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Zones technology experts, system engineers and solution architects help IT administrators assess business functions, evaluate corresponding products and suppliers, and determine ideal solutions. We'll then configure, package and test the converged infrastructure solution. For example, Zones offers EMC VSPEX converged virtualization infrastructures, featuring EMC storage plus components from other technology partners such as Brocade, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and VMware.

Why a converged infrastructure?

Converged infrastructure is an enabler of cloud (private or hybrid) and a foundation for creating modular, virtualized, and automated IT systems. Here are three established benefits:

1. Improved service provisioning time. CI is designed with virtualization in mind. It's optimized for quickly provisioning infrastructure capabilities to support apps, developers, or other IT teams. Example: One customer (a bank) noted it was able to reduce the time it takes to provision a virtual machine for a developer from six weeks to one hour; the bank expected to soon have that down to six minutes.
2. Reduced deployment costs. The integration is done by Zones and our technology partners, to deploy the technology significantly faster. You get a single support number if you need to troubleshoot any part of the converged solution. Example: An oil and gas exploration company that drop-ships preconfigured, converged VDI stacks to new data centers around the globe, a process that used to take months, said it now takes days.
3. Create application-tuned infrastructure. Another key benefit is how you can configure the converged stack to optimally serve up a particular app. Need more IOPS for optimized VDI deployment? No problem. Want an SAP stack optimized for big data analytics? Done. In fact, one large retailer did just that. The retailer purchased a Hadoop-optimized stack so the business can run nightly analytics on pricing data; it now can quickly push new prices out to retail locations around the world.

How Zones helps you converge and optimize your infrastructure

When helping IT administrators evaluate their data centers for convergence and optimization opportunities, Zones solution architects consider storage, networking, servers and virtualization:

• Servers: Zones helps organizations pursuing data center convergence consolidate their server infrastructure to achieve the greatest efficiencies from server management.
• Virtualization: Whether an organization has adopted some degree of virtualization or hasn't started their virtualization planning, Zones helps IT administrators develop and implement an optimized data center, which relies heavily on virtualization across teams and resources.
• Networking: A networking optimization strategy fulfilled by Zones may feature FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), the unifying fabric in a network that is part of a data center convergence strategy. And expanding a network to 10GbE is a great starting point for any organization to enhance its network.
• Storage: Since storage ties directly to organizational growth and the modern office's big data, additional storage capacity or consolidation –or even both – may make sense. And Zones experts help IT administrators choose the storage components of the converged infrastructure.

Zones has the expertise and technology leadership to help transform your data center - at your pace - by engineering your IT resources to work better together. Our solution architects will devise and implement a converged infrastructure strategy for your business and budget.