“Working hard, or hardly working?”
These days, that old office joke might well be directed at the hardware in your data center. In fact, a pair of recent studies suggest that your data center may be more like a data cemetery. McKinsey & Company found that most data center servers are working at five to fifteen percent of their capacity on average. You read that right: most of the time, 85% of your server capacity is idle.
And a separate study conducted by a Stanford University researcher discovered that nearly one-third (30%) of all active servers have actually been inactive (i.e., they haven’t delivered any service) for the last six months. So, if you accept the idea that 80% of IT’s time is spent maintaining equipment and 85% of that equipment is sitting idle… well, you do the math.
Clearly, there has to be a better way to build a data center. And there is. It’s called converged infrastructure, and it’s shrinking one of the biggest problems in enterprise data centers: inefficiency. In a traditional enterprise data center (i.e., that of the idle 85%), you’ll typically find best-of-breed systems that look like small-scale cities including towers of servers, storage racks, and switches that sometimes feel like they consume as much space as a small city and require a small army of security, virtualization, storage area networking, etc. experts to manage them.
The arrival of the cloud, however, changed the IT landscape. Suddenly, IT departments were being asked to support more users and more data to meet the new demand for large-scale, real-time business applications that the cloud supported. As IT departments scrambled to create their own cloud environment (quickly dubbed a “private cloud”), it became clear that scaling out a best-of-breed architecture would be problematic because of the sheer multitude of moving pieces.
Wisely, equipment vendors anticipated this problem and began reducing the number of pieces through convergence. VMware, Cisco, and EMC were among the first companies to recognize the benefit of a converged infrastructure, even going so far as to create a new company around their efforts, VCE. (Today, VCE is the market share leader for integrated infrastructure.)
Converged infrastructure, as its name implies, converges the basic building blocks of IT systems—servers, storage systems, network switches, etc.—into a single block-like appliance. Converged infrastructure appliances are sold as pre-integrated solutions for virtualized environments, which allows enterprises to run more services on fewer resources. It’s not unheard of for enterprises to report running their converged infrastructure systems at 90 percent utilization rates—a far cry from 15 percent.
Efficiency isn’t the only benefit of a converged infrastructure. In general, enterprises can expect to see substantial benefits across the board:
- 40% lower operational costs;
- 4X faster speed to market for new applications;
- 96% less downtime because of pre-integrated, pre-validated components that virtually eliminate finger-pointing between vendors and IT teams.
Beyond building a private cloud, there are three reasons why an enterprise would want to move to a converged infrastructure right now. Their existing data center equipment may be nearing end of life. They could be facing new applications that require a higher level of performance and scalability than their current IT evironment can deliver. Or they may be looking to deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure, which is a natural fit for converged systems.
It’s important to note, however, that moving to a converged infrastructure only makes sense when there’s a business case to support it. To recognize the real ROI potential of converged systems, businesses need to align specific business goals and address existing pain points before they look at a converged solution. At Rolta AdvizeX, we help enterprises not only calculate the value of a converged system in their business, but also accelerate its deployment. With Rolta AdvizeX and VCE, enterprises have deployed complete private cloud solutions in less than 90 days.
To learn more about Rolta AdvizeX services, including our Cloud Advizer service, visit us online at advizex.com. ▪