The life of a CIO is split between deploying new infrastructure for the business and maintaining what they already have.
Deploying new infrastructure includes evaluating, integrating and validating new products. It’s the integration/validation steps that often cause CIOs the most pain; a new technology solution will have multiple integration points (network, storage, servers, operating systems, etc.) and can consume months with extensive proof-of-concept testing before it’s finally deployed. To counter this problem, many IT solution vendors now offer reference architecture solutions that provide a pre-integrated and pre-validated alternative to building out IT infrastructure.
EMC’s VSPEX solutions are a great example of the reference architecture approach done right. VSPEX features all of the core components that CIOs need to think about—network, storage, and compute—in a pre-integrated/validated solution that works “right out of the box.” This not only accelerates the deployment time (by eliminating the integration and validation tasks), but also simplifies troubleshooting and maintenance because one company, EMC, can provide the troubleshooting/support for the entire architecture. And enterprises benefit from the fact that many customers are using the same architecture, enabling them to leverage the lessons learned from a broad user community.
The reference architecture approach is popular with enterprises that need to build high availability/scalability solutions such as Cloud, enterprise applications, mobility solutions and big data applications. EMC even offers a reference architecture specifically for Cloud deployments: VSPEX Private Cloud. Because Private Cloud environments will often require some level of interoperability with Public Cloud solutions (e.g., Amazon Cloud, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure), either now or in the future, a standardized and pre-integrated/validated Private Cloud architecture is preferable for most enterprises.
While a reference architecture offers less flexibility than a best-of-breed approach, it’s a trade-off for simplicity, speed and cost—and reference architectures do offer some flexibility. Customers can implement a reference architecture initially, and later modify the architecture to meet their unique requirements.
Perhaps most importantly, a reference architecture removes the risk of creating accidental architectures that are difficult to maintain and integrate. Because a reference architecture is structured and operates in a known, predictable manner, IT departments can deploy new applications and environments quickly, whether it’s a business intelligence application for marketing or a Cloud-based self-service application for customers.
Of course, some CIOs may require even more rapid deployment and standardization options. For them, a third path to the Cloud remains—Converged Infrastructure—, which I’ll cover in my next blog. ▪