The idea of a team is a core concept for most businesses.
We think of our co-workers as teammates. We refer to our sales successes as wins. We even have team-building exercises. The trouble is, while we’re all on the same team, technically, there are teams within our team. In IT, for example, there is a storage team, a virtualization team, and a network team. And these teams tend to play in their own silos most of the time, interact with their own supporting group of vendors, and basically see the world from the viewpoint of their specific team’s objectives.
When things are going smoothly, the multi-team mindset works fine. But when there’s a bump in the road—say, a firmware fix that needs to happen—it can create extra layers of complexity as different teams now have to come together to troubleshoot the problem.
I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that a periodic IT healthcheck reveals that your data center is now out of compliance with industry requirements. In a typical “team” environment, days will pass as the various teams work together to determine the optimal patch process, plan the upgrades, implement them, etc. This type of scenario usually results in delayed update cycles and, worse, unplanned downtime. At that point, it doesn’t take much for all of your team building to devolve into finger pointing.
Where we don’t see this kind of scenario being played out is in enterprises that have migrated to converged infrastructure systems. Because converged infrastructure features pre-integrated and pre-validated hardware, most of the problems can be solved at the management (i.e., hypervisor) layer without digging deep into the specific storage or networking layers.
In cases where these converged appliances are supported by a single vendor, such as VCE, the finger-pointing is virtually nonexistent since there’s only the one direction to point. I’ve actually seen customers do live updates with this hardware in the middle of the afternoon with no downtime.
The difference between traditional best-of-breed and converged infrastructure can be striking. Not long ago, a bug was discovered with a popular Fibre Channel switching solution that impacted several of our customers. One customer, who had a best-of-breed system, needed 10 days to solve the problem. The other customer, who was running a converged infrastructure, had it resolved in less than 24 hours.
I’d estimate that 90 percent of IT problems that occur in converged systems are fixed with the first phone call to technical support. In fact, the simplicity of converged infrastructure systems makes them a logical fit for managed services where virtually 100% of the systems management is offloaded from the IT department.
I don’t deny that adversity can help build stronger teams, but IT faces enough challenges enabling innovation in the business without being bogged down with routine maintenance problems. Bringing in a trusted managed services provider like Rolta AdvizeX to manage your converged infrastructure allows IT teams to spend more time finding solutions in the cloud. And that sounds like a winning formula to me. ▪