IT infrastructure is the backbone of today's modern business. And IT leaders are focused on deploying business services on demand and at scale, all while managing costs. To meet these needs, many are deploying converged infrastructure systems — a pre-engineered, pre-tested platform that tightly integrates compute, storage, network resources, virtualization software, and infrastructure management software.

Organizations around the world spent over $5.4 billion on converged systems in 2013, and IDC forecasts that spending to increase by nearly 50 percent in 2014. IT executives looking to buy converged infrastructure want to quantify the business value of such an investment — either by driving business expansion, reducing the cost of conducting business, or speeding business innovation.

To help IT leaders quantify the value of converged infrastructure, IDC conducted in-depth interviews with several IT organizations that deployed VCE Vblock systems.

The study found that Vblock system implementations sped deployments by 5 times, simplified operations, improved agility, cut data center costs in half, and freed staff to launch new applications, extend services, and improve user/customer satisfaction.

These organizations also reported that, compared with their prior IT environment, Vblock systems reduced infrastructure hardware costs and IT staff time to manage operations. Together, these savings reduced annual datacenter costs by half.

Vblock systems are built by VCE using computer and network technologies from Cisco with Intel Xeon processors, storage and data protection from EMC, and virtualization software from VMware.

Enterprises and service providers using Vblock Systems are well positioned to drive data center modernization, enable more effective private cloud launches and expansions, and maintain ongoing benefits in terms of speed, savings, and simplicity.