| | November 20168CIOReviewStreamlining Business Value through Hyper Converged InfrastructureBy Lee Caswell, VP Products, Storage & Availability, VMwareOn October 14, 1947, nearly seventy years ago, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier after testing aircraft prototypes for years. Prior to this historical achievement, airplane designers had concluded that traditional planes wouldn't survive the stress of supersonic flight, so test pilots became a critical resource to find a new aeronautic design ready for the demands of high-speed flight. According to the official Chuck Yeager website, "he became the test pilot of choice among engineers because he flew with such extraordinary precision that his data points were always right on target." Most CIOs have similarly concluded that simply running traditional IT organizations harder will not get their companies through today's economic barriers of flat budgets and limited IT skill sets. One CIO recently described his frustration in managing separate server, storage, and network teams that were all individually under-funded. "Working harder isn't working," was her comment. What is needed is new thinking on how IT teams can be organized, managed, and funded as a single entity.To talk about IT silos is to open up a politically charged discussion. Any given storage, server or network team manager can elaborately describe how their given discipline requires unique expertise, management skills, and eventually budget. The uniqueness of each management silo is real because legacy systems invoke hardware-defined architectures that address a single problem from a single resource that must be managed separately.For CFOs, this hardware-defined legacy IT has been an incredible source of frustration. While managing costs across an organization is challenging to start with, segregated budgets further compound the problem. Traditional systems make it difficult to scale IT resources at an aggregate level because they require lumpy investment across individual resources. Legacy systems further reduce vendor negotiating leverage because IT dollars are spread across a fragmented supplier base.This inflexibility of IT silos has led many CEOs to conclude they can no longer develop IT as a competitive differentiator. They fear they can't be competitive with larger competitors who can fund critical mass across IT silos. They don't have the expertise to negotiate power struggles across compute, storage and network leaders. Further, they get exhausted with waiting for long-term fixes to near-term needs.Hyper-converged infrastructure(HCI) introduces a new design that can break the IT "sound barrier," something that traditional hardware-defined systems are not capable of handling. HCI consolidates IT silos under one software-defined management view. Unlike hardware-defined infrastructure, HCI relies on commodity server building blocks that are unified with software and can be managed by virtualization administrators. HCI is made possible because of a unique timing in silicon and software innovation. On the silicon front, the inexorable progression of Moore's Law has made CPU cores powerful enough to affordably manage both compute and storage processes. Furthermore, the high volume production of flash for mobile phones has made flash affordable in enterprise systems. Flash is critical for HCI because it allows scale-out systems based on industry-standard servers to match the performance of legacy storage systems. Finally, hypervisors such as VMware vSphere have added storage and network management functionality to integrate resource management and eliminate legacy management silos for each IT domain. Many early adopters of HCI are impressed with the cost savings of resource consolidation. But this cost view pales before the far-reaching opportunity for HCI to consolidate IT OPINIONIN MYLee Caswell
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