Converged infrastructure is quickly becoming big business. Look no further than this <a href="http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=237979" target="_blank">November 2012 IDC study</a> which predicts overall spending on converged systems will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 54.7% from $2.0 billion in 2011 to $17.8 billion in 2016.

According to <a href="http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=PRF002652" target="_blank">Jed Scaramella</a>, research manager, Enterprise Server Group, "The use of converged systems as an alternative to traditional procurement and delivery models will continue to be one of the most important developments in the evolution of IT infrastructure market. End users and service providers alike will rely heavily on suppliers to offer converged systems, which encapsulate server, storage, networking, and management services into smaller, more easily managed and efficiency infrastructure."

In light of all this, we asked one of eGroup's Technical Consultants, Jeffrey Flowers, his thoughts on the converged space and how it pertains to our customers directly around our EMC and Cisco relationships.
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">JF: The converged infrastructure conversation could cover either protocol converged transport platforms (FC and Ethernet --&gt; FCoE) or it could relate to the integrated stack platform and how products interact with one another such as the VMware, Cisco, and EMC alliances. I’ll address each of them separately and how they impact one another.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Customer conversations in the past several years have centered around virtualization efforts and have been predominately due to their desire to manage fewer devices and create a much more simplistic infrastructure environment. An environment that is scalable, agile, and high performance is a requirement. Effectively, the goal of those conversations and goals were to reduce their capital expenditures. Less equipment means less cost and fewer maintenance contracts. These conversations have shifted to one that optimizes the infrastructure and creates a much more simple to manage, simple to scale up, and simple to scale out architecture and platform.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">How can we reduce our operational expenses? Fewer moving parts, fewer steps equals fewer administrators to manage the platform.  Streamlining the administrative and operational costs for customers allows those extra administrators to focus their attention to adding additional value to the business with other IT initiatives that simply fell to the wayside before.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">This is exactly where converged infrastructures have come into play during the past several years in the virtualization landscape - by combining protocol transports together (FC and Ethernet merging into FCoE) results in fewer devices and fewer interfaces / connections. What traditionally would have required redundant Ethernet <em>and </em>redundant Fibre Channel switches with redundant connections from each host have now been consolidated down into one set of redundant devices running FCoE that can handle either or both across a single pair of connections. This has resulted in lower capital expenditures for some customers and also contributes to lower operational expenditures due to fewer points of management.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">This has been particularly true for eGroup and our Cisco UCS/Nexus offerings, even more so for Cisco UCS Blade platforms. In looking back just a few years, Cisco is the new comer to the server market, but has experienced great success in this area of their offerings.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">eGroup’s Cisco UCS business has seen steady growth over the past two years. By leveraging Cisco UCS Manager and Data Center Network Management tools, provisioning and management of the server environment have become incredibly simple. These tools handle firmware management, network adapter definitions and VLAN assignments, FC zoning, and BIOS settings quickly and simply. Server provisioning times, as a result, are dramatically reduced from days to just hours. With UCS blades, we no longer have to run cables for new server deployments, as the chassis is already cabled to the Nexus switching infrastructure. Even EMC storage arrays can communicate using traditional or converged protocols – with FC, iSCSI, and FCoE being connectivity options on a vast majority of the storage offerings.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">As there are a multitude of new server peripherals, server model numbers, CPUs, NICs, storage arrays, network switches, storage switches, firmware, and virtualization software components / versions getting released monthly, this has introduced a bit of a dilemma in managing platform upgrades.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">EMC, Cisco, VMware and others have recognized this challenged and have begun offering integrated stack / converged infrastructure offerings – portfolios of products tested, certified, and validated to be compatible. A vBlock’s converged infrastructure would be upgraded using packages of pre-certified and tested components/software intended for that particular platform. Although a vBlock may be comprised of several different products, the end user can feel at ease that the platform is upgraded together as opposed to managing multiple independent components.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">eGroup also understands that a vBlock isn’t for all customers. We all work hard to ensure the solutions we design for customers meet their individual goals and their specific TCO and ROI objectives. In scenarios where customers want the integrated components and validated solutions around our offerings without the constraints that a rigorously tested and fully certified vBlock solution impose, eGroup also leverages the EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure offerings.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">VSPEX is a fully tested solution blueprint on how to build compute, storage, and network solutions using various server and network products with EMC storage platforms. VSPEX serves as a solution validation point for customers who choose their own server platforms but still want to ensure everything functions properly for their intended use case and workload on EMC storage. eGroup uses VSPEX Proven Infrastructure offerings to ensure EMC storage array code levels are supported by their server and virtualization versions before it is deployed or before an update is rolled out. This simplifies the IT environment, as it prevents the customer administrators from having to do all the legwork themselves to validate every component independently and brings further value to our solution and service offerings.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Ultimately, eGroup can deliver solutions from fully converged and integrated (vBlock), to hybrid (VSPEX), to best-in-breed all based upon the customer’s unique requirements.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">As further adoption of 10GbE based infrastructures continues, we see the converged conversation becoming increasingly central to strategy. As all the technologies continue to evolve, cable specifications change, connectivity speeds increase, and virtualization adoption further increases, converged infrastructures offer some incredible administrative benefits while also avoiding continuous and costly cable infrastructure upgrades. Focuses are shifting more towards deeper operational efficiencies and automation of the infrastructure, so the converged infrastructure push will surely continue in the years to come.</p>