The pressure on business to act and adapt ever-faster also puts pressure on the IT systems that underpin all the key business services. This in turn places enormous stress on IT departments where, despite a decade of infrastructure consolidation, IT remains technologically complex. For example, systems can be composed of multiple elements of hardware and software, each of which requires monitoring and management.
An increasingly popular way to simplify this IT infrastructure is to use appliance-like solutions which combine software and hardware into an integrated platform. One of the best current examples of this is Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI). The problem is that very few application software vendors are also expert in hardware, and vice-versa.
Yet just as these HCI systems are integrated platforms, so their operation and maintenance should also take an integrated approach. This paper therefore looks at the importance of taking a lifecycle view of HCI systems management and the challenges it seeks to address.
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