Converged Infrastructure
Converged infrastructure definition
Converged infrastructure is a hardware defined solution designed to overcome the limitations and inefficiencies of the independent silo structure of traditional IT storage and compute. To minimize compatibility issues and simplify management, converged solutions join compute, networking, storage, systems administration, and software together in a preconfigured package that operates and is managed as a single converged system that delivers faster time to value.
Why converged infrastructure?
Converged infrastructure lets organizations use their compute resources in more efficient and cost-effective ways, lower their IT management costs, and increase the speed of software and service deployment. Many see converged infrastructure as the first step in the evolution toward a service/software-defined infrastructure. It offers:
- Simpler management infrastructure: Centralizes server management, network, and storage to streamline day-to-day maintenance
- Scalable storage capacity: The common fabrics and protocols built into converged infrastructure make adding gigabytes much simpler and faster
- Faster provisioning: Reduces a three-week provisioning time to under an hour
- Faster IT response: Provides the agility to respond to marketplace changes and business priorities
- Easier path to cloud: Makes it easier to implement private or hybrid clouds
- Greater control: Enables simultaneous management of multiple functions and devices
How do you deploy converged infrastructure?
Because converged infrastructure comes in a preconfigured package, it can easily be deployed in one on-prem location and administered via one web server. This significantly reduces deployment time, although it also means that when a business wants to scale their infrastructure, they must purchase additional preconfigured packages to scale out.
What are the differences between converged, hyperconverged, and composable infrastructure?
Converged, hyperconverged, and composable infrastructure are all forms of forms of managing IT solutions, though they differ in execution. Converged infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) are alike in that the goal is to overcome traditional infrastructure silos so that IT solutions can work together more efficiently; However, HCI does this at the hypervisor level and uses clusters of multiple nodes to create pools of shared resources. While convergence isn’t the point of composable infrastructure, IT resources are similarly abstracted from where they’re physically located so they can be managed via the web.
HPE converged infrastructure solutions
HPE converged infrastructure solutions tie virtualization, automation, and unified infrastructure management software together into pre-built, tested, and workload-optimized systems. These systems are software-defined for easy integration into existing infrastructure and quick transition to hybrid cloud delivery models. With HPE converged infrastructure solutions, you can deploy pre-validated, factory-tested configurations in weeks instead of months and set up IT services in minutes, not hours.