We live in an era of intensifying IT pressure in which organizations are asked to perform at high levels and improve responsiveness to the business while reducing costs. The need to accelerate application delivery and meet security and governance requirements continues to rise, even as budgets shrink. The lightning-fast pace of the marketplace demands agile teams and almost instantaneous delivery of products and services. Enterprises must have a secure and seamless compute, storage, and management experience; without it, they risk being left behind.

This situation poses a significant challenge to teams with cumbersome legacy infrastructures that can’t serve up the necessary functionality—including policy, quality of service, and traffic prioritization—or optimize appropriate application resources. Challenges such as slow and expensive deployments, application silos, burdensome network automation, and complex multitenancy support can be daily struggles. Organizations must perform at world-class levels without adding cost or complexity, and they are often asked to so do without the help of experienced specialists. More and more, the need for simplicity and agility is driving consolidation of workloads onto converged infrastructure (CI) platforms.