Amid all the hype and noise around HCI and cloud-type architectures, with all their layers of abstraction and virtualization, one thing shines through: traditional disaggregated network/server/storage combinations in their modern guise of Converged Infrastructure, or CI, remain the most efficient and cost-effective option for many roles and workloads.
There is a host of reasons why this is the case, and in this paper we will explore and discuss some of the most significant ones. They include the consequences of abstraction and virtualization, the questions of cost and efficiency, the shapes and patterns of your workload mix, sustainability, and the issues of manageability and visibility, which in many ways link all those others together.
The concept of converged infrastructure (CI) has been around for nearly two decades, which is a long time in the fast-moving world of enterprise IT. In that time we’ve also seen significant advances in software-defined infrastructure and related services. These range from highly abstracted and virtualized options such as hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), through open-source platforms leveraging commodity hardware, to the dizzying range of highly innovative services that have emerged in the public cloud.
Against this background, you’d be forgiven for wondering about the relevance of a 15-20 year old concept as you continue to invest in your own infrastructure, and this is the question we will be tackling in this guide.
To put it another way, is there still a case for a model that combines and pre-integrates storage, compute, networking and management software into a single solution in a way that still gives you complete control over the configuration and tuning of individual elements in the stack?
If you ask the question like that, we think the short answer is “yes”. In fact, in many scenarios converged infrastructure is really the only option that makes sense from a performance, tuning, management, control and commercial perspective.
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