ABSTRACT
Converged infrastructure seeks to make the service provisioning and delivery process even faster and easier by tightly coupling network, storage, and compute so their delivery can all be automated and available in a self-service manner. Converged infrastructure is almost invariably aligned to 100% virtualization—that is, typically all of the business-consumable systems provided by a converged infrastructure environment are virtualized hosts. The nature of converged infrastructure also tends to result in reasonably dense virtualized environments in relation to the rack-space occupied by the physical systems. The management and orchestration layer required for true converged infrastructure allows (or, indeed, requires) administrators to become policy coordinators and architects, with the infrastructure’s control system handling the mundane, day to day implementation services. Only administrators and architects who are across all aspects of the converged infrastructure will be able to ensure the service catalog as implemented will maximize data protection capabilities.
