1. Dell Point of View Article
Convergence as a Continuum to
Driving Superior Customer Outcomes
Gaining increased agility and greater efficiency in the data Operating virtual infrastructures is too costly
center is a universal goal of organizations today. Being able
to drive down capital expenditures and operational costs,
and complex
while increasing responsiveness to the business or end users, Finally, IT has been adopting virtualization for many years
can enable IT to create a competitive advantage for their to gain added agility and efficiency in supporting business
organizations. needs and increasing asset utilization. However, virtualization
in many cases hasn’t reduced ­ and sometimes has
—
Over the past several years, IT solution providers have
increased — operational costs. In effect, virtualization
increased their focus on providing converged infrastructure
has never removed the underlying needs of hardware
solutions. Converged Infrastructure solutions seek to bring
management — across compute, storage and networking
together key IT elements — across compute, storage,
— and has added new demands for IT to manage the
networking and management — to improve efficiency
hypervisor layer and supporting operational needs for the
and agility. Leading analysts suggest that converged
new virtual environment.
infrastructure solutions can provide a stronger foundation for
private clouds, speed time-to-value for applications, reduce
management complexity and lower overall computing costs. Optimizing for Efficiency and Agility vs.
However, many of today’s approaches to convergence are Performance is a key aspect of gaining
heavily indexed on fabric-based convergence solutions competitive advantage from IT
that are expensive, complex, inflexible and incomplete. In IT’s ability to deliver and manage applications is an
response, Dell believes that convergence should always be imperative variable of improving the competitive advantage
about driving customer outcomes by helping IT deliver more for their organizations. In the past, speed or performance
efficient and agile applications and IT service delivery. of the applications was the sole measure of customer
Today, IT organizations are struggling with three satisfaction. But, in reality there are two ways success can be
fundamental challenges as they work to support the business derived:
and let the CIO say “yes” again! • Performance includes the speed that applications run and
how well the needs of end users are supported
Supporting the rapid delivery of applications
• Efficiency and Agility include things like asset utilization,
and IT services ability to drive down costs (both capital expenditures and
First, for many organizations building infrastructure takes operational expenditures) and respond to requests more
too long and is not a core competency. They spend weeks quickly from the business
and months working through the selection, procurement, Consider an application like email. If your organization’s
installation and configuration phases — and, meanwhile, employees received emails one second faster than those
the business and end users must wait. Some have turned to from one of your competitors, would that make a material
cloud models to gain agility and speed delivery; however, difference? Probably not.
with inflexible infrastructure and limited tooling, they cannot
effectively build and deploy a private cloud or utilize public
cloud options.
Optimizing for
Managing the explosion of data, endpoints
and growth Efficiency and Agility
The consumerization of IT is happening across many
organizations and industries, leading end users to want what
vs. Performance is a
they want, when they want it, on any device they have. And
if they don’t get what they need quickly, they will turn to
key aspect of gaining
alternative services that could increases costs or expose
security challenges. For IT, the reality is that legacy storage
competitive advantage
and networking systems are too static, rigid and difficult to
manage. And while virtualization has helped gain efficiencies,
from IT
it has also caused virtual machine (VM) sprawl, which raises a
new set of challenges.

2. What’s needed is a rationalization of applications to help IT reduced costs. So convergence should be applied to support
determine if efficiency and agility is most important, or if each objective.
performance is most important. • Convergence today is limited, primarily occurring at the
• Which applications need to be faster to provide competitive network and infrastructure administration layers: While
advantage some gains can be achieved, the true value of convergence
is inclusive of all aspects of the infrastructure, but not limited
• Which applications have more advantage by being cheaper
to them.
or being more agile to dial up or down those workload
capacities Dell believes that convergence is a continuum that spans
infrastructure, operations management, applications and
In the past, Dell, has been focused on optimizing for application
service management to help IT deliver more efficient and
performance. Our customers are asking for our help to
agile application and IT service delivery. Here is how Dell is
make them more agile and efficient on the core set of
helping our customers leverage convergence to drive superior
applications that are built for virtualization. That’s really where
customer outcomes:
convergence comes in.
• Dell is helping our customers to move from limited physical
• Performance: Optimizing for performance might include
convergence to broad and full convergence across
low-latency banking applications where the difference in
compute, storage and networking.
milliseconds can mean the difference in millions of dollars
in trading. Dell helps our customers take all those piece • Dell is driving process convergence, enabling a single
parts to help build faster, improved infrastructures to do administrator to perform multiple functions to reduce
that. This will continue to be important, as businesses operational costs, increase manageability and speed
continue to invest in the architects and talent to design application and IT service delivery.
those applications for their performance to give them a
• With enhanced software and hardware convergence,
competitive advantage. Dell is enabling improved performance and availability of
• Efficiency/Agility: In this area, our customers are looking to applications — helping the business achieve greater results.
buy solutions for applications like email and payroll because • Dell is enabling convergence across IT service delivery
they are not going to gain any competitive advantage to paradigms — whether it be on-premise private clouds or
build these themselves. Bringing all the IT elements together off-premise public clouds.
to drive efficiency and improve agility of those operations
is as much about people and processes as it is about Dell provides open and flexible architectures to preserve your
technology. Convergence of all the IT domains is driving a ability to choose your own direction and adapt to changing
re-architecture of IT departments to allow them to get their needs at your own pace, now and in the future, all without
jobs done more effectively every day. compromising capability or performance.
Dell offers innovative and practical solutions for BOTH of these • Best-of-breed vs. all-in-one for infrastructure
organizational requirements, while other converged solution –– Today customers are faced with the decision to purchase
providers only focus on one or the other. infrastructure either in a best-of-breed approach across
Organizations are embracing converged infrastructure to compute, storage and networking or select an all-in-one,
address these and related challenges. But the reality is that pre-engineered solution. Dell offers innovative solutions
convergence is happening across the data center, not just at the for both customer needs that help them streamline
infrastructure layer. Further, we have seen it happen before and procurement and integrate with existing data center
today the following is proving to be true. investments.
• Convergence is not a new concept: Thinking back to the • Interoperability and flexibility of management
mainframe computing era, IT solution providers believed that –– Maintaining IT operations is a critical requirement
by consolidating components and management experience, for every data center environment. However, most
IT could gain efficiencies — but reality did not match the organizations have multiple, overlapping management
promised benefits. solutions that span infrastructure, applications and service
• Convergence always involves trade-offs and can be delivery needs. Many providers are introducing additional
incomplete: Whenever something is converged, often key layers of management that are required to derive the
items fall short. This is true today with some offerings lacking value of their converged infrastructure offerings. Dell
storage while others lack integration or fail to acknowledge offers an open approach to interoperability and flexibility
of management in the data center and beyond. With Dell,
that other management solutions are in play.
customers can augment existing investments, like those
• Convergence is an enabler, not the destination: Too focused on virtualization management, to drive down
often converged infrastructure solutions fail to address the operational costs. With Dell, customers don’t have to
fundamental customer challenge, which isn’t just at the change their operational processes to gain the benefits of
infrastructure layer. convergence.
• There is no single approach to convergence that By driving convergence within the infrastructure and beyond,
adequately delivers across all desired outcomes: Dell is helping IT organizations to achieve more, deliver real
Many organizations are seeking faster deployment of results faster and maximize efficiency to meet and exceed their
infrastructure, while others seek simpler administration for desired customer outcomes.
Learn more about how Dell can help you achieve your
customer outcomes at Marketing.Dell.com/Convergence
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