Organizations have traditionally acquired the biggest servers, storage and networking equipment money could buy, all to get the best performance and capabilities.  But with virtualization now making its way into the enterprise, these traditional solutions are no longer enough.

Enter Converged Infrastructure.  It packages multiple IT components into a single, optimized technology framework to centralize infrastructure management, increase automation and simplify system orchestration.

What features should every CI solution have?

Not surprisingly, there are many providers now claiming they offer converged infrastructure solutions, which makes it that much harder for an organization to choose the best vendor.  How does one know if the provider actually offers a true CI solution?

According to Richard Reiffer, Vice President of Cloud Services at Zenith Infotech and CEO of Global Cloud Consulting, a handful features should all be present for it to be considered as CI.  These features are:

• Standardization

The building block for cloud and hosting services that facilitates faster deployment and easier scaling

• Automation

The system should automate many tasks, such as deploying applications and resources.  All you need to do is click on a few buttons and the system should do the rest of the work.  This is why it’s important for all components if CIs to work together to eliminate interoperability and compatibility SNAFUs.

• Unified monitoring and administration

There should be one tool that can access data about availability, performance and events for virtualization, storage, networks and security. High convergence: Your CI system should converge the entire infrastructure—servers, storage and networking—to achieve the maximum benefit. It should integrate with your hypervisor, and either provide virtualization management or integrate with the management tools from your hypervisor vendor. Ideally, it also includes backup and replication to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery.

• Integration

To keep costs at a minimum, one should look for a system that integrates seamlessly or can support the one you are currently using.  This would allow you to migrate gradually.

• Turnkey solution

Agility and simplicity are the goals with any IT infrastructure. Look for an out-of-the-box solution that can be rapidly deployed. This lets you deploy new infrastructure or add capacity in hours instead of days/weeks. Once the solution is in place, you can rapidly provision resources for your customers or even spin up trial VMs as part of your sales cycle.

Virtualization is Key

For Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman, storage, network, the compute, and virtualization is what he considers essential for any Converged infrastructure solution.

“Virtualization is really the driver for a lot of these,” Miniman says during an appearance on this morning’s Live NewsDesk Show with Kristin Feledy (full video below).

“You look at VMware who’s trying to push software defined data centers.  This is the substrate or infrastructure that this environment is going to be built on.  It has to fit in with that management or orchestration layer. and what Wikibon would also say is that for most part of the market flash is definitely a key piece of it.  It needs to be able to type in to those virtualization orchestration layers whether that be a private cloud or if your service provider is some kind of a hybrid or public cloud offering,” Miniman explained.

Miniman also mentioned that hyperconvergence is the route that some startups have chosen to tread.  This is due to the fact that hyperconvergence makes CI simper by rolling all the components into one.  Scale Computing, Nutanix and Simplivity are the three early startups that are banking on hyperconvergence.

For more of Miniman’s Breaking Analysis, check out the NewsDesk video below:

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc