Simplify. Eliminate duplication of effort. Reduce costs. Play to your core competencies. Standardize. All of these are themes I have heard in my own company as we have looked at ways to improve our IT operations. Like many companies, we try to form a plan of where our IT operations should move, motivated by making IT highly available, redundant and cost efficient.
Converge. That theme is a tougher sell in my employer’s environment. There is resistance to converging, whether it’s IP telephony on our data network versus converging our fiber channel with fiber channel over Ethernet and putting it on our same core Ethernet network. Same would go for iSCSI, if we had it. We tend to separate for simplicity reasons, but there are certainly cost savings in convergence.
Why converge?
Convergence is a major trend in IT, today, although it goes by many names. But like most trends and buzzwords (think Cloud), your mileage will vary among vendors and interpretations of the buzz. HP’s approach to convergence is largely centered around standardized x86 hardware for both server and storage platforms. In addition, the converged storage platforms within HP are about scale out, with multiple controllers to handle unpredictable and unruly disk I/O with ease.
