Today, the complexity of data center IT environment is continuously growing as the amount of data increases and applications demand more compute power with more infrastructure components needed to support it. At the same time, IT departments should always be able to provision resources instantly while maintaining flexibility and scalability of the infrastructure to handle unpredictable data growth.
Traditional data center infrastructure is comprised of separate compute, storage, and networking components requiring different administrative groups and systems for its management. The storage team, for example, handles the maintenance of the storage subsystem and the relationship with the storage hardware vendor. The same goes for the servers and the network teams. Such infrastructures feature multiple management interfaces for separate components, higher maintenance costs, and are a real headache in terms of support since different components often come from different vendors. All of this makes infrastructure management a highly time- and effort-consuming task forcing businesses to spend their time and money just on keeping the IT infrastructure working instead of focusing on innovations and services delivery.