recently there’s been more challenges facing organizations. The challenge today is the speed and scale at which the data center and technological requirements are changing.

Many data centers today are already operating at capacity. Those that aren’t are most likely being considered for data center consolidation projects which will lead to more capacity and utilization issues. The data center is shrinking while also being tasked with delivering ‘more’.

In order to deliver ‘more’, IT needs to find a way to work around the constraints that exist within their current data center(s). In the past, IT has looked to virtualization as a means to work around many of their data center constraints to scale quickly and efficiently but even virtualization has its limits. With virtualization, IT needs to find room for a server (or a find a server with capacity) and then have plenty of room for network and storage expansion.

While virtualization has played a huge role in allowing organizations to scale their data centers, the next big step for IT is to use converged systems. With converged systems, you can roll out new capacity and/or change existing capacity and be confident that the new systems are going to work immediately with little to no customization required.

Converged systems allow organizations to bring scale into the data center quickly and cost effectively by allowing a fully managed system to be implemented giving data center managers the ability to view and manage the system as a whole rather than as multiple disparate systems. With the converged infrastructure approach, organizations are able to quickly add scale to their data centers without needing to rip and replace their existing systems or add to the existing systems utilization rates.

Converged systems aren’t the answer to every problem in the data center, but they can be an answer for scaling the data center. They allow organizations to easily scale to deliver the new systems, functionality, processing power and storage requirements to meet the data center needs of the future.

Image Credit: Two Roads Converged

This post is brought to you by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP’s Make It Matter.