A Closer Look at Converged Infrastructure Adoption
Adopting a converged infrastructure is one thing; trying to manage it is another. Servers, storage and networking environments today are usually managed by an amalgamation of tools from different vendors that make it hard to correlate, let alone see, what is actually occurring across the data center.
As part of its broader campaign to drive the adoption of converged systems, HP has unveiled its HP OneView systems management platform that for the first time unifies the management of HP servers, networks and storage systems under a common user interface that allows administrators to provision resources in minutes rather than days.
According to Jeff Carlat, director of converged systems product management for HP, as the role of administrators begins to change in the era of converged infrastructure, IT organizations need management tools that allow them to manage the entire data center more holistically. Given all the dependencies that exist between servers, storage and networks, Carlat says the need to leverage tools that make it easier to visualize the entire data center environment has become more than apparent.
At the moment, HP OneView works only with the latest generation of HP data center products, but Carlat says that eventually HP will extend this framework to a select number of legacy systems.
In addition, HP is publishing an application programming interface (API) that makes it easier for third-party vendors to integrate other management systems with HP OneView.
As the scale of the data center continues to grow in terms of workloads running on virtual machines that need to be managed, IT organizations will clearly need new tools and processes. That may not mean eliminating all the specialists with domain-level expertise in storage, servers and networking. But it will mean that someday, administrators are going to need to be more comfortable understanding how to manage all of these components in concert with one another.
