Modern times demand modern solutions — why convergence is the way to go

In the iconic Charlie Chaplin film, “Modern Times,” there is a classic scene where he tries to keep up with an ever-moving assembly line with the expected results you might envision. It’s a good image to keep in mind when considering today’s IT technology. The IT world is moving fast and the expectations on the services they deliver is ever increasing with of course, ever shrinking budgets to meet these demands.

Digital transformation

The world of technology is squarely in the middle of the digital transformation. The adoption of virtualization and hybrid cloud technologies is dramatically changing the way IT can deliver applications and services. There are new expectations for agility, simplicity and, perhaps most importantly, Availability. Customers, partners and employees expect applications and data to be available always, in all places and on any device. But there is another more fundamental change happening, regardless of the industry, the size of the company or their location — today’s modern enterprise is changing the way they deliver their goods and services. EVERY company is becoming a software company, and with this change brings a new set of IT challenges. And if companies aren’t investigating ways to change their business models, they’ll likely have to compete against a company that has. Technology has never been so important as a competitive advantage.

To converge or not to converge

One of the fundamental tools that is enabling and driving the digital transformation is converged infrastructures. The reason for the massive adoption of converged infrastructures is straight forward: Combining compute, networking, storage and virtualization provides more efficiency and predictable performance and deployment. These systems are a pre-integrated stack of technology that are pre-configured for particular applications and workloads and are optimized to work together. This eliminates a great deal of management and fine tuning which frees up those resources to focus on higher-value projects.

But convergence was just the first step. To gain even greater agility and efficiencies, we are seeing a rapid adoption of hyper-converged systems. With a hyper-converged infrastructure, a software layer and common management are added to the equation, giving even tighter coupling of the components. In fact, that’s one way to distinguish the difference between hyper-converged and converged infrastructures: With converged, you have separate components pre-configured and validated with one another, but still separate components — with hyper-converged, it is a single system in which all the components work together as one.

So, which is right for you? Well, that depends. It used to be that converged infrastructures were deployed for larger, more mission-critical workloads while hyper-converged was deployed for specific-use cases such as VDI or remote office. But with hyper-converged systems becoming more available with enterprise class storage (flash) and faster networking, the lines are blurring.

Modern times require modern Availability

As you adopt modern infrastructures as part of your digital transformation, it is imperative to adopt a modern data protection that is ideally suited for these solutions. In fact, at Veeam we are changing the way the world thinks about data protection. Instead of data protection, we frame it as Availability. If you think about it, it is a logical next step. Why do we backup? In case we need to recover something. Why do we recover? It’s really to keep data and applications available.

Veeam Availability Suite delivers an innovative approach to backup, replication and recovery. It’s designed to offer the highest levels of Availability in today’s highly virtualized environments.

It is convergence-agnostic, meaning it will work with any of the industry leading converged or hyper-converged systems. It is also tightly integrated with leading storage and hyper-converged systems vendors using storage snapshots to ensure application Availability.

Veeam Availability Suite offers rapid recovery of what you want, the way you want it with low recovery point objectives and streamlined disaster recovery, plus 2-in-1: backup and replication. Veeam provides verified recoverability of every file, application, or virtual server, every time through automated testing with audit trails.

Veeam Availability Suite is the modern data protection you need for these modern times, regardless of the infrastructure that you are using or considering for deployment. Learn more on what’s right for you in our white papers: Building a Converged Infrastructure that Just Won’t Quit and Essential Guide to Data Protection in Hyper-Converged, Converged, and Hybrid Environments.