A growing number of organizations have recognized that architecting, planning, testing, verifying, deploying, and maintaining interoperability among IT infrastructure components wastes budgets and resources while not contributing desired value to your business. As a result, they have chosen to buy not build converged infrastructure.
VCE makes the leading converged infrastructure solutions: Vblock® Systems, VxBlock™ Systems, and VxRack™ Systems. But once you’ve deployed your VCE systems, you may still be uncertain whether you’re truly maximizing the value of your investment.
In my last post, we explored five of the 10 Tips & Tricks that will ensure you make the most of your VCE Blocks and Racks. Today, let’s look at five more steps you can take.
Tip 6: Quickly Migrate Workloads
It might seem obvious, but in the daily realities of a data center environment, one of the biggest challenges is completing the migration process efficiently and effectively. I had one data center manager tell me, “My new Vblock System is like a big paperweight sitting in the middle of the room because I haven’t migrated my workloads yet.”
VCE offers a proven methodology that will enable you to virtualize physical servers with up to 1 TB of data and easily migrate your entire data center to a virtualized environment within twelve weeks or less. Once your workloads are on your new VCE converged infrastructure, you can begin enjoying the full return you expected.
Tip 7: Get High-Value Support
Obtaining the right support is essential to realizing the greatest value from your VCE Systems. VCE’s incomparable support experience for customers is facilitated through two types of team members:
- VCE Customer Advocate—A trusted advisor who works to identify and resolve issues quickly
- Virtual Platform Support Engineer or Escalation Engineer—Technical resources with the expertise to ensure your system’s optimization and reduce risk
Regardless of the resources you use, our experience has been that as long as you’ve got a single VCE system in your data center, our Core support is likely to be satisfactory. But as you increase the number of VCE systems, you’ll likely prefer our more proactive options—Plus or Premier—which can dramatically decrease the frequency and severity of reactive service requests.
Tip 8: Love Your RCM
Recently, I had the CIO tell me, “Before I implemented my VCE systems, I had ten team members who just did testing for firmware and software upgrades.” This CIO was responsible for a large, complex IT environment and clearly couldn’t afford to have things break every time there was a new release.
That all ended with his move to VCE systems. Our Release Certification Matrix (RCM) is essentially a “gold copy” configuration. VCE spends 400-500 hours testing and validating the interoperability of each infrastructure component—compute, storage, network, and virtualization—for every relevant firmware or software release by various vendors. No one else offers an RCM—and it reduces costs by 50% while minimizing the risk of downtime and enabling you to reallocate resources to value-creating activities.
Tip 9: Keep Your Systems Healthy, Optimized, and Secure
Every Vblock, VxBlock, and VxRack System comes with VCE Vision™ Intelligent Operations built in. The software offers unique intelligence, automation, and visualization capabilities to help you understand and manage your infrastructure.
You get a unified view of your environment to keep systems and application workloads healthy. You’re notified when you need to upgrade components with RCM-approved firmware and software to ensure your systems are stable and optimized. VCE Vision also discovers vulnerabilities and delivers software patches to keep your data center secure.
Tip 10: Become a Certified Converged Infrastructure Expert
The final tip to ensure that your VCE systems will perform 
up to their potential is to become a certified
converged infrastructure expert. VCE has a well-established certification program, and we encourage everyone to get certified based on their roles within your IT team. Credentials include Associate, Engineer, and Master Engineer.
A number of our customers have created incentives for team members to get certified in converged and hyper-converged infrastructure. This has really paid dividends for these companies.
So, there you have it: 10 Tips & Tricks designed to generate maximum value from your VCE converged infrastructure. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help meet your IT demands, visit our Professional Services page.