By Dan Quirk, SAP Practice Leader at Logicalis
Converged infrastructures—where servers, storage, networks, applications and management all converge into a single entity—make it possible to turn IT into a service provider rather than a cost center. A fully-functional converged infrastructure can also serve as the gateway to all the advantages cloud computing has to offer while reducing data center footprints and thus lowering power and cooling costs.
Compared to a traditional silo infrastructure, a converged infrastructure reduces complexity by pooling resources and automating IT processes. This all adds up to increasing IT’s ability to respond to the needs of the business.
Here at Logicalis, many of our clients are discovering how their SAP environments now lend themselves quite nicely to operating effectively within a converged infrastructure. It used to be that enterprises deployed only dedicated stand-alone systems for each SAP module. But Cisco, HP and IBM technologies are now driving existing SAP customers that are refreshing their environment to consider convergence.
Just last summer, HP announced a new infrastructure solution for SAP‘s in-memory computing system HANA, which converges database and application platform capabilities for transactions, analytics and text analysis as well as predictive and spatial processing. And according to a 2013 IDC report, many organizations that have developed confidence in the speed, scalability and reliability of VCE Vblock systems have moved their critical SAP module workloads to Vblock.
In addition to the system-efficiencies and reduced operating/maintenance costs, converged architectures generate several other key benefits:
- Streamlining training and development environment deployments
- Facilitating long-term planning for stability, capacity, and performance
- Providing simplified yet highly-effective automated management tools
- Enabling better control for IT departments over the infrastructure
- Reducing the cost of running applications
- Improving the time-to-value for application and cloud deployments
Logicalis features a team of experts than can help you modernize your SAP environment and show you the best way to design and deploy a converged infrastructure. Visit the Logicalis Website to find out more.