Converged InfrastructureIT by Wire Layer 1

Insight Guide

Insight Guide

Instrumentationand Analytics

Virtualisation

ConvergedInfrastructure

Cloud ServiceIntegration

Automation

5 Layer StackInfrastructure: comprises converged platforms (platforms of stability) and hyper-converged platforms (platforms of change) to enable more efficient resource pooling and greater resource control.

Virtualisation: releases resources from being tied to particular physical devices in order to enable portability of services.

Automation: comprises cloud automation and Data Centre automation. Cloud automation provides on premise and off-premise self-service provisioning and lifecycle services for virtual systems and workloads.

Cloud Integration: provides authentication and authorisation services for in-house Active Directory platforms to control user access to cloud services, such as Office365, Salesforce etc.

Instrumentation: this delivers the visibility and control that is needed across the entire Data Centre. The Instrumentation layer includes element managers for the core Data Centre technologies.

With these five layers in place, the IT department will be perfectly positioned to support digital business innovation and respond immediately to changing demand. IT staff will be able to provision and control resources from the Data Centre instantly to support changing demands and priorities. They will be able to control their networks in real-time and finely tune the service available to users to match their specific needs. They will be able to operate service and software defined platforms with considerably less manual intervention. And they will be better equipped to protect against new and changing security threats. The Service Defined Infrastructure operated under the IT by Wire model will make the Data Centre and networks less costly to run, and enable IT to deliver more choice, agility and value to the business.

Overview

Today’s CIOs face a challenge at the very heart of the data centre. They must deliver the agile, flexible, scalable IT services demanded by today’s line of business managers, at the low cost demanded by the boardroom, when the infrastructure they have to hand is slow and hard to change, and difficult and costly to scale.

CIOs can address the challenge by replacing their restrictive, traditional siloed data centre architecture with a Converged Infrastructure, facilitating the quick and easy deployment, sharing and scaling of resources.

Data centres grow and develop organically over time. That growth is usually driven by point needs in the enterprise: a server to run this application, data storage for that line of business. For most data centres more than a few years old, this results almost inevitably in a highly siloed data centre architecture, suffering from ever-increasing IT sprawl.

Siloed architectures are defined by their physical resources - servers, storage and networking. Physical resources are dedicated to specific applications or lines of business, and cannot be readily redeployed, in part or whole. This severely limits IT’s ability to respond to the changing needs of the enterprise.

Silos also make it difficult or impossible for information to be shared across applications and lines of business, restricting the enterprise’s ability to gain valuable insights that could deliver significant competitive edge.

Furthermore, in a siloed data centre architecture, the deployment of a new solution requires the installation of new physical resources - a new silo. As well as being costly and demanding on the IT department’s time, this requires physical space and resources such as power and cooling. Addressing such requirements typically takes weeks or months to achieve.

IT sprawl - the result of the continual implementation of new silos - makes for a data centre which is inefficient, inflexible and significantly more extensive than should be necessary.

IT sprawl drives ever-rising costs in all areas - power, cooling, hardware investment, maintenance, upgrades and updates and software licensing - to the point where the majority of IT spend is typically made simply to keep the existing infrastructure running, with little time or budget remaining for new ventures. Furthermore, it restricts agility and flexibility, costing the enterprise even more by holding back productivity and innovation.

Against this backdrop, the business is making increasing demands of IT. On one hand, the CIO must address demands from the boardroom for on-going cost reductions. On the other, line of business managers require ever greater agility and speed of response. They have grown used to the innovation and near-instant response available in the app stores and increasingly they expect the same of IT.

With a siloed data centre, the CIO cannot meet either of these demands, much less both of them. For the Data Centre to be continually, seamlessly aligned with the needs of the enterprise, the IT environment must be simplified, and made adaptive and responsive.

Insight Guide

The issues

A Converged Infrastructure delivers pre-integrated units of server, storage and networking capacity to enable the application of virtualisation (IT by Wire Layer 2) to remove the links between physical resources and specific applications and lines of business. This creates a pool of server, storage and networking resources in the data centre, which can be shared among various applications and lines of business.

A Converged Infrastructure brings together the data centre components necessary for application delivery, presenting them as a flexible, shareable pool that IT can deploy and redeploy as required. As well as making the deployment of resources markedly easier, Converged Infrastructure also enables the easy scaling up and out of the enterprise IT infrastructure via pre-integrated units of server, storage and networking capacity.

Converged Infrastructure - The benefits

Once physical resources are no longer directly linked to applications and lines of business, it becomes possible for the CIO to specify best in breed solutions, combining infrastructure technologies from leading vendors, rather than having to heavily commit to a single vendor.

With silos and IT sprawl eliminated, less IT effort and budget are required to keep existing systems running, allowing a much greater proportion of resources to be committed to innovation and the development and deployment of new solutions.

Converged Infrastructure may be implemented independently, or as the first of the five layers of a complete IT by Wire infrastructure.

Reduced: Improved:

Management overhead

Costs (power, cooling, hardware investment, maintenance, upgrades, updates, software licensing)

Risk

Speed of deployment and redeployment

Resource control

Resource pooling efficiency

Agility and flexibility

Scalability

Efficiency

Converged Infrastructure - The solution

How we help

Logicalis’ consultants have extensive experience in business-led IT infrastructure transformation. Vendor agnostic and tightly focused on your business circumstances and objectives, we always provide advice and solutions appropriate to your needs.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you.

01 295 8966 info@ie.logicalis.com www.ie.logicalis.com