SearchCIO: Converged data center infrastructure promises to banish IT silos

As data centers continue to gain more and more IT equipment, they aren’t necessarily getting more people to manage their servers, new surveys have found.
One of the biggest data center infrastructure challenges that IT executives face is the management of disparate technologies and standards. For decades, they’ve implemented various parts of the puzzle — servers, routers, storage and management — only to wind up with IT silos. Emerging converged infrastructure technologies could alleviate this management challenge and connect those silos for on-demand resource sharing.

“Way back when, convergence was voice and data,” recalled Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director of ThinkStrategies Inc., a consultancy in Wellesley, Mass. Today’s convergence “is around centralized control of a traditional data center environment, while at the same time permitting self-service provisioning around authorized end users,” he said.

Enterprises can build their own converged data center infrastructure, but the hassle is a hurdle, according to experts. Hence the arrival of third-party converged infrastructures: essentially, plug-and-play virtual computing parcels from such vendors as Hewlett-Packard Inc., with its BladeSystem Matrix; and Cisco Systems Inc., with its Unified Computing System (UCS), which combines Cisco servers and networking with VMware Inc.’s vSphere and EMC Corp. storage.

These software products are integrated, tested, optimized and supported with no finger-pointing — a big plus, according to Geoff Woollacott, engagement manager and senior analyst at Technology Business Research Inc., in Hampton, N.H.

More of the SearchCIO article from Laura Smith

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.