ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly reviews data protection implications of utilizing converged infrastructure within a modern IT environment. 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. Converged and hyperconverged systems can make deployment and management of data protection systems as easy as they make deployment and management of primary production systems, but data protection considerations must be broader than the virtualized infrastructure provided by the said systems. All data points within the infrastructure should support appropriate levels of dump and restore functionality, or be appropriately protected via clustering (local and multisite) and self-healing/self-building capabilities: IP networking, storage area network (SAN), hypervisor management, and orchestration layer databases.
