It's hard to find a business objective today that doesn't require IT support and resources. However, IT systems continue to grow in complexity as users require on-demand resources that are secure, reliable and easy to use.
For greater speed and efficiency, many IT organizations are looking for a simpler approach to deploying and managing infrastructure that enables greater agility, better optimizes costs and existing staff resources, but also maintains data security and adherence to compliance requirements. By breaking down the barriers between servers, storage and networks, organizations can realize benefits ranging from accelerated deployment to strengthening disaster recovery capabilities.
While the concept of converged infrastructure isn't new, it hasn't seen tremendous and sustained growth until now. In the third quarter of 2015 alone, the converged infrastructure market reached $2.5 billion in value as more organizations embraced convergence.
How and why is converged infrastructure being deployed? Explore the following examples from NetApp customers.
(Image: Studio Grand Ouest)
The Brooklyn Hospital Center simplifies data center transformation
The Brooklyn Hospital Center (TBHC) provides compassionate, quality care to the underserved in Brooklyn and the surrounding New York City boroughs. With more people than ever relying on TBHC, it was looking for ways to optimize the delivery of care and leverage opportunities for collaboration and new revenue streams.
TBHC wanted to rethink its siloed IT and data center environment, which included externally shared and hosted applications, as well as platforms such as messaging and electronic health records (EHR). It also needed infrastructure that could scale to meet the hospital's growing needs. The team at TBHC turned to converged infrastructure to consolidate and simplify systems because of its relatively fast and low-risk deployment.
TBHC's new infrastructure increased performance and capacity, allowing the hospital to house previously shared applications in-house and move remotely hosted platforms on site. In addition to advancing internal goals, the organization is planning to make these resources available to its local healthcare community to further its mission of care.
The City of Houston serves citizens with private cloud
As the fourth largest city in the nation, the City of Houston has millions of residents counting on it to provide pivotal services. These include EMTs using telehealth capabilities and emergency response services. In order to best serve its citizens, the City of Houston wanted a new IT strategy that would help its 22 departments operate in the most efficient way possible.
The City's strategy was to consolidate seven data center facilities into a private cloud combining on-premises hosting with colocation. Converged infrastructure was used to support the new private cloud with a tightly integrated platform.
A private cloud powered by converged infrastructure has enhanced The City of Houston's ability to better serve citizens and increase revenue and collections. It even led to the creation of the nation's first Emergency TeleHealth and Navigation program.
The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group shrinks disaster recovery time
Upon merging to form the Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group, the Farmers', Glengarry, and Lanark mutual insurance companies had six weeks to design, deploy, and configure a new, combined IT infrastructure. In addition to consolidating the three separate IT infrastructures, they also needed to strengthen disaster recovery, improve management and cost efficiency.
Prior to the amalgamation, the fastest recovery that any of the three organizations could provide in a potential disaster situation was 48 hours. After conferring with business leaders, a new recovery time objective of 15 minutes was established for business-critical applications.
To achieve its goals, Commonwell created one IT infrastructure at each of the three data centers and replicated critical data between sites for business continuity.
As a result, Commonwell was able to meet its deployment deadline, provide business continuity, enhance data protection, avoid $70,000 annual costs and integrated data protection, spend 75% less time managing infrastructure, and conserve up to 75% of storage capacity with deduplication.
Photobucket achieves zero downtime
Photobucket, an image-hosting site with 100 million registered members, 60 million unique visitors per month, and over 17 billion photos and videos, plays a critical role in how its users record and share their most valued memories. In order to stay relevant in a fast-moving industry, Photobucket must constantly innovate. Customers are mobile and they want to be able to print, share and edit their memories quickly, all from one place.
Photobucket needed to decouple its customer-facing photo management applications from file systems to shorten development cycles and give developers new options for adding features. Moving to object storage would directly contribute to Photobucket's competitive edge but the company needed a way to get there while minimizing business risk.
To achieve this, Photobucket leveraged a converged infrastructure platform, server virtualization software, and a midrange storage array system to seamlessly transition to an object storage solution to improve performance and offer new services.
As a result, Photobucket has been able to achieve zero downtime, accelerate time to market for new features while opening up revenue opportunities, serve customer content faster, improve experiences and loyalty as well as transition to object storage at its own pace, reducing risk.
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