These days cloud technology is on everyone’s mind. Which type is best for their situation; public, private, hybrid, native? What should go in them and how to get there? However it is just as important to know why you want to move to the cloud.
The move to cloud computing is usually driven by one or more of these factors:
- Replacing aging infrastructure that has reliability problems and high maintenance costs
- Simplifying overall infrastructure complexity and adopting greater virtualization
- Supporting needs of business to reduce time-to-market and increase innovation.
- Deploying additional capacity to support business growth, launch new services/products, and/or streamline expansion into new geographies
Faced with these needs, IT professionals have three major paths to cloud adoption: “do it yourself” by buying and assembling hardware and software components, public cloud services, and converged infrastructure with pre-assembled storage, compute, network, and virtualization.
A new 2016 study conducted by Forrester Consulting provides guidance on how customers can evaluate converged or hyper-converged infrastructure. (The study*was commissioned by VCE, the Converged Platforms Division of EMC. ) Time constrained IT leaders who want a practical versus an exhaustive way to evaluate the benefits of converged infrastructure will appreciate the actionable suggestions in this study.
As the study describes, Forrester interviewed organizations that implemented VCE converged platform solutions and found that they experienced these quantifiable benefits:
- Increased Application Development
- Infrastructure Cost Avoidance
- IT Operational Efficiency Increase
- Business Productivity Increase
- Security and Compliance Cost Reduction
In a 2015 study**, Forrester wrote: “The fastest path to cloud for most organizations is a fully integrated solution from one of the vendors offering converged private cloud solutions. This approach fast-tracks your ‘journey-to-cloud’ from a technology standpoint and lets you focus on the organizational and process transformations required to support a true and efficient private cloud.”
With a broad portfolio of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure platforms – VCE Vblock, VxBlock and VxRack Systems, and VxRail Appliances – EMC enables customers to optimize private cloud capabilities to achieve better business outcomes.
The guidance in this new study from Forrester Consulting can help you embark on modernizing your data center with private cloud infrastructure.
*Source: A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Report Commissioned By VCE, “A Practical Guide for Evaluating the Value of VCE Converged Infrastructure for Data Center Modernization” March 2016
** “Vendor Landscape: Converged Infrastructure-Based Private Cloud Solutions,” Forrester Research, Inc., June 10, 2015.