Are appliance-like converged infrastructures the solution to data centre challenges?

As data centres become more complex, many organisations are turning to the appliance-like approach offered by converged infrastructure

While technology has helped solve uncounted number of challenges across the world, one almost insurmountable challenge remains: efficiently managing the data centre in order to keep up with demands from business, customers, and consumers more broadly.

A number of solutions have been proposed, including outsourcing and the use of cloud computing, but if an organisation wants to keep hold of its IT, and the data it processes and stores, then the solution is typically to add more computing power, extra storage and to increase the amount of bandwidth in and out of the data centre.

This challenge is neatly illustrated by Computing research among major data centre operators.* While the vast majority of organisations have virtualised their server architectures, the picture in terms of storage is more mixed. Indeed, the word "mixed" perfectly describes the scenarios.

One-tenth of organisations are largely using network-attached storage, while two-fifths "mostly use" fiber-channel storage area networks and a further 10 per cent use iSCSI storage area networking. One third, meanwhile, use a combination of both network-attached storage and network-attached storage.

If that sounds confusing, some two per cent of organisations have stuck resolutely with direct-attached storage, with all the inflexibility such an architecture prescribes, although these are likely to be in smaller organisations, with more straightforward data centre requirements.

An alternative is to take an appliance-like approach to the data centre and its growth. Converged infrastructure enables an organisation to effectively plug-in combined compute and storage in a single appliance. Although a fairly new idea in the data centre, already one-fifth of organisations are at least trialling converged infrastructure.

One-quarter of respondents said that they had migrated some production systems, where reliability is of key importance, to a converged data centre infrastructure.

A further benefit of converged infrastructures is that they lend themselves to the extension of the virtualisation applied to server to the storage component, according to Computing research director John Leonard. That's a real advantage as organisations move on to create a virtual layer of software-defined storage (SDS) separate from the underlying hardware.

With such a shift, that means that servers can be presented with a consistent storage interface, regardless of whether it's storage area networking, network-attached storage or even direct attached storage that the servers are interrogating.

The "software-defined" approach, although relatively new, is already coming of age, with one-quarter of organisations either trialling software-defined networking or "looking into it". Software-defined networking is, in many respects, a key prerequisite of software-defined storage as it provides the infrastructure over which the data is transmitted.

The promise of the software-defined "revolution" is that organisations will be better able to control their storage costs, reduce storage bottlenecks, and improve management of storage architectures. Indeed, at the IT department level, managing fast expanding IT infrastructures should be simpler and cheaper, because the complexity is largely handled at the software layer.

That, of course, is the promise, but it is the direction in which many organisations are shifting as they grapple with their data centre and storage infrastructures.

* Computing conducted an in-depth survey of 100 organisations operating data centre infrastructures, of which 87 per cent represented major organisations with more than 1,000 employees. Respondents were also selected on the basis of their involvement in the planning and management of those data centres, with just under half (48 per cent) either data centre managers or with responsibility for planning and management at a national, global or executive level.