Gary Coburn on converged infrastructure: Published in ComputerScope magazine July/August

Gary Coburn, CEO, Island Networks, talks to Computerscope magazine about his view of the current state of converged infrastructure adoption in Ireland. This interview was published in ComputerScope magazine  July/August 2013 issue

Many organisations in Ireland have already taken the initial steps towards using cloud infrastructure technologies to deliver their IT services in a more efficient and cost-effective manner than previously. In some cases, they have migrated to a shared infrastructure that runs a number of applications; they have consolidated and virtualised their servers and storage; and they are beginning to reap the benefits of their progress towards IT service delivery over the cloud by increasing the utilisation of their resources.

A clear area of interest in the short term is how they will take the next step of implementing converged infrastructure solutions in their data centre – essentially pre-designed pools of compute, storage, and network resources. Early adopters in the area of converged infrastructure are the multinational technology companies and already they are pointing to a bright future with converged operations, with most indicating that they are providing a better customer service than before, with much higher resource utilisation.

Interest in converged infrastructure is rapidly spreading across all industry sectors because of the significant benefits that are being achieved. This was apparent at a recent Island Networks Executive Briefing in Dublin, entitled ‘Catch Your Cloud’, where a number of Irish organisations from across a variety of industry sectors, expressed their intentions to move to a converged infrastructure environment.

The main reasons these organisations are considering and adopting converged infrastructure technology are to achieve business agility (i.e. faster responses to changing needs of the business) and lower capital expenses (via higher overall resource utilisation).

In a global survey conducted in the first quarter of this year by Zenoss Inc, a leading global provider of unified IT monitoring and management software, it was found that 75% of those organisations with converged infrastructure indicated that they’re providing better customer service than before. Of the 340 professionals surveyed, 30% had already implemented converged infrastructure and 50% were either considering or planning to implement it.

In summary, converged infrastructure promises more agility in a very competitive business environment, better customer service and more predictable expense management and, for these reasons, it will be high on the agenda of Irish organisations in the short term.