As business processes become increasingly automated and software takes over previously manual operations, the role of applications and software in business becomes more widespread and far-reaching. As application ecosystems increase in complexity and become more intertwined with business operations, IT’s relevance to the business increases as well, which represents a huge shift for many IT organizations, particularly for those organizations that are accustomed to a back-office support function.

IT organizations must reexamine every facet of what they do, how they do it, and how they prioritize their business objectives. In particular, IT organizations must transform to deliver greater efficiency, predictability, and business agility.

A reference system from the Dell EMC Ready Stack portfolio that is based on converged infrastructure (CI) methodologies brings together the disparate infrastructure elements that power IT: servers, data storage devices, networking functions, virtualization, and management software. CI provides the following benefits:

• Validated integration testing, which reduces risk and speeds deployment time
• Management and automation tooling, which increases efficiency and provides insight into the entire platform

Whether you are virtualizing workloads for private, public, or hybrid cloud deployments, CI systems expedite your journey to the cloud.

Underpinning the modern data center are multiple technology pillars—flash, scale-out architectures, and cloud-enabled systems. CI helps make the adoption of these new technologies faster, simpler, more agile, more efficient, less risky, and less costly, which speeds overall IT transformation efforts.

Each Dell EMC Ready Stack design is a certified reference system that simplifies and accelerates the process of deploying full-stack systems that are based on hardware and software from Dell Technologies. (Industry-analyst firm IDC defines a certified reference system as a pre-integrated, vendor-certified system containing server, storage, networking, and basic component management software. Dell EMC Ready Stack combines all these elements plus validation by Dell Technologies Engineering.) Ready Stack incorporates the core tenets of a CI system. The system helps organizations modernize faster, with less risk and less effort than through alternative solutions—whether the environment already includes technologies from Dell Technologies or uses reference architectures from other vendors.

Not all customer objectives are the same, so Dell Technologies offers a continuum of CI options. Customer preferences range from do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches to fully engineered, factory-built, enterprise-class architectures for organizations with global data centers.