Faced with the need to boost data-center flexibility, control costs, improve performance, and keep pace with growing data-processing requirements, Mark Reboli wanted to find an innovative technology that would enable him to get off the treadmill of adding one-off physical servers and storage systems.

Reboli, the network, telecom, and IT security manager at Misericordia University, a liberal arts college in Dallas, Pennsylvania, adopted a converged infrastructure and hasn’t looked back.

“At a university, systems are critical. We always have students accessing classes, along with faculty and staff, so we need to be at 99.999% uptime.” Reboli says that with a converged infrastructure, he can keep systems running if a hard drive or processor fails. If he needs more resources, such as memory, disk, or processor, he can just add it to the virtual server. If a system is no longer needed, it can be easily decommissioned and the resources can be repurposed elsewhere. If someone needs quick access to new resources, he just fires up a new instance.

Reboli is one of a growing number of enterprise IT executives switching to converged infrastructure, which combines storage, compute, networking, and virtualization technologies in a preconfigured, tested, and validated system that promises ease of deployment and management. The latest numbers from an IDC revenue report put the worldwide converged systems market revenue at $3.9 billion for the second quarter of 2019, an increase of nearly 11% year over year.

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