Powering Converged Infrastructures

Often seen as a natural fit for virtualised workloads, converged and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions are emerging as an increasingly compelling choice for a wide range of data centre environments. Adopting a converged infrastructure – combining servers and virtualised storage in a single appliance – is often viewed as the way forward for IT. Even better, hyper-convergence delivers on the promise of a software-defined data centre (SDDC) with compute, storage, networking and virtualised technologies all-in-one box. But they are not a magic bullet and there can be a gap between the potential of these modern IT architectures and what they actually deliver in real-world deployments. This manageability gap is frequently created by the absence of an intelligent power management solution.

Virtualised servers are running at 70-80% capacity compared to 10% previously; every enclosure draws more power and requirements shift suddenly as virtual workloads, applications and storage can be moved at a moment’s notice. All this needs to be managed, if not the complex power demands of converged and hyper-converged infrastructures simply create and widen the manageability gap.