Digital business transformation has become one of those catchphrases that is defined by the eye of the beholder. There is no such thing as a turnkey digital business transformation that an organization can buy to magically solve every challenge they face. There are, however, modern IT infrastructure platforms that enable digital business transformation projects to move rapidly forward.
When most business executives talk about digital business transformation they are really seeking to inject agility back into the business. They want to be able to develop and test new digital services enabled by advanced applications with the least amount of risk possible. Not too long ago it would take an IT department six months or more just to acquire and configure all the components needed to create such an IT platform. Not surprisingly, that lack of alacrity gave rise to demand for public cloud services that application developers now routinely employ to access IT infrastructure resources on demand.
The trouble is that over time those monthly public cloud computing bills start to add up. Before anyone in the organization realizes it the total cost of computing for the enterprise starts to spin out of control. What’s really required is a more cost efficient approach to IT infrastructure
defined by software that provides all the agility associated with a public cloud. To achieve that goal Dell has been investing millions of dollars in converged and hyper-converged infrastructure that unifies the management of compute, storage and networking.
Arguably, it’s the separation of compute, storage and networking into isolated silos that accounts for why most IT organizations are not up to the digital business challenge. When managed in isolation each of these functions develops its own unique set of specialized tools, processes and procedures. For the first time converged and hyper-converged platforms enable IT organizations to manage compute, storage and networking at a much higher level of abstraction. Instead of manually provisioning each component, an IT team can now think in terms of defining templates and polices to meet the specific IT infrastructure requirements of different classes of application workloads in a matter of minutes. The templates can then be implemented by IT generalists in a way that frees up compute, storage and networking specialists to focus their efforts on more pressing issues.
Just as significantly, it also means that rather than being wholly
dependent on costly public cloud services to achieve IT agility an IT organization can now create a software-defined data center capable of servicing multiple types of application workloads in a way that doesn’t wind up busting the IT budget. In effect, converged and hyper-converged systems provide the foundational layer of a private cloud that enables developers to self-service their own IT infrastructure requirements without requiring the IT organization to sacrifice either governance or security.
We invite you to download a copy of the Dell Getting Started with VxBlock and Vblock Systems that describes in detail what’s involved in setting up and managing these systems. We’re confident that you’ll discover that Dell converged and hyper-converged systems provide both the simplest and most elegant approach to managing IT infrastructure at scale for the digital business age.
