If you’re a CIO today, you’re responsible for driving the innovation engine for your business. That responsibility brings with it many challenges. You’re challenged with how to transform your data center to manage complexity; how to leverage new disruptive technologies while integrating with legacy tools and operational processes; and, how to manage evolutionary innovation with reduced IT budget year over year. When CIOs look at their operating budget, the vast majority of that budget is spent on maintenance, not on net new initiatives. So how do you pivot from being an infrastructure provider to an innovation enabler? These were some of the challenges we discussed at the recent 2015 Gartner Data Center conference.
The answers lie in intelligent converged and hyper-converged infrastructure that are rapidly transforming the way end-users consume IT by taking a software-defined approach to architecting a fast and easy to deploy, all-in-one compute, storage and network solution. As we heard from various global CIOs, analysts and industry pundits, the excitement around and confidence in CI is real. Our customers—spanning midsized companies, large enterprises, service providers and the public sector—are seeing tangible business benefits in our ability to accelerate IT transformation, simplify operations and shift resources to increase the focus on innovation and business agility while reducing risk.
As we look to the future, we see more change in the IT industry than we’ve ever seen before. We see a world where software will create and manage the autonomous data center- a data center that’s reliable, self-healing and predictive in identifying when things don’t work and fixing potential problems before they happen.
In the enterprise, developers sometimes used to wait anywhere from a week to a month for servers, networking, and storage resources to be provisioned with the right operating systems, software, and tools they need for just a few days of development work. This is no longer acceptable, as businesses expect instant access to data and apps and consumers are equally demanding of a rich user experience that protects personal information and spans multiple devices.
To deliver on these expectations it’s imperative for today’s enterprises to have a reliable, software-defined infrastructure management strategy. Doing so, via converged and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, enables enterprises to quickly and seamlessly deploy necessary server, network and storage resources associated with applications to scale up or down to meet demands in a cost-effective manner.
These solutions fully address both traditional workloads that require the infrastructure to be reliable and performance-driven and cloud-native workloads that are inherently resilient and work across white-box infrastructure which is reconfigured based on the application requirements. As the complexity in technology choices, security threats and business requirements increase and evolve, the need for a massively simplified infrastructure to deliver applications and tools that drive business competitiveness and end user experience will become even more critical.
At VCE we are leading this journey with our customers so they can turbo charge their innovation engines to focus on improved agility in accelerating their critical transformation initiatives for future growth.