Help customers go hyper-scale

Indeed, the second half of the year will see entries from EMC, Dell and Yottabyte and those that were hiding from companies such as VMware and Cisco.

EMC in May confirmed it is building a hyper-converged technology codenamed ‘Project Mystic’, pitting the storage giant against startups such as Nutanix and SimpliVity.

David Goulden, chief executive of EMC Information Infrastructure, told IT solution providers at the EMC Global Partner Summit that it will have a hyper-converged appliance by the end of the year. “It will be very competitive to products starting with N or S,” he said.

EMC majority-owned virtualisation behemoth VMware is also getting into the hyper-converged fray with ‘Project Marvin’.

Cisco appears ready to launch an entry-level UCS server line, giving it a new tool for expanding its server business and possibly entering the hyper-converged market.

Even Dell is getting in on the act with its plan to resell Nutanix’s hyper-converged appliance before offering its own branded solution that ties the Nutanix software stack to a Dell server under an OEM deal.

Dell is also working on ‘Blue Thunder’ to tie technology from partners including Red Hat’s OpenStack and Ceph solutions, Nexenta’s ZFS storage software, and Cloudera’s Hadoop big data software, into converged infrastructure offerings.

Conservative customers

For the benefits of automation and orchestration that derive from single-source origins, converged infrastructure of either stripe isn’t for every customer.

“Some customers are very conservative,” Cloud Solutions Group’s Rubens says. “Sometimes you can turn them around, but others only buy IBM or NEC and they will be too hard. [But] if their cultures are innovative like Webjet, those customers thrive on disruptive technology.”

Infront’s King agrees. “We find smaller organisations are more
agile because they usually have asset replacement cycles that are aligned. The bigger organisations have asset cycles anywhere from a one to four-years gap. It takes a brave customer to step into the fold and say, ‘I’ll get rid of it all’; not many customers are in that position.”

Data#3 general manager Laurence Baynham says the channel and customers must grapple with the question of where to break into the upgrade cycle.

“That’s at the nub of what’s going through customers’ minds right now: what is the catalyst?” Baynham says. “It may be a major network upgrade that requires significant spending or it could be storage or compute that serves as a major event. [Customers ask] ‘Do I consider running it independently or do I run it converged?’ ”

Baynham sees a tight link between virtualisation, the cloud and converged systems but cautions that “it’s not a question of buying converged infrastructure and plugging it in… there’s still complexity”.

This comes from balancing workloads and, in a holistic sense, defining where applications and their data should live – on-premise, in a hosted data centre, out in the public cloud or a mix of the above.

It’s in this complexity that arises from a quest for simplicity where a trusted adviser makes their mark, says Corie Marinucci, general manager of HP partner Triforce Services Australia.

“We’ve been able to create a subset of reference architectures around converged systems portfolios, particularly with HP where
we can develop reference architectures for different situations,” Marinucci says.

This includes parachuting converged systems into existing customer data centres, adding to hybrid systems that marry public cloud and on-premise networks and grafting vendor reference architectures into customers’ existing roadmaps, he says.

Sydney-based managed services provider Oriel has also found a way to dovetail hybrid cloud with the allure of converged infrastructure through it’s “your place or mine” promotion. As customers are less obsessed with a badge on the tin, service-level agreements are taking their place. 

Oriel managing director Jake Wynne explains that the company is trying to say it doesn’t matter where the infrastructure lives. “Some customers will need to be on-premise for valid reasons. It’s not a one-size-fits-all for this process of converged infrastructure. Everyone is looking for a business outcome, not just holding on to a server and staring at it.”