Are Converged Infrastructures Good For IT?

IT pros have most of the basic ingredients to cook up their own cloud-like infrastructure — but there's no recipe, and many ingredients just don't combine well. Complicating the story are the traditional infrastructure silos around servers, networks, and storage that must work together in a new, truly integrated way. Vendors like Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM know you need packaged solutions that just work, but until recently they left too much of the burden on their customers. Recent integrated solutions take a big step toward delivering complete virtual infrastructures in a box, but to effectively use them, you must assess your own virtualization maturity, start small with development and test workloads, and consider whether you really need to run it yourself.