A growing number of businesses are relying on or planning to use cloud and colocation services, and this has brought about a need for new and improved unified computing platforms. The results of an extensive survey from NextiraOne show that more and more IT decision makers are looking to the cloud and managed services to offload many of their routine IT and networking tasks.
More than 40 percent of those surveyed by NextiraOne are in the process of implementing or have made plans to adopt converged and unified platforms to meet their data center and cloud services needs. Respondents indicated that new and improved unified computing platforms capable of managing their evolving needs were essential as they migrate to more complex cloud and colocation services.
The NextiraOne survey showed that 44 percent of participants were planning to migrate to public or hybrid cloud services, while 32 percent were considering colocation services. And 57 percent of respondents believe the process to provision new server or storage capacity takes too long, indicating a need for better and stronger unified computing platforms.
"These findings confirm what we have been hearing directly from our customers," said Geraint Davies, head of business development for NextiraOne. "The survey shows that the industry is at the tipping point of a massive change as organizations streamline their infrastructure and move from silos containing storage, networking and servers towards unified computing platforms."
Unified computing platforms provide a basis for managed and cloud services, operating as a single infrastructure to simplify the process of cloud computing. The FlexPod solution is one example, which NextiraOne has already implemented for its customers for its own managed and professional services offerings. The solution includes components from a variety of technology partners like NetApp unified storage systems and Cisco Unified Computing System servers, Cisco Nexus switches and a Cloud Management software solution. The FlexPod offering is flexible and may be scaled to meet the needs of a variety of workloads, in both virtualized and non-virtualized environments.
"The new generation of unified computing platforms combines storage, networking, servers and hardware, replacing multiple hardware appliances by combining best of breed technologies from industry leaders," added Davies. "We can help to reduce the time taken to evolve existing architecture to support cloud computing by implementing a unified computing platform - the deployment of virtualized servers and applications takes dramatically less time than previous options."
Edited by
Alisen Downey
