What Converged Solutions Buyers Truly Care About

Take a peek behind the curtains of nearly any organization’s data center, and you’re likely to see a legacy model of complexity. Whether it’s a cutting-edge design with raised floors or a makeshift wiring cabinet with a mix of servers, storage devices, routers and switches, many of today’s data centers are a mismatched collection of brands, topologies and platforms across both hardware and software.

This has led to a drastic increase in IT complexity, creating big challenges for organizations when it comes to management, security, scalability and cost efficiency. As a result, many of those organizations have turned to their solution providers to help them come up with new infrastructure solutions for computing, storage, networking, security and other core software platforms.

So, what exactly are organizations looking for when turning to their solutions providers for converged infrastructure solutions?

1. Reduced complexity. For IT departments—or those in smaller organizations with at least some responsibility for IT operations—the no. 1 issue is reducing complexity. Most IT organizations still do a lot of systems management and other IT tasks manually, rather than on a highly automated basis. Anything that helps them reduce the amount of time they have to spend monitoring and managing infrastructure is a huge benefit.
2. Assured performance levels and meeting SLAs. For technical buyers, assured performance levels and meeting SLAs is of extreme importance. Immediate and reliable access to applications and services can be compromised by infrastructure migration projects that are increasingly common in today’s IT environments. Those delays or access challenges typically cause frustration, lost business and dissatisfaction among business constituents, so solutions providers need to ensure that converged solutions deliver sustained performance and consistent availability.
3. Highly scalable solutions that will meet future requirements. Technical buyers also want to know that converged solutions are highly scalable and can meet not only today’s requirements but also those several years down the road. Higher-capacity and faster storage subsystems, more memory, improved network bandwidth and scalable, clustered servers that can be virtually re-deployed to meet the needs of the business likely will be needed as the organization grows, so solutions need to provide those capabilities.

On the business side, buyers care primarily about costs (both capital and operating expenses), end user productivity and more flexibility in deploying IT resources for truly transformative projects rather than just administrative tasks such as help desk oversight, change orders and security patching.

Avnet partners with solutions providers to deliver a full range of capabilities that organizations are demanding from today’s converged solutions, with dedicated engineering and support teams to design multi-supplier solutions. This creates best-in-class integrated infrastructure solutions that a single supplier may not offer. Avnet offers such integration services as hardware assembly, racking, cabling, device configuration, hypervisor configuration and software loads. These expert capabilities minimize the technical and financial burden that solutions providers normally bear for provisioning new infrastructure while still providing the buyers of converged infrastructure the quality solutions and customer experience they’re searching for.

For a look inside the complex process of building a converged infrastructure solution, watch this time-lapse video and see how Avnet’s global integration center builds one in less than three minutes.

Phillip Privett is vice president, Technology and Solutions, Avnet Technology Solutions. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of The VAR Guy's Talkin' Cloud's annual platinum sponsorship.