“VCE, the Virtual Computing Environment Company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, accelerates the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models that dramatically reduce the cost of IT while improving time to market for our customers.”
Part 1: Building the Vblock Infrastructure Platform
See how VCE builds and delivers the market-leading Vblock Infrastructure Platform. Watch how VCE takes many components and builds the Vblock platform into a fully integrated piece of converged infrastructure ready for delivery to the customer’s doorstep.
Part 2: Building the Vblock Infrastructure Platform
Knowledge Transfer and Learning along the way
ATS and CDW – Converged Infrastructure: Migrating to Vblock
As its cloud services for small businesses took off, Dallas-based ATS Cloud turned to CDW to help it converge its infrastructure by migrating to VCE Vblock. The move to the consolidated and fully virtualized environment let the company accommodate its own growth while providing speedy scalable IaaS to its end users.
Single Integrated Service Provider and VCE Professional Services
One Stop Shop with One Number to Call
Reduce Costs and Improve Asset Utilization with Vblock
Matt Eastwood, IDC – Group VP and GM Enterprise Platforms
Converging the Datacenter Infrastructure: Why, How, So What?
Richard L. Villars, Randy Perry, Jed Scaramella
IDC Whitepaper ( #234553) May 2012
“Our research with five companies that have implemented Vblock Infrastructure Platforms from VCE indicated substantial business benefits associated with IT convergence and improved asset sharing. The results also showed reduced IT costs per unit of workload, faster deployment, and reduced downtime. These organizations reported reducing calendar time for deployment of new infrastructure from five weeks to one week and reducing staff time to configure/test/deploy by 75%. They indicated that, compared with their prior IT environment, the new infrastructure led to reductions in infrastructure hardware costs and IT staff time to manage operations that lowered the average annual datacenter cost by 68% per 100 users.”
Gartner Highlights Five Things That the Private Cloud Is Not
Ongoing hype around private cloud computing is creating misperceptions about private cloud, according to Gartner, Inc. To help reduce the hype and identify the real value of private cloud computing for IT leaders, Gartner explains five common misconceptions about private cloud.
“The growth of private cloud computing is being driven by the rapid penetration of virtualization and virtualization management, the growth of cloud computing offerings and pressure to deliver IT faster and cheaper,” said Tom Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, in the rush to respond to these pressures, IT organizations need to be careful to avoid the hype, and, instead, should focus on a private cloud computing effort that makes the most business sense.”
The five misconceptions about private cloud and the corresponding realities are:
Private Cloud Is Not Virtualization
Server and infrastructure virtualization are important foundations for private cloud computing. However, virtualization and virtualization management are not, by themselves, private cloud computing. Virtualization makes it easier to dynamically and granularly pool and reallocate infrastructure resources (servers, desktop, storage, networking, middleware, etc.). However, virtualization can be enabled in many ways, including virtual machines, operating systems (OSs) or middleware containers, robust OSs, storage abstraction software, grid computing software, and horizontal scaling and cluster tools.
Private cloud computing leverages some form of virtualization to create a cloud computing service. Private cloud computing is a form of cloud computing that is used by only one organization, or that ensures that an organization is completely isolated from others.
Private Cloud Is Not Just About Cost Reduction
An enterprise can reduce operational costs with a private cloud by eliminating common, rote tasks for standard offerings. A private cloud can reallocate resources more efficiently to meet enterprise requirements, possibly by reducing capital expenses for hardware.
However, private clouds require investment in automation software, and the savings alone might not justify the cost. As such, cost reduction is not the primary benefit of private cloud computing. The benefits of self-service, automation behind the self-service interface and metering tied to usage are primarily agility, speed to market, ability to scale to dynamic demand or to go after short windows of opportunity, and ability for a business unit to experiment.
Private Cloud Is Not Necessarily On-Premises
Private cloud computing is defined by privacy, not location, ownership or management responsibility. While the majority of private clouds will be on-premises (based on the evolution of existing virtualization investments), a growing percentage of private clouds will be outsourced and/or off-premises. Third-party private clouds will have a more flexible definition of “privacy.” A third-party private cloud offering might share data center facilities with others, could share equipment over time (from a pool of available resources), and could share resources, but be isolated by a virtual private network (VPN) and everything in between.
Private Cloud Is Not Only Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Server virtualization is a major trend and, therefore, a major enabler for private cloud computing. However, private cloud is not limited in any way to IaaS. For example, with development and test offerings, enabling higher-level Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings for developers makes more sense than a simple virtual machine provisioning service.
Today, the fastest growing segment of cloud computing is IaaS. However, IaaS only provides the lowest-level data center resources in an easy-to-consume way, and doesn’t fundamentally change how IT is done. Developers will use PaaS to create new applications designed to be cloud-aware, producing fundamentally new services that could be very differentiating, compared with old applications.
Private Cloud Is Not Always Going to Be Private
In many ways, Gartner analysts said that private cloud is a stopgap measure. Over time, public cloud services will mature, improving service levels, security and compliance management. New public cloud services targeting specific requirements will emerge. Some private clouds will be moved completely to the public cloud. However, the majority of private cloud services will evolve to enable hybrid cloud computing, expanding the effective capacity of a private cloud to leverage public cloud services and third-party resources.
“By starting with a private cloud, IT is positioning itself as the broker of all services for the enterprise, whether they are private, public, hybrid or traditional,” Mr. Bittman said. “A private cloud that evolves to hybrid or even public could retain ownership of the self-service, and, therefore, the customer and the interface. This is a part of the vision for the future of IT that we call ‘hybrid IT.'”
While the IDC whitepaper is sponsored by VCE and the sample was limited to only 5 customers the findings are compelling.
If you are not considering a Vblock System based on cost savings alone you will have a hard job justifying your capex budget going forward.
So converged infrastructure provides for a simplified management solution with only one [Service Provider] throat to choke.
From a customer perspective it is important to design the service model to match the solution to your needs exactly. Should the customer consider a Vblock VPLEX configuration for Business Continuity or share assets with other organizations whilst retaining the benefits of a private cloud?
Gartner help to debunk a few myths around private cloud computing. This sentence stands out – Private cloud computing is a form of cloud computing that is used by only one organization, or that ensures that an organization is completely isolated from others.
Converged infrastructure and the Vblock system is a fundamental building block of your journey from an on-premise virtualised environment into the cloud.
Safe travels.
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