With continuing pressure on data center managers to maintain the highest levels of responsiveness and availability, converged infrastructure is emerging as a solution that reduces costs and operational complexity, and increases efficiency.

The simplified, scalable infrastructure can be centrally managed with a single source of support, reducing the risk of downtime, maximizing availability and making the most productive use of skilled support staff.

Availability is a major challenge for data center managers – meeting business demands while controlling operational and support costs. Business expectations continue to grow, with demand for 24×7 access and availability, faster delivery of services and greater agility to meet changing threats and opportunities.

Cost of Outages

However, outages remain a barrier. According to the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data center outage increased by 38 percent between 2010 and 2016 with costs averaging almost $750,000 in 2016. Outages also have many indirect consequences, including risk of lost revenue opportunities, reduced productivity, poor customer experience, impact on reputation and non-compliance with regulatory standards or SLAs.

Improving reliability can result in significant savings. An IDC study found that deploying a converged infrastructure in an enterprise with 1000 users can result in gains worth more than $256,000.

Improved Reliability

Converged infrastructures can improve reliability by bringing together the key IT compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources, converging them in a tightly integrated single system. This solution can reduce or eliminate the time and cost of sourcing, deploying, managing and scaling legacy infrastructures that require specialized skills to manage and maintain separate components.

Converged infrastructures reduce the risk of downtime through compatibility problems by using standard, modular components. Everything is supplied by a single vendor, eliminating integration challenges and compatibility issues.

Simpler Management

This simplified infrastructure is easier to monitor, manage and maintain from a single centralized point. By using automated monitoring and management tools or the dedicated management toolkit provided, teams can eliminate many of the time-consuming day-to-day tasks and reduce the risk of outages caused by human error.

According to a report in Information Age, IT teams spend an average 85 percent of their budget on day-to-day management tasks such as monitoring, troubleshooting, patching, updating and configuration. IT teams have fewer repetitive tasks to perform to keep the system up and running.

Increasing capacity or scaling the system in line with changing demand also ensures high levels of availability. Converged infrastructures are highly scalable so that capacity is always aligned to demand. Growing capacity permanently is also straightforward with the use of standard modular components, eliminating any delay and helping reduce upgrade costs.

Eliminate the Availability Gap

A converged infrastructure can reduce or eliminate the gap between what business expects and IT can deliver. Virtual Tech Gurus believes that this solution represents an important development with many benefits for the data center. However, it may not be the most suitable solution for every environment, so it pays to take impartial advice on infrastructure upgrades from experts like VTG.

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