Too Many Silos on the IT Farm?

The ultimate goal for many of IT organizations is to provide scalable resources on demand. But, the greatest obstacle faced by most IT departments during periods of growth is infrastructure sprawl.

When IT infrastructure is deployed to meet new organizational demands, the traditional approach has been to create distinct silos that support individual applications and services. Unfortunately, this results in an extremely inefficient use of resources, as utilization is low. Not only do these silos trap hardware resources, IT sprawl also robs an organization’s budget for innovation and makes it harder to keep pace with growth.

The adoption of virtualization has done a great deal to reduce the effects of IT sprawl, but without a significant investment in systems management and automation tools, many data centers are unprepared for increased  IT demands. Organizations still rely on manually intensive processes that place a heavy burden on IT staff and slow down response times.

Converged Infrastructure, also known as Unified Computing, solves the problem of IT sprawl by integrating server, storage, networking, and management resources into shared pools. IT environments using solutions such as Cisco Unified Computing with Intel® Xeon® processors allow organizations to more effectively support initiatives like virtualization, cloud computing, and server and storage consolidation.

By combining separate silos, a common management platform can control operations for many different applications and infrastructure components.  This delivers the flexibility and scalability needed to allocate the right amount of resources to projects on an as-needed basis, ensuring efficiency.