Issue link: https://insights.oneneck.com/i/1437687
20 Typically, most CI vendors and products will offer the ability to purchase all of the infrastructure parts in a single product SKU. The CI vendor should be able to offer single call support for the entire CI solution, which means that the CI vendor can support all of the products within the solution. This is an added benefit as it allows customers to eliminate the need to work with multiple vendors in the troubleshooting process. With most CI offerings, there is a limited number of products offered within the solution. This allows the CI vendor to pre-test and validate all parts and pieces to ensure they work properly together, removing much of the risk in the BYO alternative. Even after several years of CI products being sold in the market, little has been done by the CI vendors to simplify the management of these products. With CI offerings that include the same products as the BYO alternatives, one will typically manage both alternatives in a similar and dispersed manner. This alternative may converge the purchase and or some of the products, but it typically does not converge the daily operational management of the solution. A converged infrastructure product should be able to scale the resources within it independently of each other. This would mean that you can just add compute, although there may be minimum increments that one can scale in. The other resource that would be scaled in a CI offering is storage, and this will be heavily dependent on the type of storage solution selected as part of the CI offering. A converged infrastructure product will have a maximum size, meaning it will have a limit on the number of servers it can support, and a storage limit based on the included storage array. Scaling limits of a CI offering are typically fairly large, but at some point as one scales the resources within the CI product, it will hit the maximums. To continue to scale the design at this point, one will need to purchase an additional CI product. This will cause large peaks in infrastructure costs at different points of the scaling process depending on the maximum size of your design.