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The Challenge of Managing Converged Infrastructure

Kent Erickson

While the use of converged infrastructure (CI) is becoming mainstream, the accompanying management tools are still a challenge, according to the third annual global State of Converged Infrastructure survey from Zenoss.

CI systems integrate servers, storage, network and virtualization components into one system that can be managed as a single unit rather than separate systems. With 84% of all respondents using or planning to deploy CI, the technology has reached mainstream status. Companies large and small are building data centers around these integrated systems because they reduce investment risk and offer a faster way to scale out IT infrastructure capacity.

"While converged infrastructure architectures are delivering real value as the foundational element behind the transformation already underway in enterprise data centers, these packaged offerings are lacking unified monitoring and analytics software," said Megan Lueders, VP of Marketing at Zenoss. "With more effective management tools available, there is a huge opportunity for IT organizations shops to dramatically increase their agility and IT effectiveness."

The 2015 CI survey provides many additional insights into data center modernization, including:

■ In companies with more than 5,000 employees, only 8% are not using or considering CI.

■ Despite being pervasively adopted, the survey results indicate management software is lagging behind, with 63% of respondents indicating they manage their CI deployments by repurposing existing management tools designed for traditional infrastructure.

■ Astonishingly, 25% of companies who have deployed CI are dealing with seven or more tools to manage it.

■ Key drivers for CI deployments include projects for big data, infrastructure as a service, unified communications, and custom application development.

Zenoss polled 410 IT professionals from across the world to determine how technology leaders are leveraging CI to respond to business needs, including 151 who have already adopted CI within their IT environments and another 194 who were currently considering or planning for it. 32% of these respondents come from organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

Kent Erickson is Alliance Strategist at Zenoss.

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The Challenge of Managing Converged Infrastructure

Kent Erickson

While the use of converged infrastructure (CI) is becoming mainstream, the accompanying management tools are still a challenge, according to the third annual global State of Converged Infrastructure survey from Zenoss.

CI systems integrate servers, storage, network and virtualization components into one system that can be managed as a single unit rather than separate systems. With 84% of all respondents using or planning to deploy CI, the technology has reached mainstream status. Companies large and small are building data centers around these integrated systems because they reduce investment risk and offer a faster way to scale out IT infrastructure capacity.

"While converged infrastructure architectures are delivering real value as the foundational element behind the transformation already underway in enterprise data centers, these packaged offerings are lacking unified monitoring and analytics software," said Megan Lueders, VP of Marketing at Zenoss. "With more effective management tools available, there is a huge opportunity for IT organizations shops to dramatically increase their agility and IT effectiveness."

The 2015 CI survey provides many additional insights into data center modernization, including:

■ In companies with more than 5,000 employees, only 8% are not using or considering CI.

■ Despite being pervasively adopted, the survey results indicate management software is lagging behind, with 63% of respondents indicating they manage their CI deployments by repurposing existing management tools designed for traditional infrastructure.

■ Astonishingly, 25% of companies who have deployed CI are dealing with seven or more tools to manage it.

■ Key drivers for CI deployments include projects for big data, infrastructure as a service, unified communications, and custom application development.

Zenoss polled 410 IT professionals from across the world to determine how technology leaders are leveraging CI to respond to business needs, including 151 who have already adopted CI within their IT environments and another 194 who were currently considering or planning for it. 32% of these respondents come from organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

Kent Erickson is Alliance Strategist at Zenoss.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...