Converged Infrastructure & The Branch Office

Converged infrastructure is on people's minds. In fact, David Giambruno, the CIO of the Tribune Co., and I were recently talking about the converged infrastructure that he is implementing in his branch offices. Knowing the model works -- he deployed converged infrastructure previously -- he's applying it at the Tribune Co.

"I have had three major disaster recovery events at my remote sites. You know what happened? Nothing. And that's the value my team provides to the business," he said. "Not having to think about it enables my teams to turn around, face forward, and help the business. Less time is spent keeping the lights on, and more time is spent being innovative."

But getting to this scenario wasn't easy. Status quo branch IT architectures are prone to failure, downtime, and data loss. Giambruno needed a new approach to branch IT architecture. And he will be the first to explain how this approach had to build on the 90% virtualized and highly automated private cloud in his datacenter.

Branch office IT is broken
His experience is not unique. As a former analyst at Forrester, I've spoken to thousands of companies that struggle with their branch office IT architecture. Just how big a challenge is this?

Well, consider this:

The branch is a unique IT environment. It suffers from all the same challenges as the datacenter -- availability, reliability, scalability, security, complexity, etc. -- but with the additional challenges of limited staff, immature IT operations, and unsophisticated infrastructure. Put simply, branches are challenged by the IT trifecta of inadequate people, process, and technology.

The solution to inefficient branch infrastructure, as Giambruno discovered, can be found in today's modern datacenters: converged infrastructure. It collapses disparate server, storage, and network infrastructure into a single appliance, all with industry-standard virtualization and automation capabilities. The result is a single, standardized, pre-integrated stack optimized to run highly automated cloud workloads.

Applying converged infrastructure to the branch
Branch converged infrastructure builds on the proven techniques pioneered by datacenter providers, but it is optimized for the unique requirements of the branch.

Specifically, branch converged infrastructure:

To accomplish this, branch converged infrastructures needs three unique components above and beyond what's in the datacenter already.

Branch converged infrastructure balances the best of both worlds: centralization of as many IT apps and data as possible, with local execution of the remaining services running on a converged appliance. As Giambruno put it, "Centralize when you can, converge when you can't."

There are three easy steps to transforming branch architecture and bringing the power of virtualized, automated IT to remote sites.

That's it -- converge, centralize, replicate. This is the recipe that has helped many CIOs, like Giambruno, apply the economics of converged infrastructure to branch IT.