Ever watched a great conductor leading a world-class orchestra? It’s an impressive thing. Everything depends on the musicians’ responsiveness to the cues that the conductor uses to coax the best result from the available orchestral forces. It’s a demonstration of the power of unified control and an image that I’ve often found useful in thinking about how IT infrastructure should work.
It’s not often that IT shops achieve that level of integrated, concerted control, though. As data centers have grown larger and more central to business initiatives, they’ve become more complex, difficult to manage, even chaotic. It’s as if the sections of the orchestra gradually became unaware of the conductor’s cues; the woodwinds are out of synch with the brass, the strings are too loud, and the percussion is half a beat behind the score.
Stranded capacity, wasted resources
The causes of the disharmony are easy enough to identify: platforms and management tools that don’t talk to each other; equipment that requires complex, manual configuration; complicated change-management tasks and maintenance procedures.
The result is rollouts that seem to take forever, overprovisioning to buttress performance and guarantee SLAs, and resources that are allocated to a specific project and then left stranded when the project winds down. About 30% of servers in data centers are burning energy but delivering no useful information, according to this Computerworld article.
Seemingly, the public cloud could reduce complexity by offloading some workloads, but control is not the cloud’s strong suit. It enables the lines of business to operate outside IT, disguises and hides costs, and leaves you vulnerable to unpredictable cost increases.
What’s needed for tighter control is a more fluid, responsive kind of infrastructure, one that can compose and decompose compute, storage, and networking resources, one that’s unified under the firm control of a software-defined intelligence and a single API.
Composable Infrastructure tightens control
Composable Infrastructure is designed to give you back control by automatically connecting, aggregating, and managing infrastructure resources. With Composable Infrastructure, you can:
Bring all the sections together. Composability turns compute, storage, and fabric into fluid pools of resources that can be configured on the fly to meet application needs. It eliminates silos that weaken control, even bridging legacy and new IT environments. With resources always fluidly available, you can reduce overprovisioning and stranded assets.
Concentrate on the score, not the mechanics. Software-defined intelligence provides template-driven workload composition to automate configuration and accelerate deployments. It automates change-management tasks like updating firmware. You can monitor, update, and troubleshoot the infrastructure from a single interface.
Get your cues across clearly. No more management-tool sprawl or time-consuming scripting to low-level interfaces. A unified API abstracts every element of the infrastructure, providing full programmability and enabling you to control infrastructure resources with a single line of code.
Best of all, Composable Infrastructure lets you deliver a cloud-like experience for your users from your own secure data center, putting IT back in control of application development and service delivery.
To learn more, visit this interactive webinar that explores one company’s journey to Composable Infrastructure. And check out this ebook: Top 10 reasons to move to composable infrastructure or visit www.hpe.com/info/composable