Best Converged Infrastructure Platforms
Converged Infrastructure: An Integrated Approach
Converged infrastructure typically includes the following integrated components:
- Compute: The processing power provided by servers and CPUs.
- Storage: The data storage systems, such as SAN or NAS.
- Networking: The switches, routers, and other networking equipment.
- Hypervisor: The virtualization software that manages the underlying hardware.
- Management Software: Tools to centrally monitor and control the infrastructure.
- Automation & Orchestration: Capabilities to automate and streamline infrastructure management.
The key benefit of converged infrastructure is that these elements are pre-integrated, tested, and validated as a single, optimized solution. This contrasts with traditional data center environments where these components are often deployed and managed separately.
Converged infrastructure solutions can be delivered in two main ways:
- Pre-Configured: The vendor provides the entire, pre-tested and pre-racked solution, ready for deployment.
- Reference Architecture: The vendor supplies detailed guides on how to assemble and configure the converged infrastructure at the customer site.
Regardless of the deployment model, converged infrastructure aims to simplify implementation, reduce integration challenges, and accelerate time-to-value for the customer.
Converged infrastructure solutions can be designed and optimized for a variety of applications and industry use cases, such as:
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems
- Big Data and analytics workloads
- Private cloud environments
By providing a pre-integrated, tested, and supported infrastructure, converged solutions help organizations focus on their core business needs rather than complex IT deployments.
Featured Software
List of 0 Best Softwares
FAQs of Converged Infrastructure Platforms
A converged infrastructure platform is an all-in-one data center solution that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking, and virtualization resources into a single, pre-configured system. The goal is to simplify and streamline IT infrastructure management.
Deploying and maintaining a traditional data center with separate servers, storage arrays, networking gear, and virtualization software can be extremely complex and time-consuming for IT teams. Converged platforms package all these components together in a unified, optimized solution.
The core components are pre-integrated server hardware, shared storage, network switching, and virtualization software. Advanced platforms also include centralized management tools, automated provisioning, and built-in data protection/disaster recovery.
Instead of provisioning, configuring, and troubleshooting all the individual infrastructure components, you manage the entire platform as a single entity. This dramatically reduces the time and specialized skills required for day-to-day IT operations.
Vendors offer a range of converged solutions targeted at different application needs – from general-purpose private cloud to specialized configurations for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), big data analytics, and other workload-optimized deployments.