Making IT Consolidation '100% Achievable' With Edge-VSI

“IT consolidation”is a very high priority strategic initiative for most CIOs today. The reason for this is that the sprawl of distributed IT infrastructure spread around a company’s remote offices poses a big risk to IT security, forms a large administrative burden and has a big impact on overall IT costs.

Therefore, consolidating and rationalising IT infrastructure has been and will continue to be a dominant IT trend. Many organisations have been investing heavily into building the “datacentre of the future”. While datacentres hold the potential for maximising cost efficiency and mitigating risk, the reality is that IT also, if not primarily, needs to support productivity and revenue growth, which generally involves supporting users outside the datacentre, at the edge. After-consolidation performance is a major show-stopper in consolidation initiatives such as such virtualisation and storage consolidation.

The benefits of a well-planned and executed consolidation approach can extend beyond merely cost savings, with companies improving the way they mitigate risk and grow. While many organisations have achieved some level of consolidation, beginning with server virtualisation, enterprise-wide consolidation efforts require overcoming greater complexity, distance and latency, and traditional IT organisational silos. Thus, there are a number of strategies in large-scale consolidation projects, and different customers may be focused on different stages.

More from Biztech

Future Group - Reliance Retail Deal approved by CCI RBI ban on cryptocurrencies takes effect; prohibition could force investors to tap the black market

IT consolidation initiatives typically go through the following stages:

1. Consolidation candidate resource identification in remote offices

2. Virtualisation and consolidation of remote resources to the datacentre

3. Acceleration of the now remote applications and data, via WAN acceleration technology, to restore LAN-like performance to remote users.

While most CIOs would like to centralise their entire IT infrastructure to the central datacentres, up until recently, certain types of IT resources needed to stay at the edge because of the demands of custom and write-intensive applications, the concern of user productivity in the face of WAN outages and the need to work with certain types of data that don’t work well with WAN acceleration technology. The result of these limitations is that even after the consolidation project has completed, some amount of server and storage resources have had to remain behind in the branch office. Thus the ideal vision of 100 percent consolidated IT has not been achievable - up until now.

“Edge-Virtual Server Infrastructure” (Edge-VSI) is the term used to describe a new technology that promises to solve these remaining challenges and make IT consolidation “100 percent achievable”. Edge-VSI is a new architectural approach that does for edge servers what virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) did for desktops – allow IT to consolidate and manage branch servers, applications and data resources in the datacentre. With Edge-VSI, global enterprises can finally achieve complete consolidation while delivering local performance at the edge.

The “IT Dream” of complete IT consolidation with no associated performance penalty can therefore be achieved by combining Virtualisation, Consolidation, WAN Acceleration and Edge-VSI techniques. If this is done, the following benefits can be realised:

**Achieve complete consolidation.**WAN Acceleration + Edge-VSI technologies make it possible to consolidate servers, applications and data from branch offices to the datacentre for secure and centralised infrastructure while delivering access over the WAN at local speeds.

Extend the boundaries of the datacentre. Edge-VSI accelerates access to centralised applications and enables full consolidation of servers, applications and data from the branch by decoupling storage from compute over thousands of miles of distance.

Support custom and write-intensive applications in the branch. Edge-VSI technologies make it possible for branch-based custom and write-intensive applications to access and write to centralised storage as though it is local.

**Eliminate the need to back up in remote offices.**Edge-VSI technologies enable branch data to be protected in the datacentre where IT departments can leverage the same tools and practices applied to all corporate data. Edge-VSI technologies eliminate the need to purchase, install and manage a branch office backup solution.

Ensure data security. By consolidating data from the branch to the datacentre, IT gains control over valuable corporate assets. Data in the branch is no longer exposed to risk. Edge-VSI technologies integrate state-of-the-art authentication and encryption to ensure the security of data.

Achieve WAN outage resiliency. User productivity in the face of WAN outages is a key reason organisations have left IT infrastructure in remote and branch offices. Edge-VSI technologies support disconnected operations enabling business operations to continue even in the event of a WAN outage.

Improve recovery point objectives. Edge-VSI technologies enable branch data to be more frequently protected in the datacentre with datacentre class technologies such as array-based snapshots as well as traditional backup and recovery. With more options from which to recover, organisations are able to improve recovery point objectives (RPOs).

Improve recovery time objectives. Edge-VSI technologies accelerate access to centralised data across the WAN, enabling improved recovery time objectives (RTOs). It is no longer necessary to perform full data recoveries to restore service to branch offices. Data safely available in the datacentre is streamed to the local branch as needed.

Maximise datacentre investments. Edge-VSI technologies make it possible for organisations to leverage the economies of scale of an enterprise datacentre – including enterprise storage – to serve the needs of branch offices.

**Simplify branch office IT management.**Edge-VSI technologies help reduce IT costs by eliminating the need to purchase and support servers, storage and backup solutions for branch offices.

Organisations of all sizes and industries are consolidating IT infrastructure in pursuit of improved cost efficiency, manageability, resiliency, security, and flexibility. WAN Acceleration and Edge-VSItechnologies allow customers to realise greater economies of scale, control, and security by maximising their utilisation of datacentres and extending consolidation benefits to branch offices.

The author is Marketing Evangelist, Riverbed Technology.