An appealing alternative to traditional technology infrastructure deployments
If you had a chance to look at the ESG Research Brief, Integrated Computing Trends (requires an ESG subscription), you saw that although only 10% of organizations have already deployed integrated computing platforms, two-thirds expressed some level of interest in the technology. ESG research respondents tout simplified management, reduced deployment times, and a better economic model as top benefits, but the are still concerned about vendor lock-in. The data also gets pretty interesting when you break it down by company size, storage capacity, and production servers. Comprised of server, storage, networking, and management components, integrated computing platforms offer an appealing alternative to traditional technology infrastructure deployments. Most, if not all, of the solutions available in the industry are primarily sold by vendors attempting to build new markets and are not yet 100% aligned with customer demand, but that’s a story for another day 😉 IT organizations that are looking to deploy should consider:
- What gets dropped off at the loading doc? Is it a bunch of boxes that three different services organizations having to coordinate unpacking, racking, and stacking or is it a pre-configured rack that IT can put the key in and take it for a drive as soon as it shows up.
- What’s the support model? This is a big one. Who gets the call for support? How is it handled/routed/escalated?
- How has the platform been matched to your specific workloads, applications, and capacity requirements? I have seen this go bad already, with a vendor promising mixed workload support and then leaving the customer high and dry when they went to migrate Microsoft Exchange.
- How does it scale? Can you add capacity on a modular basis or are you required to purchase a new unit to scale. This is a big deal and current integrated computing platforms all handle this differently.
- Management! Chances are good that operational efficiency was/is a primary driver for this investment. What’s the management platform, does it integrate with pre-existing management solutions? If so, how?
