Evaluate New Converged Infrastructures To Underpin The Software-Defined Data Center

The transformation of virtual computing environments into fully software-defined data centers is disrupting the architecture of the underlying physical infrastructure. The recent wave of converged infrastructure products targeting purely virtualized environments takes a markedly different approach from the previous generation of application-specific and service-centric products. These new systems, which Forrester calls storage-centric virtualized infrastructure, are designed from a storage-centric perspective that integrates the x86 server and storage. The result is simpler and lower-cost hardware; easy, modular expansion; and architectures optimized to deliver fast storage administered with virtual machine (VM)-centric abstractions instead of the logical unit numbers (LUNs), partitions, and volumes of conventional storage. This report defines storage-centric virtualized infrastructure, its opportunity and use cases, and the emerging vendor landscape that IT infrastructure and operations groups should evaluate as they purse the software-defined data center.