I found this article to be interesting as it deals with a growing problem that IT Administrators face as companies grow.  “IT sprawl” makes it difficult to manage platforms because of the lack of standardization as a company moves from one vendor’s platform to another.  One solution is converging to unified platforms in a data center.  This takes the idea of building infrastructure to designing the model and utilizing Infrastructure-as-a-Service to fulfill your platform needs.

Converged data center infrastructure promises to banish IT silos

By Laura Smith, Features Writer
15 Feb 2011 | SearchCIO.com
One of the biggest data center infrastructure challenges that IT executives face is the management of disparate technologies and standards. For decades, they’ve implemented various parts of the puzzle — servers, routers, storage and management — only to wind up with IT silos. Emerging converged infrastructure technologies could alleviate this management challenge and connect those silos for on-demand resource sharing.
“Way back when, convergence was voice and data,” recalled Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director of ThinkStrategies Inc., a consultancy in Wellesley, Mass. Today’s convergence “is around centralized control of a traditional data center environment, while at the same time permitting self-service provisioning around authorized end users,” he said.
Read the rest of the article – https://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/2240032093/Converged-data-center-infrastructure-promises-to-banish-IT-silos?asrc=EM_NLN_13300185&track=NL-964&ad=813750