For some reason May and June has become conference season in the IT industry. While not every major conference happens in these two months, a large number do, including EMC World, HP World, the new IBM Edge storage conference, the Dell Storage Forum, Microsoft TechEd, Cisco Live, the Hadoop Summit, and HP Discover. Several of these featured announcements concerning the new converged infrastructure models that have been published by major vendors over the last year.

Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Stuart Miniman has provided a handy synopsis of the changes in converged infrastructure models from EMC, IBM, HP, Cisco, NetApp and Dell along with an argument for the need to choose the right system for the application portfolio in “Application Expertise is Critical for Converged Virtualization Solutions to Succeed”, his latest Wikibon Alert.

Miniman focuses on flexible designs, rather than pre-configured single-SKU systems, and specifically on Cisco and NetApp FlexPods, IBM PureSystems, EMC VSPEX, Dell vStart, and converged infrastructure announcements from HP. He quotes Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, who said in an interview on the SiliconAngle Cube from Hadoop Summit “After crossing the chasm, companies need to have use case domain expertise to succeed.”

“Not all VMs are created equal, and applications have widely varying requirement that must be well understood if infrastructure is to be sized and utilized efficiently,” Miniman writes.

Miniman says that these converged system architectures have real value for IT, but that CIOs need to match the right system to their application portfolio. “Companies,” he concludes, “should be examining equipment refresh cycles to move toward convergence adoption rather than asynchronous upgrades of individual silos.”

As with all Wikibon research, this piece is available free on the Internet. Interested parties are invited to read, make changes where appropriate, and leave comments.