Converged systems have been around for more than five years now, and they are entering a new phase both in market acceptance and in technology. Billions of dollars of converged infrastructure have been deployed, with VCE Company, LLC running at a $2 billion rate and the Cisco Systems, Inc.-NetApp, Inc. FlexPod partnership passing $3 billion in joint sales writes Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Stuart Miniman.

The technology is moving beyond the initial stage of combining piece-parts built often for traditional standalone sales to highly virtualized systems designed from the ground up as a unit. The Oracle Red Stack, which is designed from the chip level through to the database and Oracle applications for maximum efficiency and performance, is the ultimate vertically integrated solution. Cisco, which is involved in several converged systems partnerships including VCE with VMware, Flexpod, and an agreement announced in December with IBM, is the other major market leader. The new hyperconverged systems – what Wikibon calls ServerSAN — are designed as a unit to be fully virtualized platforms that can be used as standard building-blocks to create an architecture.

The advantage of converged systems, Miniman said, is that they allow the IT organization to focus on the software without the distraction of having to deal with hardware and middleware piece-parts that constantly have to be optimized, integrated and updated. The issue has been that these systems cross the lines of IT organizational silos that often do not coordinate their planning and acquisitions. Organizations, therefore, often use a “land and expand” strategy for introducing converged systems to the organization.

The new generation of hyperconverged systems makes this easier with smaller, lower-cost introductory boxes that are easy to expand by plugging in more identical units. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is a popular initial use for converged systems in many IT shops, and this plug-and-play infrastructure concept fits that application well since it can easily accommodate demand growth.

Miniman’s full analysis, which looks at the leading converged system players and discusses the advantages and challenges of converged systems, is available on the new Wikibon Premium site without charge.