Data Center selection: Integrating infrastructure vs. Best practices

As more and more vendors enter the market and existing vendors continue to improve their products, the choice of converged infrastructure as a platform for building modern data centers is attracting more and more corporate users ' attention.

Sophisticated vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and Oracle, which provide converged infrastructure products are now facing Dell, The competition and challenges of mainstream IT companies such as Huawei and Xsigo, and the new vendors, all of which are actively attracting users who are planning to choose a one-stop approach to building the data center infrastructure.

But potential users are also looking at the multiple-vendor optimal solution, a solution that not only provides them with technical choices, but also helps them avoid falling into the confines of a single vendor's technology.

In the foreseeable future with the continuous development of technology trends, users will face this numerous choices.

The converged infrastructure is a way to centralize multiple it technologies, such as servers, storage, network devices, virtualization and/or application software, into one large solution.

Unlike the solution provider and its users, which consolidate different components from two or more vendors based on specific user requirements, the converged infrastructure is provided based on the choice of vendor or product, with relatively little room for choice.

In addition, converged infrastructure solutions are usually pre-installed by a vendor or distributor, or assembled by a distributor or solution provider based on the manufacturer's blueprint.

The fusion infrastructure offers a range of advantages over the optimal solution.

The main advantage is that the solution is consolidated by a single vendor's product or built from a vendor's pre-designed template, which is much simpler than a solution that requires onsite assembly from multiple vendors.

A converged infrastructure solution can also provide users with "a bundle of the end" products and services, or a single entity that can handle services, repairs, upgrades, and patches. Indeed, many of the converged infrastructure solutions include automated upgrades and patching services that reduce the amount of effort that administrators can take to maintain their system's replacement.

However, the optimal solution also has a strong advantage.

Although it is much more complicated to integrate solutions from multiple vendors into the data center than to move the entire configured solution into the datacenter, they can allow users to choose the technology they need from the vendors they choose. This is especially true for users who have invested heavily in servers, storage or web vendors that they already prefer.

For many users it is more important to optimize the optimal solution to prevent the manufacturer from locking the situation.

The converged infrastructure allows vendors to lock users and exclude other competitors from the data center. This evolves into a major problem when users are increasingly connected to their data center and cloud, because vendors who provide a converged infrastructure are internally tracking the build cloud infrastructure.

Solution providers see the benefits of fusing the infrastructure and optimizing the optimal solution.

Denali Advanced, a solution provider and HP partner at Redmon, Washington John Carville, executive vice president of integration's firm relations and marketing division, says the company is a strong fan of HP's converged infrastructure, as HP's converged infrastructure helps them reduce data center costs while increasing it efficiency.

Denali Company has 30 user activities each year to promote the integration of data center infrastructure, Carville said "This is our support."

Denali is currently working with management equipment Technology developer McKinstry in Seattle to develop HP Cloud Center of Excellence to help users develop cloud solutions based on HP's converged infrastructure.

"Efficiency is our life," Carville says. From the beginning, we talked to the user about the cost. Many data centers face the reality of economic downturns and budget compression. So we're not just talking to them about efficiency, but about spending on our infrastructure.

Not every user is a user of a converged infrastructure, but there is no shortage of attempts, Carville stressed.

"We are all professional sales people who can feel their needs and provide the best value from the user's consulting," says Carville. When dealing with the integration infrastructure, the sales cycle is increased, but if the user requests and needs 1000 blades, we will accept the order. Then we'll talk to them about virtualization, thin clients, virtual desktops, or more.

Bob Oleg, the vice president of corporate strategy at Wide Marvell, a Saint Louis solution provider, said that their company used Cisco-emc-vmware Vblock, Cisco-netapp-vmware flexpod, and HP Cloudsystem Matrix Fusion Infrastructure Products has been a great success.

"Users are very interested in fusing infrastructure or pod (HP Performance Tuning Data center), and they appreciate our structured, independent multi-vendor approach that ultimately creates the exclusive infrastructure that best fits the needs and budgets of the enterprise," Oleg said.

World Wide offers a full range of consulting services, including hands-on training, solution demonstrations, exploratory experiments, technical evaluations and proof of concept, many of which are performed by their senior technology centers. Oleg says three of the integrated infrastructure products mentioned above are running in their advanced technology centers.

"We see that these converged infrastructures are getting more and more quickly recognized by the federal government and midsize enterprises, but we hope to get a quick reception from the world's top 1000 customers by the end of 2011," Oleg said.

At the same time, another solution provider using NETAPP,EMC, Cisco and VMware, said that their company preferred to optimize the architecture.

The solution provider, who does not want to be named, says the integration of infrastructure solutions does exist in the marketplace, but the flexibility of configuration is even more important. The company stressed that "we think it is not feasible in vertical integration software".

The two originator of the integration infrastructure, which integrates storage, server and network technology, is Cisco and Hewlett-Packard.

Cisco's product in this area is the Cisco Unified Computing System, which integrates network, blade server, storage, core switches, routers, security and voice telephony in one architecture.

But Cisco does not offer its own storage technology. Instead, they worked with EMC and VMware to develop a vblock product that is sold jointly by three companies, owned by three partners and sold exclusively through channel distributors. Cisco has also worked with NetApp and VMware to develop the Flexpod products, which NetApp is responsible for exclusive distribution through its channel partners. Although Vblock has its own SKU, the three companies are deployed as fully configured solutions to users, and flexpod components can be ordered from three vendors and assembled by solution providers on site.

HP's converged infrastructure includes its ProLiant blade servers, various storage technologies and the network technology they acquired from 3COM.

IBM was also developing a converged infrastructure last year through the acquisition of network maker Blade receptacle technologies. Like Hewlett-Packard, IBM can provide its own storage, server and network infrastructure.

Oracle is another competitor in the field, with a unique strategy to combine its powerful software with server and storage technologies acquired from Sun Microsystems. But Oracle has no internet products of its own.

In the first two months, several powerful it manufacturers have aggressively entered the converged infrastructure market.

This July Dell Inc. said it plans to buy a High-performance data center network device developer Force10. Once the acquisition succeeds, Dell has its own network of intellectual property that can be combined with their powerful server technology and the storage product line they recently acquired from Compellent.

Dell's plan to acquire FORCE10 is a powerful complement and expansion of Dell's storage and server product lines, especially when users are focused and interested in cloud computing, said Darrow, vice president and general manager of Dell's network business division, Samaritan, when announcing the takeover.

There is no doubt that FORCE10 and its network technology will be an important part of the solution, Samaritan stressed. While some users will continue to look for an open approach to the datacenter architecture, other users will find that a converged solution with a unified management framework will be better suited to their needs.

Intel announced in July this year the acquisition of a framework agreement for Fulcrum Microsystems, a factory-wide network chip manufacturer specializing in the design of High-bandwidth Ethernet switch processors in data centers. Intel Corporation says Fulcrum Microsystems technology will become part of a converged server, storage and networking strategy. Intel's partners are unique in the system and infrastructure markets and are unable to compete with other vendors.

Huawei, a company established by China telecom giant Huawei and the US storage and security software maker Symantec Inc., launched a full range of enterprise network devices to match their servers and storage offerings in July this year, providing the possibility to integrate these technologies.

Smaller emerging companies also see the value of integrating infrastructure. For example, Xsigo system, located in California State San Jose, has launched software that connects virtual machines and networks and storage technologies in data centers with hardware and software technologies with their ownership input/output controls.