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Executive Summary ......................................2  

Methodology........................................................................... 4 Survey Sample ........................................................................ 4 About Zenoss, Inc................................................................... 4

The State of Converged Infrastructure 2013

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Introduction. ........................................................................... 5 Adoption of Converged Infrastructure ................................ 5 Who is adopting Converged Infrastructure?....................... 6 Why is Converged Infrastructure pursued? ........................ 8 Why now? .............................................................................. 10 Why not Converged Infrastructure? .................................. 11 What vendors and solutions are considered and then purchased?............................................................................ 12 After the Decision: Living with Converged Infrastructure14 How do organizations structure their staff for Converged Infrastructure?...................................................................... 15 What’s the approach to orchestration and provisioning?18 How are performance and availability being managed? 20 Overall Business Impact...................................................... 22 Voices of Experience: Advice from Early Adopters .......... 23 Demographics of Survey Respondents ............................. 25

The State of Converged Infrastructure - 2013

P r e s e n t e d b y Z e n o s s , I n c .

The results of this survey were collected during the 1st quarter of 2013 from the Zenoss IT infrastructure monitoring community with regards to their adoption or consideration of Converged Infrastructure.

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Executive Summary Zenoss conducted this survey during the 1st quarter of 2013 to learn more about companies adopting Converged Infrastructure. 340 professionals responded from across the globe, representing dozens of industries in companies of all sizes, including perspectives from System Administrators, Server/Storage/Network Domains, System Architects, Application Developers, IT Managers, IT Directors, C-level Executives, and more.

Adoption of Converged Infrastructure is proceeding briskly

• 30% of respondents are already living with Converged Infrastructure. • Half of respondents (51%) are actively considering or planning to adopt Converged

Infrastructure; of these, 2 out of 3 expect to be deployed by the end of 2014. • Technology & telecommunications firms were – not surprisingly –early adopters, but Education

is hot in pursuit, as are Software & Service Providers. • Virtualization, Unified Communications, Big Data, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and

Database projects – along with custom application development - are driving today’s Converged Infrastructure installations.

There are strategic disconnects (top-to-bottom) regarding what Converged Infrastructure should accomplish

• Overall, respondents named efficiency as the top reason to adopt Converged Infrastructure. But C-level executives seek (and likely measure) success differently; they are after agility (faster responses to changing needs of the business) and lower capital expenses (via higher overall resource utilization).

Many consider building their own Converged Infrastructure (1 in 3 do so); Cisco UCS reigns supreme

• Introduced in 2009, Cisco UCS has become dominant as a key component of 43% of Converged Infrastructures today (including NetApp FlexPod, VCE Vblock, and EMC VSPEX). UCS is also top of mind for those planning a future deployment.

• Almost half (42%) of organizations consider building their own Converged Infrastructures. 1 in 3 actually go the do-it-yourself (DIY) route.

• Non-UCS based solutions under consideration include HP (26%), Dell (20%), IBM (13%) and Oracle (12%).

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Early adopters of Converged Infrastructure point to a bright future with Converged Operations

• 75% of those with Converged Infrastructure indicate they’re providing better customer service than before

• While 39% of organizations currently plan to hand Converged Infrastructure to the Server team, organizations that have formed new Converged Infrastructure teams are 74% more likely to be “very satisfied” with their staffing structure, and report needing fewer tools to ensure performance & availability.

Additional resources on Converged Infrastructure

Share the Accompanying Infographic with you IT Operations team

Achieving Converged Infrastructure's Top 3 Business Benefits

The Skeptics: 8 Reasons Customers & Developers May Fight Converged Infrastructure

See it Done: Service Orchestration with Cisco UCS & CIAC

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About Zenoss, Inc.

Zenoss – used in 35,000 data centers worldwide - is the leading provider of unified IT monitoring and management software for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT. Leaders at these organizations enable revenue growth and cut costs by consolidating onto a single, unified IT operations platform from which to manage heterogeneous networks of bare-metal, virtualized, and Converged Infrastructures. IT teams gain 360° visibility as to the stability and capacity of their IT operations, and their business, academic, and government counterparts assure delivery of mission-critical services. Customers include LinkedIn, Los Alamos National Labs, Rackspace, VMware, Motorola and SunGard.  

Methodology  

Zenoss provides industry news, commentary, operational best practices, and insights to a community of IT professionals 100,000-strong. This community was polled in the 1st quarter of 2013 regarding their status with respect to Converged Infrastructure. Early adopters of Converged Infrastructure were asked about their experiences to date. Those considering Converged Infrastructure were asked about their plans. Those with no interest provided feedback on why Converged Infrastructure was not a fit.

Survey Sample

340 professionals participated in the survey, including 102 who have already adopted Converged Infrastructures within their IT environments. Just under 30% of respondents represent organizations with 1-100 employees, another 34% represent organizations with 101-2000 employees, 12% represent organizations with 2001-5000 employees, and 24% of respondents represent organizations with 5000+ employees. Open participation in the survey was encouraged via email, the Zenoss blog (blog.zenoss.com), Twitter (@Zenoss), and other social media outlets.

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The State of Converged Infrastructure 2013 Converged Infrastructure – essentially pre-designed pools of compute, storage, and network resources – is probably coming to your data center soon, according to the findings of this Zenoss report. What’s in this trend for you? What will it mean for the people, processes, and tools to which you’ve become accustomed? This report compiles input from early adopters as well as those currently considering or planning for adoption. IT teams should review these findings because a) respondents report significant business benefits from installing Converged Infrastructure, and b) there are key lessons that can be learned to make this new paradigm less painful for all involved. Converged Infrastructure promises more agility in a very competitive business environment, better customer service, and more predictable expense management. Read on to see what insights your organization can glean from the experiences of your peers.

Adoption of Converged Infrastructure

Nearly 1 in 3 (30%) of respondents are using Converged Infrastructure today. Half of respondents (51%) are actively considering or planning to adopt Converged Infrastructure.

FIGURE 1

34% of those in active consideration/planning mode expect to deploy in each of 2013 and 2014. Almost all (87%) should commence by the end of 2015.

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Who is adopting Converged Infrastructure?

Not surprisingly, the technology industry tops the chart (Figure 2) with regard to early adoption of Converged Infrastructure. Telecommunications, Manufacturing and Service Providers are a distant 2nd-4th.

FIGURE 2 - INDUSTRIES OF THOSE WHO HAVE CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE NOW

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Education jumps to the 2nd spot when you look at who is considering or planning for Converged Infrastructure.

FIGURE 3 - INDUSTRIES OF THOSE CONSIDERING OR PLANNING FOR CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

Interest is global, though clearly North America leads adoption in our survey (in the spirit of full disclosure, Zenoss is located in North America – this may skew our findings somewhat), with Europe/Russia and Multi-Nationals gaining slowly.

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Why is Converged Infrastructure pursued?

So why are all these organizations adopting, or at least investigating, Converged Infrastructure? It was eye-opening to see that efficiency topped the list, both for those who have invested in Converged Infrastructure (Figure 4 below) and for those actively considering/planning for Converged Infrastructure (Figure 5 below). Why did we find this surprising? Because, from the business side of things (which typically bankrolls the investment), the reasoning isn’t put that way. Customers typically want “better, faster, cheaper” (they hardly ever ask for “more efficient”). Agility, speed, and cost savings absolutely appeared, but not at the top.

At least, until we drilled into the data.

What we found is that – not surprisingly – our audience of primarily IT Operations staff is skewing the data toward the efficiency this group craves. They are tech-expertise-rich and time-poor. And they represent 2/3rds of our respondents. So we compared the answers of the C-level executives & upper management respondents to the answers of those whose title included “System” or “Systems.” We found that there’s a very measurable disconnect; this is especially true for firms who have not yet purchased Converged Infrastructure. The C-level leader cohort selected a 2-way tie for top reasons for pursuing Converged Infrastructure, naming “more agility in responding to needs of business units or departments” and “lower capital expenses resulting from higher utilization of compute, storage, and networking resources.” (This was a consistent 1st-place tie at the C-level leader level, both for firms who have adopted and firms who are only considering/planning.) For organizations actively considering or planning for Converged Infrastructure, therefore, a C-level leader is 32% more likely to name agility and capital expense management as goals than a staff member with a title including “System” or “Systems.”

One takeaway, then, may be that communication is needed up and down the chain of command, to get aligned on what the measure of success with Converged Infrastructure is intended to be, for any given organization. If the business expects turn-around time on new customer/product launches to go from 4 days to 4 hours, but the IT Ops team focuses all their energy on keeping operating costs down (IT Managers’ top pick ), then nobody will be happy when it’s time for performance evaluations.

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FIGURE 4 - REASONS SELECTED BY THOSE WHO NOW OWN CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

FIGURE 5 - REASONS SELECTED BY THOSE ACTIVELY CONSIDERING OR PLANNING FOR CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

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Why now?

What drives the timing of Converged Infrastructure adoption? When does making do with the status quo become untenable? The forcing factor has changed somewhat over time (comparing Figures 6 & 7 below), though virtualization initiatives continue to top the chart. A quarter of early adopters referred to their projects as the adoption of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), but that’s less prominent in today’s active consideration cycles.

FIGURE 6 – INITIATIVES THAT DROVE FIRST ROUND OF CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE ADOPTION

Unified Communications projects are more prevalent now than in years past, and there’s a growing need to handle Big Data projects (which we don’t foresee going away any time soon). Custom application development jumps as well, likely in correlation to the software industry increased interest, seen above in Figure 3.

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FIGURE 7 - PROJECT TYPES CURRENTLY DRIVING PLANS OR AT LEAST CONSIDERATION OF CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

Write-in responses provided additional insight for both early adopters and the considering/planning bunch. A few examples that resulted in deployments were “a new datacenter build-out,” “long term strategy”/”vision,” and plain old frustration (“inadequacy of incumbent server platform to deal with our virtualized environment”). From those still in considering/planning mode, write-in examples included the merger of multiple organizations, a desire for agile development, and (in utter honesty) “a new CEO.”

Why not Converged Infrastructure?

19% of those surveyed had no interest in Converged Infrastructure whatsoever (one respondent just considered it “a new buzz word”). Of those with no interest, 30% report that their current infrastructure is working fine for them; thus their teams have no reason to undertake any refresh. Similarly, 10% stated that their business requirements aren’t changing/don’t change often; primarily this represented education and government workers.

25% consider themselves too small for Converged Infrastructure, though organizations within the 1-1000 employee cohort actually beat all but the 5000+ employee cohort in terms of adoption plus interest in Converged Infrastructure. 20% had been turned-off previously by pricing that didn’t make sense to them. It’s quite likely that the recently-released smaller and less expensive solutions from VCE and NetApp FlexPod are still growing in awareness.

Concern about vendor lock-in (20%) and preference for hand-selecting componentry (16%) were voiced – as might be expected. 10% state that their needs are unique (not a fit with today’s

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offerings), and 10% currently prefer to custom-tailor systems for their customers on a 1-by-1 basis. We look forward to seeing how Converged Infrastructure providers attempt to resolve these concerns in the next few years.

FIGURE 8 – THOSE WHO HAVE NO INTEREST IN CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE SHARE THEIR REASONS

What vendors and solutions are considered and then purchased?

It takes a lot of time and effort to establish criteria, review proposals, evaluate your options, and select the Converged Infrastructure path that seems like a good fit for your organization. Here, you can inform your team with the experience of early adopters gone before you.

Cisco UCS reigns supreme, both at the time of consideration/planning, and within the solutions of those who have adopted Converged Infrastructure. Cisco provides the Virtual Multi-service Data Center (VMDC) reference architecture for those who plan to build on their own, and Cisco UCS (the compute-and-network combo SKU) is at the heart of 3 popular solutions below: EMC VSPEX, NetApp FlexPod, and VCE Vblock solutions. Oracle leads the non-Cisco pack in terms of marketshare in this survey, with HP, Dell, and IBM solutions chosen as well.

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FIGURE 9 - SOLUTIONS AND VENDORS CONSIDERED PRIOR TO CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE PURCHASE

FIGURE 10 - SOLUTIONS AND VENDORS CHOSEN BY CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE EARLY ADOPTERS

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FIGURE 11 – CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS AND VENDORS BEING ACTIVELY CONSIDERED OR PLANNED FOR

42% consider the do-it-yourself (DIY) path, but history shows that only 1 in 3 choose to go it alone. Write-in choices included OpenStack and CloudStack as well.

After the Decision: Living with Converged Infrastructure

This survey’s early adopters of Converged Infrastructure have been living with it for a median of 2 years. Generally, they are achieving eye-opening results, with 75% reporting better customer satisfaction. But achieving success clearly requires more than a pure hardware purchase. Respondents cited converged staffing and converged management tools as primary needs as well.

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FIGURE 12 - BLADE COUNT OF EARLY ADOPTERS' CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURES

As might be expected, organizations with 5000+ employees accounted for the majority of 65+ blade installations, but 25% of the small (1-100 employee count) organizations reported having 65+ blade installations as well. 101-1000 employee count organizations typically reported a smaller 9-16 blade installation.

How do organizations structure their staff for Converged Infrastructure?

Among firms with Converged Infrastructure in place, more than 1 in 3 report that the Server team is responsible for its success, followed closely by the Virtualization team (see Figure 13). Those considering or planning for Converged Infrastructure are more likely to name “a new Converged Infrastructure team” (see Figure 14). Write-ins included DevOps teams and Infrastructure teams (specified as consisting of compute, storage, network, & often virtualization).

Upon further inspection, we found that IT Directors are 3 times more likely to have answered “a new Converged Infrastructure team” than IT Managers, who may not see this coming. The new purpose-built Converged Infrastructure team was the top pick of C-level executives, whether their organizations have Converged Infrastructure or are only considering/planning for it.

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FIGURE 13 - HOW EARLY ADOPTERS ARE ASSIGNING STAFF RESOURCES TO CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

FIGURE 14 - STAFFING PLANS OF THOSE CONSIDERING OR PLANNING FOR CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

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Overall, early adopters called themselves “satisfied” with their Converged Infrastructure staffing. But while 39% of organizations in consideration/planning mode foresee the Server team as the eventual home of Converged Infrastructure, early adopters who have formed new Converged Infrastructure teams are 74% more likely to claim they are “very satisfied” with their staffing structure, as compared to those who gave Converged Infrastructure to the Server team.

FIGURE 15 - STAFFING SATISFACTION AMONG THOSE LIVING WITH CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

Of all the questions in the survey, we received the most commentary with regard to staffing. Representative insights are excerpted below:

“A dedicated team would have been better” – System Administrator, Europe/Russia

“With all the hype around Converged Infrastructure, everyone seems to forget about the staff portion. I have come up with the term converged staff … converged staff is a person or persons whom are both broad and deep in order to reduce or eliminate silos. The major issue is that companies are trying to find these broad and deep persons but not giving due consideration to training, compensation, etc. and end up with the siloed persons and converged infrastructure… [causing loss of] a significant amount of value” – System Administrator, North America

“ It has been difficult to find resources with the skill-set to cross all the silos of the new Converged Infrastructure” – Systems Architect, North America

“Need more development skillz (scripting, code repository etc.), less bouncing e-mails, overall more a generalists in the team.” – Systems Architect, Europe/Russia

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“As a group, we have always wanted to have fewer admin silos (Server, Storage, FC networking, IP networking, Backups, etc.) and we are nearly at the point where any admin can perform all of these functions.” – IT Manager, North America

“It can be possible for issues to fall between the server, networks and storage team, however we have a good team of people who work together well” – IT Manager, North America

“We have a platform team that is pooled with necessary domain specialists that is responsible for the Converged Infrastructure. We have a services team that structures services in our ITaaS model leveraging the Converged Infrastructure.” – IT Director, Multi-National

“a converged staff made everything easier… less fighting between teams” – CIO/Upper Management, North America

“We are managing an international three data center 15k core infrastructure with 4 people. This is very good.” – CIO/Upper Management, Multi-National

What’s the approach to orchestration and provisioning?

Since this survey’s respondents favored “efficient provisioning through automation” above all other reasons to pursue Converged Infrastructure, we share the orchestration and provisioning choices in great detail below.

With VMware projects driving many adoptions, it’s no surprise that vCloud would be the top approach. Over a quarter of early adopters didn’t find all the capabilities they needed to be readily available or affordable; they brought their technical expertise and creativity to bear by supplementing with homegrown scripts. With the prevalence of Cisco UCS in use today, CIAC (Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud) makes number 3, and OpenStack and Puppet round out the top 5.

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FIGURE 16 - ORCHESTRATION AND PROVISIONING CHOICES OF EARLY ADOPTERS OF CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

Application layer tools, vendor-specific tools from Dell & Hitachi, and other tools like Ansible, Enstratius, OpenQRM, RightScale, SaltStack, SlapOS, & Zenoss were also written-in as used by Converged Infrastructure’s early adopters, as was “no clue!”

FIGURE 17 - HOW THOSE ACTIVELY CONSIDERING CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN TO ORCHESTRATE & PROVISION IT SERVICES

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It seems clear that those who are considering or planning for Converged Infrastructure are much less likely to think they will need to develop homegrown scripts. vCloud, OpenStack and Puppet remain top of mind here, while CloudStack jumps up. The planning/considering bunch may not be as aware of the availability of Cisco CIAC.

How are performance and availability being managed?

When it comes to managing and monitoring the performance and availability of the IT services they’re delivering via Converged Infrastructure, juggling multiple tools is the norm for early adopters. 15% were handed multiple tools to fold into their processes by their Converged Infrastructure vendors. And over 1 in 3 now juggle 4+ tools, which has been shown significantly slow troubleshooting - typically wasting 20% of a firm’s operational resources.1 This survey found that respondents were 20% more likely to be satisfied with performance & availability monitoring if they used fewer tools.

FIGURE 18 - HOW CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE’S EARLY ADOPTERS ARE MANAGING PERFORMANCE & AVAILABILITY OF IT SERVICES

Additional insights can be gained by reviewing commentary provided by those currently living with Converged Infrastructure.

1 According to a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting on behalf Zenoss, entitled “How Too Many Tools Can Impact Your IT Operation Efficiency,” published January 2013

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“it would be nicer to have fewer tools overall” - System Administrator, North America

“It seems we are on the verge of tools for monitoring converged being really great. The correlation between components and movement still proves to be tough” – System Administrator, North America

“It takes too many tools with too much under the hood tuning to get all of the data we need” – Unix Admin, North America

“We are finding that our monitoring environment is fractured” – Platform Lead, Australia/Southeast Asia

“These [performance & availability tools] are still the trickiest part of managing a Converged Infrastructure.” – Systems Architect, North America

“Because we have many tools, we lack [an] "open" point of view. When [diagnosing] a problem is needed, we must walk every tool to find out what is going on.” – Chief Infrastructure Architect, Central/South America

“Still developing the reports and tools we need.” – IT Manager, North America

“would like greater levels of integration” – IT Director, Multi-National

“We have automated resiliency, automatic fail-over, and burn-in/swap-out, so servers can be put in the racks and they self-configure and self-heal. We also have automated workload scheduling automation through predictive algorithms. I am not aware of other infrastructures that have this level of automation for service delivery.” – CIO/Upper Management, North America

A big surprise was the number of people who expect their Converged Infrastructure vendor to supply the tools they’ll need for managing performance and availability. Why is this surprising? Because our analysis and experience shows that few Converged Infrastructure vendors have a converged performance and availability management solution. Or at least few vendors besides Cisco, which has validated Zenoss Cloud Service Assurance as part of its VMDC architecture.

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FIGURE 19 - HOW THOSE ACTIVELY CONSIDERING OR PLANNING AIM TO MANAGE PERFORMANCE & AVAILABILITY WITH CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

We hope this advice will be taken into account by those who are considering or planning for Converged Infrastructure, who primarily don’t know how they’ll manage performance and availability. Many look to their Converged Infrastructure vendors to provide the tools they will need. Far too many expect to continue juggling multiple tools, accepting the slower troubleshooting and interrupted services that come along with this approach.

Overall Business Impact

Organizations that invest in Converged Infrastructure point to improved customer services as a result of this investment: 3 out of 4 say they are delivering better customer service. 76% say they are experiencing improved/faster mean time to repair (MTTR) due to the adoption of Converged Infrastructure. Both of these measures of success bode well for the future of this technology.

However, less than half (49%) say that the business units or departments they support feel that they have sufficient visibility and control of their own destinies (for troubleshooting, etc.). The latter may be cause of needless pushback and delay regarding full deployment of Converged Infrastructure within enterprises.

When asked how Converged Infrastructure has changed alerting and notification processes, one Systems Architect in Europe/Russia described it as “drastically improved by centralization.” The IT Director at a multi-national firm says Converged Infrastructure has “greatly enhanced and simplified” alerting & notification.

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The “Big Data” generated by Converged Infrastructure itself is still something to be grappled with. Asked to comment on the techniques currently being used to aggregate all the data from tools used to manage performance, availability, utilization, etc., respondents had little to say.

“‘Chaos - and luck. No single view into all the data at the moment, which is something we'd like to address in the future.” – System Administrator, North America

“We use this data selectively for analytical purposes. Mostly this data is used in operations to ensure capacity, availability, etc. and for investment planning purposes.” – IT Director, Multi-National

Voices of Experience: Advice from Early Adopters

We asked Converged Infrastructure’s early adopters to provide any advice they would to their peers, and compiled a great list of insights to inform the entire industry. We hope this report has been as informative to your staff as it has been to the team here at Zenoss!

“Documentation and structure before getting started. Ease into it and follow the documentation and structure in place. Slow migration to new platform.” – System Administrator, North America

“Make sure you understand all of the pieces, not just your part” – System Administrator, North America

“Concentrate on redundancy and automation.” – System Administrator, Europe/Russia

“Understand the technologies, have the right skills in place and don't expect a 3rd party to come rushing over the hill in a disaster. They often have less experience than you.” – Network Engineer, Europe/Russia

“Do not use multiple tools, monitor what is going on and react in advance” - Developer/Software Engineer, Europe/Russia

“All the teams involved have to be in sync and communication is key.” – Systems Architect, North America

“Redo alerting/notification processes with more automation in mind” – Systems Architect, North America

“Today you will need multiple tools to allow for orchestration, management and monitoring of the environment, but keep in mind it's rapidly changing so make sure to keep your options open.” – Systems Architect, North America

“Start big. Easier to scale down initially rather than scale up.” – Systems Architect, North America

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“Carefully ask your vendor about how the whole stack can be examined for availability/performance/capacity, etc. using their tools, and how this can be done out of single pane-of-glass.” – Systems Architect, Europe/Russia

“Start with business requirements” – IT Manager, Europe/Russia

“Ensure a holistic approach in adopting the converged infrastructure” – IT Manager, Multi-National

“Make sure your staff has a deep technical understanding of how it works so they can support it when the consultants leave.” – IT Manager, North America

“For a period of time, there will be legacy as well as new converged infrastructure.” – IT Director, Multi-National

“don’t DIY” – CIO/Upper Management, North America

“approach this as Business Technology as a Service” – CIO/Upper Management, North America

“Replace sysadmins with software developers” – CIO/Upper Management, Europe/Russia

“Automate as much as you can: we are running an almost lights-out operation. Our scale has continuous hw failures so physical operations are necessary, but all logical operations are automated. This is a huge scale enhancement.” – CIO/Upper Management, Multi-National

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Demographics of Survey Respondents FIGURE 20 – SURVEY PARTICIPANTS’ ORGANIZATIONS SIZES

FIGURE 21 – SURVEY PARTICIPANTS’ JOB TITLES OR ROLES

Other roles written-in included Consultants, Project Leaders, and Help Desk/Support, Analysts, and more.

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FIGURE 22 – SURVEY PARTICIPANTS’ INDUSTRIES

FIGURE 23 – SURVEY PARTICIPANTS’ GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION