2012 Trend: Consolidation to Convergence
by Hu Yoshida on November 16, 2011
In 2012, consolidation will give way to convergence.
Over the past few years IT has focused on consolidation of servers through hypervisors, as well as the consolidation of storage over SAN for cost reductions. Much of the low-hanging fruit has now been consolidated, and in order to gain further cost savings, the focus will be on convergence of server, storage, networks, and applications.
Application programming interfaces (APIs), which offload workload to storage, can make the servers and memory more efficient. Orchestration software will help to converge the management, automation, provisioning, and reporting across local, remote, and cloud based server, storage, and network infrastructures. Reference architectures for applications like Exchange and Oracle databases, which are pre-configured and pre-certified, will shorten the time and effort to stand up applications.
While consolidation was mostly about reducing acquisition costs, convergence is more focused on reducing operational costs. Convergence reduces the cost of provisioning, migrating, load balancing, and overall management of infrastructure, while providing faster time to implementation and application delivery.
Convergence across infrastructure silos also has an implication for the way we manage IT. Many IT shops are organized in silos, with separate administrators for servers, storage, networks, databases, and hypervisors. Successful convergence will be better served by a horizontal organization. VMware administrators should not be at odds with storage administrators over the resources to provision a virtual disk.
The technologies to support convergence and reduce costs are available today. Like all technologies, the success in realizing the benefits of convergence will depend on people, process, and management leadership.
For Hu’s other 2012 trends, visit this bit.ly bundle: http://bitly.com/vXGP2T
