How quickly can you benefit from IT infrastructure convergence?

Convergence for both access devices and infrastructure continues to advance at a dramatic pace, with the analyst community becoming increasingly focused on defining and measuring its drivers and impact.  In fact, in the words of IDC, ‘the concept of converged systems is indisputable and inevitable’*, as customers look for solutions that support improved scale, cost efficiency, business agility and time to value.

In a report about infrastructure convergence over a year ago, IDC surveyed a number of companies, gathering information about their throughput and level of convergence, data center costs, IT labor costs, speed of deployment and system uptime. The results showed a clear correlation between higher levels of convergence and reduced IT costs, faster deployment and reduced downtime.

IDC categorized the maturity of the organizations with regard to convergence as follows:

• Traditional and Compartmentalized (Level 1) - organizations have only begun to initiate convergence.
• Standardized and Optimized (Levels 2 and 3) - organizations have implemented many of the best practices but are just realizing benefits such as lower infrastructure costs and IT productivity improvements.
• Automated and Adaptively Sourced (Levels 4 and 5) - organizations have optimized IT infrastructure as far as possible given currently available technology and are technically capable of offering cloud services.

From the research it was clear that moving to the most mature level of infrastructure convergence, at level 5, brought about the greatest ultimate benefit to an organization.  Labour costs are reduced by 99.5% over an organization at level 1, the time taken for the organization to deliver new applications is reduced by 70 percent, and annual downtime is reduced by 97 percent.  These are clearly massive improvements and hard to ignore for IT departments and the businesses they support.

However, research showed that the greatest incremental gains can be made in the early stages of covergence.  For example, just by moving to an ‘optimized’ virtual environment across servers, storage and networking, represented by Level 3 in the model, an organization can see its IT costs reduced by 86 percent, its time to deploy new applications reduced by 40 percent and its annual downtime reduced by 84 percent.

This means that organizations don’t have to delay implementing convergence, even though technology advances will mean a state of continual improvement in solution capabilities.  Immediate financial and operational benefits can be achieved today with HP Converged Infrastructure and we think that’s what makes convergence so exciting for customers and analysts.

To find out more about HP's approach, please take a look here.

*Source - IDC's Worldwide Converged Systems Taxonomy, 2012 - June 2012, IDC #235293, Volume: 1