data center that combines computing, networking and storage all together in, let's say, a

purpose-built appliance. And then it builds it into a giant grid, so that you don't have

to worry about additional computing power and storage as you grow.

It's fast, easy and agile. Let's talk a little bit about the evolution of, you know, converged.

What does it mean? How did we get to hyperconverged?

Converged came first. Converged was a term that was "market-tecture", so to speak. It

came from Cisco, really, when they developed an integrated blade solution. And that was

nice because everything sort of sung and danced together.

And so they also took a second technology, which I'm going to use the term web-scaling,

which was like a grid of just purpose-built computers with no storage. Google did this.

People are familiar with that. Netflix uses that kind of technology.

So then they started putting two-and-two together and they said, "Let's make a software-centric

solution with just purpose-built servers,"and that's what hyperconverged is.

The two benefits of hyperconverged, there's a lot, but the two big benefits: One, business

agility. Number two is IT innovation. Let me explain.

So, what happens is a business now, they're beyond the cost of ownership and so forth.

They do that. Yeah. That's a given, but what they want to know is what's going to help

the business to become better and more profitable by IT being agile.

Gartner's now calling this concept "Run IT". I need business agility. I can't put all these

pieces together on a five-month timeline. That's where this is really helping with management

because, again, it's software-based, so you run virtualized software on a purpose-built

server and then you just keep plugging the grids in.

And so it just scales up. You run out of computing power, so to speak, you add another grid.

You run out of space? You add another grid. I'm simplifying a bit, but that's really the

concept because they can buy the purpose-built servers and pop them in, get up and running

and go to town. I mean, and even taking it further, they can then eventually go into

a hybrid cloud from there because now they've virtualized, and get that project done.

So "Run IT" is direct involvement in the business. At the end of the day, you're cutting down

that complexity and you're able to say, "Yeah, we can do that. Give us a week," as

opposed to, "We can do that. Give us three months."

The second benefit is it simply helps IT to not be dealing with all the little things

that give them "death by a thousand cuts," like missing a cable or whatever, and they're

able to actually have an easier roll-out of the project so they can move on to the next

thing and become more innovative and learn technology.

So a customer comes to me and wants to build a VM farm, for example, and I've got to get

the server, the processor, the storage, the network and it's probably about a thousand

parts. You've got to wait for pricing and, you know, it's just a process that slows things

down more, and so, to take that away will help the industry as a whole, to actually

do what we're supposed to do, which was to be in the business of technology helping business,

not the business of technology paperwork.

You know, a really common use case is end-user computing. An example of that is I had a customer

who had 45,000 desktop users. It was a call center and they were trying to bring the call

center into the data center because it's just very expensive to maintain all over the United

States.

They looked into hyperconverged. They developed what's called a "pod concept" and they are

able to do it 200 people at a time and grow as they, you know, as they built it out.

Another important use case, and this is really what drives America, is small business. They

don't have a large IT staff, but they're driving our economy too, right? And what's important

to them is that they just need something simple.

What they do is they buy hyperconverged. They only have one guy running IT and they're

up and running in a couple of days, and they're getting the best of both worlds, which is

disaster recovery, storage and computing and networking combined.

CDW can help with hyperconverged data centers because of our broad portfolio. We can explain

it to you. We can compare it for you. We can walk you through it, save you some time and

hopefully that will help you to get there quickly and run your business faster.

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