The popularity of working on the go in Asia has resulted in a sudden increase in commissions for application developers to create enterprise apps for the mobile workplace over the past 18 months.
With data increasing at this monumental rate, the adoption of new apps has become a double-edged sword for many organizations.
As these business apps reach mainstream adoption, data centers are now housing a wealth of information on a variety of apps that can help organizations improve their revenues and gain market share. On the flip side, managing the data on these apps also poses risks for organizations.
The massive amount of unstructured data created can clog network pipes, stretch storage resources, and reduce data access performance. This could lead to data center inefficiency, loss of vital information and storage management costs spiraling out of control.
A few reasons why data center convergence is now grabbing mindshare in the IT and business community are that it promises storage management simplification, reduction in overall costs and physical space at the data center facility. Simply put, data center convergence introduces a new class of integrated servers that leverage on virtualization by combining processors, networking capabilities and storage innovations in a commonly managed platform. This takes away the inefficiencies and costs of managing the vast array of devices, apps and components in a data center.
For customers, data center convergence translates into two main value propositions that can be immediately realized. First, it reduces the amount of actual equipment in the data center, which translates into lower management costs, less floor space needed, and reduced energy consumption.
Secondly, the convergence allows all data center components -- whether they are servers, networks or content from mission-critical business applications -- to be managed through one console. This drastically reduces the need for deploying multiple management tools and the need to find expertise to manage each of them. It can also free up expensive IT manpower to other more value-adding tasks for the organization.
Combined, these two value propositions provide CIOs the necessary solution to tackle the proliferation of data and manage the deployment of new business apps more effectively. It also sets the foundations for cloud adoption, a key driver for new types of apps.