If you’re like me, you probably get a few emails daily telling you that you need to get on the Converged Infrastructure wagon. The trend popped out overnight, and now it seems everyone is getting into the act. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia describing the concept of Converged Infrastructure.
Converged infrastructure operates by grouping multiple information technology (IT) components into a single, optimized computing package. Components of a converged infrastructure may include servers, data storage devices, networking equipment and software for IT infrastructure management, automation and orchestration.
IT organizations use converged infrastructure to centralize the management of IT resources, to consolidate systems, to increase resource-utilization rates, and to lower costs. Converged infrastructures foster these objectives by implementing pools of computers, storage and networking resources that can be shared by multiple applications and managed in a collective manner using policy-driven processes.
IT vendors and IT industry analysts use various terms to describe the concept of a converged infrastructure. These include “converged system”, “unified computing”, “fabric-based computing”, and “dynamic infrastructure”.
In short, if you are sharing hardware and software resources for more than one system, you are converging your system architecture. We did that with Virtual Machines a couple decades ago. So, how is this any different than using shared hardware?
The biggest difference I observe is the centralized management of everything. Instead of managing a SQL Server over here, and a SAN over there, using completely different management tools, in a Converged world, all of the different pieces are brought together so that they can be managed seamlessly to solve overall business needs.
Fabric computing was an early concept of Converged Systems. You managed the fabric, and it handled workload, balancing, distribution of software, failover. In short, you rarely managed a single machine. Generally, you managed the fabric.
Do you need converged systems? How would you know if you would benefit from a converged system? How much hype do you find in the offerings available? Share your thoughts and experiences with us regarding Converged Systems with your comments here online, or by dropping an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben