Much headway has been made throughout the data center industry to circumvent the traditional ‘vendor lock-in’ associated with hardware systems in the past few years. The move towards open source in the hardware space has opened up a wealth of possibilities not only to the smaller vendors competing in the market but also to their customer base. There is, however, a potential threat to this open approach.

Converged infrastructure (CI) bundles multiple IT components into a single solution, including servers, data storage, networking equipment and software. This doesn’t seem to be a particularly new concept – other industries have taken this approach for years with their own product offerings. Historically, however, IT resources have been siloed – resources deployed to deal with a particular job/application in isolation.

CI appears, on the face of it, to bring a measure of order into what can often be a chaotic system leading to wasted resources, a lack of flexibility and unnecessary operational expenses.

This should be a good thing right? Well yes and no. 

Benefits of CI

According to Sacha Kavanagh, author of a DCD Intelligence short report on converged infrastructure, CI is about delivering better performance with less cost and less complexity “by streamlining and optimizing IT resources customers are able to do more with less”.

For example, the core components in a CI system are technically validated, standardized and maybe pre-integrated. As hardware is pre-integrated with virtualization and automation tools, CI is less complex than traditional deployment and scalability is achieved by pooling IT resources and automating provisioning – so no need to invest in excess capacity ‘just in case’.

So CI is a cost effective, scalable solution that ultimately saves money and enables a company to better manage operational costs. Perfect. Just what the industry has been looking for. But there are several downsides  and some industry players  are of the opinion that these negatives can outweigh the benefits of CI.

Downside
Although a main selling point for CI is its cost benefits there are likely to be significant costs associated with initial CI deployment. Planning, design, management and maintenance services all add to a cost and for single-stack solutions that are not pre-integrated. The time needed to deploy and integrate can be significant and shouldn’t be underestimated.

In addition, for certain customers, a CI system may actually end up being more expensive and less flexible than standard architectures, especially those companies at the lower end of the market. And when it comes to support, the sheer number of vendors involved in a project designed to decrease complexity may also lead to problems.

The biggest concern though is that with a single-stack CI approach, the enterprise is essentially back to being ‘locked in’ to a particular vendor. The customer loses its choice in terms of the components deployed, regardless of whether they are actually the best for the particular situation. This removes the ability to choose the best solution for the customer’s individual needs.

One source likened CI to an oven – an oven can be used for many things including boiling water and toasting bread, although very few people will ever use it in this way, preferring the efficiency and ease of a kettle and a toaster. In other words, although a single approach may sound good it doesn’t always make the best or most efficient solution.

We will be watching closely the growth of the CI market. It is still in early days of adoption. Only time will tell whether it will live up to its proponents’ claims or if it will, in fact, result in a backwards step from the strides made towards vendor-neutral environments. Watch this space.

For further details on the report, contact: [email protected]