There’s no “easy button” in the datacenter. There’s no one architecture, one hardware, one software, or one business strategy that will solve the numerous challenges enterprises are facing in the modern digital economy. The sheer amount of data, exploding number of applications, constant demand for innovation, and increasing complexity of IT architecture — which now includes the datacenter, the cloud, and the edge — place an extraordinary burden on the IT department. In fact, IDC survey data shows that an IT staff spends only 20% of its time on innovation, whereas efforts to just “keep the lights on” take up 80% of its time.

Ideally, IT must evolve into a key player that helps a corporation embrace digital transformation, drive new business models and revenue, strengthen customer relationships, and enhance customer experience. Furthermore, IT executives must formulate an overarching strategy that reduces operational costs, increases agility, boosts efficiency, satisfies service-level agreements (SLAs), and future proofs the IT architecture.

One of the strategies for this daunting objective is to consolidate the datacenter by eliminating silos of disparate infrastructure.