$10 million dollars is a lot of money. It's a decent budget for a non-financial industry IT department supporting $300M in revenue in retail, services or even some manufacturing industries. With that budget though, you probably have to support quite a few mission critical legacy applications, certainly SAP or Oracle ERP, lots of MSFT licenses, several thousand desktops. Taking care of the data center running the mission critical applications is a team of 5-10 really smart dedicated admins supporting everything the last 3 CIO's bought in the previous decade.
In my opinion, converged infastructure with hybrid cloud is the only way out of the current mess most departments are in. Why not a move to public cloud and consumer apps? Because typically, there aren't resources to deploy them.
Example: You have a mostly working Business Objects reporting infrastructure with 50 really active users. Of those 50 users, 5 know how to revise and edit reports. The resources necessary to transition all the knowledge in those reports over to another platform just isn't there. But, the data rates keep rising and it's hard to keep up. This is a typical challenge.
My definition of a converged architecture:
This is the low-lying fruit. Retiring Siebel and migrating to SalesForce.Com may be a great thing but it'll take a lot of resources. Encapsulating the Siebel production envirorment so it can be moved and migrated, keeping application envirorments partitioned so patches can be applied without damaging other applications.
How is this different than today? It's orienting spend and physical infrastructure with a new eye towards some common goals:
- Reduce direct attached storage. DR, tiered back-up, cloud migration can be greatly simplified at a block, not application level. It just isn't going to happen on an app-by-app basis. Migrating to a hybrid SAN envirorment from a DAS basis (or local SAN with dedicated filespace to a single app - same issue) to a more manageable envirorment is an absolute. You may have looked at this and nixed a $1M box a few years ago.
- Work on a converged 10GB network core. The mid-sized organization has a huge advantage here. You may find that a strong access switch can work fine as a core. A $20K Arista has more backplane than the $100K core switch you put in 3-years ago. But getting the network up to snuff with QOS, framing, etc to handle storage is key. It's not that hard and many of the same things needed for storage will also help for video conferencing and bulk data transfer.
- Get good at a hypervisor. VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen - doesn't really matter. VMWare certainly is the easiest to get resources for - need to trade that off against licensing costs.
- Start consolidating now - don't build another data center or rent more space. Increase DR capabilities and reduce the operational load on your team for legacy support.