Back in the noughties I made the conscious decision as a
Storage guy to immerse myself into what was being termed server virtualization
and understanding the product offerings of a relatively new company named
VMware. To this day I remember the incredulous looks and responses I received
from my Storage counterparts, who were convinced that the VMware fad was nothing
more than a system admin tool. Indeed the organizations that were early
adopters of VMware ended up assigning the virtualization responsibility to the
system admins team; at no point was there ever a thought that a dedicated
virtualization team could or should be established. Fast forward to 2014 and virtualization
teams are the norm and Storage administrators are constantly being hard pressed
to have a better understanding of VMware as they provision and manage
virtualized environments. Such a culture change was unthinkable 10 years ago,
yet here we are again with the emergence of another silo, the Converged
Infrastructure team.
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| If you've got an IT problem, if no one else can help and if you can find them, maybe you need to hire a converged infrastructure team... |
This culture change became incredibly apparent at last years
VMworld. Having attended every VMworld for the last four years, there was no
escaping the significant change in the vendors, the products and the folks that
were now in attendance. Gone were the numerous stalls of third party VMware
management and monitoring tools and their vendors, almost resigned to the fact
that vCenter Operations Manager had now monopolized that market. Gone too were
all the VM labs that focused on the server virtualization features and in their
place numerous labs that highlighted how VMware was now a cloud product. Even
the third party vendors that were on display were now focused on orchestration,
automation, self-service portals, service providers and everything else Cloud
orientated. As for the traditional storage vendors, each of them was now
presenting their storage arrays as part of either a reference architecture or
converged infrastructure. If you belonged to either the Storage or
virtualization silo there was little if anything on offer compared to previous
years, if anything it was a wake up call that times were changing and changing
fast.
As the converged infrastructure market continues to
experience unprecedented growth there is now an inevitable evolution in how IT
infrastructure is being procured, manufactured, managed and monitored. Akin to
how desktop PCs evolved into slim and powerful laptops and portable tablets, IT
infrastructure is experiencing a similar revolution. It wasn’t that long ago
when you wanted to buy a PC you’d have to choose and order all the various
components as single items i.e. the CPU, the RAM, the motherboard, the CD-ROM
drive, the monitor etc. and then wait several weeks as the PC store would build
and integrate all of those components together. In terms of support if anything
went wrong with that PC, you’d have to go back to the PC store who’d then spend
several weeks deciphering the issue as they went back to all the component
manufacturers to either replace or diagnose the issue. Such an approach is now
almost non-existent where instead an end user can simply purchase a
preconfigured, customized laptop online as a single product that’s manufactured
and supported by a single company. Converged infrastructure offers the same
simplicity to what was once a complex approach to setting up infrastructure
that’s ultimate aim is to support applications. Consequently the simplicity
that converged infrastructure has brought to organizations in terms of time to
deliver, speed of deployment and risk mitigation has led the same organisations
to question their traditional silos of management and monitoring.
Indeed such a change was exemplified to me in recent weeks
with examples from two clients that I have been working with. The first client
is a large organisation that has a multitude of silos and consequent processes
and stumbling blocks to whenever they require new infrastructure for any new
projects. With their current project they decided to bypass their internal silos
and instead create a new team that would solely be responsible for a Vblock,
i.e. their converged infrastructure team. In 45 days this team were up and
running with their system delivering a service to the business, something that
their traditional silos were taking nine months to achieve. The other client
was a completely different case where a small team of seven was responsible for
IT operations. Separated as silos of storage, network, compute, databases etc.
this client made the step towards a mid-range 300 series Vblock converged
infrastructure just over a year ago and immediately saw the benefits of
accelerated deployment, performance optimization and risk mitigation. Recognising
the potential their internal IT now had to open up new avenues for business,
the same client only a few months later went on to procure seven more Vblocks.
As for the team of seven there was no requirement for them to grow or change,
in fact the only change that was required was their name; they’re now the
converged infrastructure team.
