Today’s reality is that businesses must evolve to an IT-as-a-service delivery model. The rapid ascendance of public cloud has shown that organizations are looking for an IT platform that can deliver simplicity, agility, self-service and elastic scalability.
If IT can’t provide the organization with cloud capabilities and economics through their on-premises infrastructure, they run the risk that business units and development teams will circumvent them and go to the public cloud.
It doesn’t have to be this way. IT teams can leverage converged infrastructure (CI) as a fast track to this new model without having to rip and replace everything already in place. With the right CI solution, you can accelerate the move to IT-as-a-service with the ability to:
- Refresh without re-architecting, leveraging a modular, stateless architecture designed for zero downtime.
- Achieve maximum uptime for all applications, while eliminating planned downtime to keep your business running.
- Maintain deployment flexibility by cost-effectively consolidating infrastructure for multiple hypervisors, bare metal servers and containers.
- Manage IT your way by using standard management tools, processes and investments.
- Consume technology as Opex or CAPEX paying only for what you consume, with the ability to dial capacity up and down as needed.
- Take advantage of tested solutions and support from proven market leaders.
Transitioning to a service model
The shift to cloud computing is being driven by the business need for flexibility, scalability and agility. Today, key business processes, particularly those that are customer-facing or revenue-generating, live online in data centers. Customers and employees expect access to these applications and their data at any time and from any device.
To efficiently deliver IT as a service, more and more organizations are creating cross-domain teams to manage their IT infrastructure. But companies also need to match this with infrastructure that doesn't live in silos. They are looking for a simpler approach to on-premises infrastructure that provides a cloud-like experience across the stack.
Companies that don’t embrace agility and fail to knock down silos have difficulty achieving digital transformation. The three tiers of cloud computing—software, platform, and infrastructure as a service—need to continue to work alongside conventional on-premises systems.
For the foreseeable future, IT teams have to manage both on-premises and cloud infrastructure—and they need tools that make that easy. To fully embrace IT as a service, IT must leverage the native capabilities of each platform, while also ensuring interoperability and mobility between them. They need common approaches to management, automation and reporting that span the on-premises and cloud environments.
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Download NowThe business value of converged infrastructure
Converged infrastructure has become a go-to solution for IT teams looking to accelerate the shift to IT as a service without risk, and without having to compromise on performance, agility or availability. With the right solution you can:
- Simplify operations and reduce management complexity.
- Eliminate silos while consolidating IT to save money.
- Scale with agility, dialing resources up or down as needed.
- Deliver transformative value, with on-premises control, security, performance, reliability and availability at cloud pricing.
- Transition to IT as a service at your own pace.
- Manage IT using a unified team with a single point of managing and reporting.
The business benefits of FlashStack
Not all converged infrastructures can deliver these business benefits. In fact, there is only one solution architected to meet the unique needs of delivering IT as a service. That is FlashStack™, the family of converged infrastructure solutions from market leaders Cisco™ and Pure Storage™.
FlashStack solutions are pre-tested, integrated and designed to help customers achieve best performance through Cisco Validated Designs. Existing customers have experienced dramatic improvements in application performance, IT efficiency, user productivity and return-on-investment, according to research from IDC.1 These organizations are able to achieve these business benefits because they:
- Achieve operational efficiencies when employees leverage much-improved performance to become more productive.
- Reduce the frequency and impact of unplanned outages, thereby minimizing the cost of lost productivity related to downtime.
- Enable application developers and IT infrastructure teams to work more effectively and take on new projects and responsibilities.
- Establish a cost-effective infrastructure foundation, especially by avoiding the need to purchase more storage, even as they benefit from having substantially more usable flash capacity.
Conclusion
The transition to an IT-as-a-service model is necessary and strategic. In 2019, companies that don’t make the transition smoothly are facing increased risk of digital disruption. As noted earlier in this special section—now is the time to position your company as “digitally determined.” FlashStack is uniquely designed to simplify, accelerate and reduce risk in embracing IT as a service for both cloud-native and business-critical apps. For more information, please visit Pure Storage and Cisco.
1 “FlashStack Delivers Business Value Through Efficiency and Improved Performance and Scalability,” IDC, September 2018.
