The Journey to Converged Infrastructure Via Prevalidated Designs

To effectively architect your system to take advantage of the cloud in your data centre requires a solid, well-considered strategy in consultation with the appropriate outside experts. When you get this right, the result is a transformation of an enterprise’s service delivery with all the competitive advantages your business needs.

The first step is usually to partner with an appropriate managed services and outsourcing provider with the experience, expertise and top-level industry partnerships (all important boxes to tick) to work with your enterprise to get the best job done. It is well worth doing you proper due diligence and homework before you commit to a service provider, because cloud implementation can have its issues.

When evaluating a service provider, it’s important to consider its technical, operational and financial skills. You need to thoroughly evaluate exactly where you are currently at, to plan for where you want to be. A good question to ask is what pre-scoping facilities does the partner offer. Logicalis Australia, for example, offers a Cloud Advisory Workshop, a Cloud Readiness Assessment and Cloud Implementation and Migration Planning workshop.

A 24/7 friend

A good provider will also monitor and manage a cloud environment around the clock so your enterprise has the maximum operational efficiency, freeing your staff from complex data centre duties, to focus on core profit-generating business.

Such a partner can combine its proven systems and data centre methodology to reduce costs and accelerate the deployment of a cloud system for your organisation – be it public, private or hybrid – so it can be implemented in an effective and rapid timeframe to ensure your success.

Of course, the top service providers in turn partner with other major technology players, like VMware, Netapp, and Cisco to name just a few. The quality of these partnerships is in itself a good measure of the dependability and value of any particular outside service provider – the big technology companies don’t agree to such partnerships lightly.

Of course, in its enterprise cloud strategy, your ideal service provider partner should also combine the technical staff as well as the best technologies to deliver the most effective IT cloud services to your organisation. Logicalis offers the Logicalis Private Virtual Data Centre (LPVDC) providing a complete infrastructure solution and the Logicalis Virtual Workspace Cloud Edition, a complete hosted desktop offering.

Prevalidated design advantage

Top service providers typically offer prevalidated designs, such as VSPEX or Flexpod, for very good reasons, so your enterprise benefits from the accumulated knowledge and cloud wisdom of past years. These facilitate the journey to converged infrastructure, enabling enterprises to buy applications, servers, networking and storage together as pre-integrated or validated solutions rather than as individual components.

In a recent report, Gartner found that converged infrastructure is “a 3.5% slice of the total IT infrastructure business, but one growing at over 50% annually, hitting $83 billion this year”.

IT giant Cisco says that prevalidated designs are based on common use cases and current engineering system priorities. These “incorporate a broad set of technologies, features and applications, all which have been thoroughly tested and document with the aim of ensuring a faster, more reliable and fully predictable deployment for your enterprise”.

Popular prevalidated solutions

VSPEX is a virtualisation solution offered by Cisco and EMC, that helps deploy virtual machines in a range of sizes, to meet application needs. Cisco says that EMC VSPEX, with Cisco Unified Data Center is “a validated reference configuration which delivers a virtualised data center in a rack composed of leading computing, networking, storage, and infrastructure software components”.

FlexPod is a integrated computing, networking, and storage solution developed by Cisco and NetApp and there are versions for large enterprises, high capacity performance for specialized workloads, and even for small to medium sized enterprises. NetApp says that “The unique appeal of the FlexPod is how it can deliver these benefits of Converged Infrastructure while still being flexible. It starts with the combination of best of breed components from VMware, Netapp, Cisco, along with a pre-validated design that still accommodates flexibility in scale and configuration.”

So, it can be a great comfort to enterprises who partner with external experts to draw on such expertise and experience as evidenced by prevalidated designs and big-end of town partnerships themselves. The journey towards converged infrastructure is much safe and more secure when an enterprise has an appropriate, forward-thinking professional guide.

To find out more how Logicalis can help you transform your data centre, click here.

Tags Digital Transformation, Data Centre, Data Centre transformation, revalidated designs, Infrastructure, validated designs

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