Converged systems could be just another buzzword – we’ve had many in the technology industry and there’s always room for one more! “Converged”, though, has a distinct meaning, referring to systems and particularly individual pieces of equipment that have more than one function in them. We’ve written about this elsewhere on the site – but how does it work in practice?
Examples
It’s worth considering a couple of real-life examples of how this sort of computing actually works and makes efficiencies happen. So here are a couple of summary case studies, drawn from New Style of Business partner HP’s archive of press releases.
Yorkshire Building Society: A case of efficiency
Yorkshire Building Society had 500 colleagues in its HQ and needed to simplify the way its infrastructure worked. There was no problem as such, it wasn’t broken, it just didn’t work as efficiently or as easily as some of the other systems available on the market. Crucially this may have given the competition an advantage if it had been allowed to continue.
The spur to start changing things came when the business grew into a second office in Leeds, effectively giving it two head offices. At the same time it put flexible working practices in place and stacked PCs with data centre racks so that third parties and staff could collaborate well; colleagues promptly named this “PC Jenga”. This didn’t matter until it grew to 400 devices, a solution that was getting less and less scalable and the alternatives that presented themselves didn’t look too promising either. One was virtualisation, which would have been too complex due to the amount of applications it would have to support, and the other was full persistent virtual desktop infrastructure, which would have put too much of a strain on the I/O elements of the system.
Eventually the organisation came to look at HP Moonshot for Hosted Desktops. Using this system based on Proliant servers, YBS realised that it could support 180 desktops per Moonshot chassis – and that the support would be uncontested and unshared. Stephen Mulley, Head of Desktop Services, said: “Hosting desktops on dedicated hardware in a dense, lower-power infrastructure like the HP Moonshot System proved to be the ideal fit for meeting our performance, scalability, and efficiency goals.”
YBS engaged HP Technology Service Consulting (TS) to plan and implement a solution. It came up with integration with Microsoft ConfigMgr, which hadn’t actually been done before. YBS bought four Moonshot chassis to accommodate 720 servers. The physical space required to support all of the colleagues shot down immediately by 50% and the business expects to save s £111K in IT and power costs over a 5-year period.
European Electronique: a case of customer service
Technology services company European Electronique has been in business for 30 years, and has most recently seen itself morph from a hardware seller to a solution provider. It offers managed services, a lot of which go to the public sector, so a move towards the cloud has looked inevitable for some time.
Its first implementation was fine on its own terms; IaaS by offering VMWare’s Vcloud was a good start but the business needed more. “There were some huge gaps in what we really needed in order to take our business forward into the cloud market,” said Jason Hall, senior cloud solutions architect at EE. “And that’s when we decided HP is really the partner of choice for us moving forward.”
It opted for a private cloud solution based on s HP Helion CloudSystem Enterprise on HP Converged Infrastructure (HP BladeSystem, HP ProLiant server blades and HP networking products). This allowed for price, security and ease of use concerns to be addressed and allowed the organisation to put its FreedomAccess offering together, this being a multitenant Microsoft SharePoint portal for communication and collaboration which allows the end client all the functions with less complexity.
It was the idea of the partnership as much as the technology that appealed to European Electronique, as it is able to tell public sector clients that the systems are based on industry-standard HP infrastructure. The technology is also vital, of course: “There’s a great power behind the converged infrastructure platform that HP provided us, the software platform to control that, and then enabling us to actually deliver on our future cloud vision through that software. There is no other company that can do that for us at the moment,” said Mulley.
Right partner and technology
So, converged delivery is happening in the real world and offering real benefits to the corporate world. The best thing, or one of the best things, is that it’s scalable as well. There’s no such thing as future proof, but ensuring scalability upwards and downwards and ensuring the least impact on your immediate environment by using fewer boxes has to be as good a preparation as any.