Why Converged Infrastructure is Essential for a Thriving Business, and How Oracle is Among Top Vendors to Consider
Among various niches that Walmart capitalized on well to consistently rank as a Fortune 500 for several decades, was bringing nearly everything a shopper may need under one roof. Result? Customers walked in to buy vegetables and ended up spending extra dollars on a pair of jeans that were not quite a dire need. Essence? It helps to have everything under one roof and deal with one vendor rather than associate/negotiate with many.
Businesses have depended on data centers for computing, storage, and networking requirements for decades, but disparate systems in silos require dedicated resources to manage the hardware and update the software, and scaling up or down is a tiresome expensive process.
Converged infrastructure vendors are now the Walmart of businesses’ computing needs – bringing every data center component under one roof and simplifying the processes to significantly reduce the IT resources required for uninterrupted operations. Converged infrastructure is a vendor-certified and preconfigured system of hardware, disk storage systems, networking equipment, and pertaining management software – delivering enormous potential to scale up or down depending on the requirement and minimize risks with little human interference. The converged infrastructure providers offer built-in maintenance, support, and software updates as well as own accountability in case of malfunctions.
Converged Infrastructure Benefits
As businesses grow, data centers become complex and at the same time, costly and difficult to maintain. Consequently, the convergence trend is disrupting the IT industry and luring enterprises with numerous business values including:
- Lower costs: Since fewer hardware and software components are needed while needless redundancies are eliminated, capital expenses are reduced as a primary benefit, besides saving on maintenance, monitoring, and powering expenses.
- Management uniformity: With several layers of complexities removed and the dependency shifted to only one vendor, converged infrastructure delivers a unified engineered system that is much easier to sustain and troubleshoot.
- Optimized network performance: As converged infrastructure platform is repeatable and allows for modular deployment of data center resources, the simplification of all components installs greater availability and faster connections to network applications and cloud services.
- Scalability and time to market: Simplified deployment based on predefined modular configurations pave the way to faster installations that is scalable in real time and offers the agility to deploy new services. Enhanced validation configurations cut down on guesswork as businesses now use a preset template and ripe converged infrastructure benefits in terms of faster time to market of new services.
Converged Infrastructure v/s Hyper-converged Infrastructure
While converged infrastructure solutions aim to streamline four core aspects of computation, networking, storage, and server virtualization resources, the concept of hyper-converged infrastructure aspires to achieve similar goal via a different approach with tighter integration between components. It does so with software-defined integration of aforementioned four core aspects besides bringing in several newer components including backup software, data deduplication, snapshot functionalities, WAN optimization, and inline compression. Often, hyper converged infrastructure is deployed on commodity components, enabling a simple scale up architecture with commodity servers.
The key benefit of hyper-converged infrastructure over its counterpart is being software defined, which means the infrastructure operates separately from the physical hardware, leading to stronger integration between components. Workload manipulation at software level means an ability to reconfigure specialized application, making hyper-converged infrastructure more flexible and suitable for greater workloads than converged infrastructure solutions, which are pre-configured.
Oracle Converged Infrastructure Merges Application and Database to Deliver Exclusive Engineered Systems
Associating with most converged infrastructure vendors means gaining a genetic solution that is a collaboration of compute, storage, networking, and virtual machines in a single system. Sadly, the system does not incorporate two of the most essential aspects of a data center = the databases and applications.
Oracle’s converged infrastructure portfolio, better known as engineered systems, goes that extra yard to integrate and optimize every layer of the overall IT stack including storage, database, and even the Oracle Cloud. Oracle Engineered Systems are strategically and carefully designed to handle some of the key hindrances encountered by an organization’s IT workforce across levels:
- For a Chief Information Officers (CIO), Oracle converged infrastructure solution in the form of engineered systems is a boon when it comes to unifying computing strategies ranging from inhouse data centers to the cloud. This, as a result, enables CIOs to implement security initiatives more effectively across the organization.
- For Enterprise Architects, Engineered Systems solutions a platform that is standard and secure as well as scalable to feed the future growth prospects. Additionally, single vendor accountability means reduced risk and quicker troubleshooting turnaround time.
- For IT resources, exclusive Oracle converged infrastructure simplifies IT environments that are invariably prone to complexities, particularly in the present times when data center transformation to cloud is underway, or anticipated.
7 Quick Oracle Engineered Systems Benefits
- Striking upgrade to do-it-yourself project
- Purposefully designed to sustain mission critical enterprise applications
- Single engineering team responsible for application architecture and storage; reducing complexities
- An integration that delivers one-stop solutions to streamlined operations, software updates, support, and contracts
- Cloud compatible with no changes required in technology, skilled, and protocols
- Managed swiftly across all layers of the stack from a solitary pane of glass
- Security protocols inbuilt from chip to the cloud
