Updated Q2 2011: Are Converged Infrastructures Good For IT?

IT pros have most of the basic ingredients to cook up their own cloud-like infrastructure or support complex applications — 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 Systems, Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM have had basic converged infrastructure (CI) offerings for several years — but many I&O teams hesitated to deploy them, as they required higher levels of integration. Recent evolutions in CI solutions give new choices to I&O professionals, including complete integrated applications as well as horizontal virtual infrastructures in a box. Utilizing updated data, this document will look at how the solutions have matured and differentiated and how I&O teams should look to CI as the foundation of all x86 server deployments.