Customers used to say that their LOBs wanted IT resources on demand, as per their business objective. Their LOBs don't want to be dependent on the IT team, and want to consume IT services as per their need without any constraint on time and location. They want to provision apps to their end users on any device, at any time, and from any location. To achieve this, they need agile IT infrastructure that can provision them IT resources on demand from anywhere, anytime, and on any device.
For example, an Oracle database needs to be 100% available 24*7*365 days. Customers have to deliver more applications with the same resources without exceeding its TCO and at the same time, maintain the end user's demands by fulfilling all compliance parameters.
To build a robust private cloud while considering all the preceding parameters, we have to consider the following three mechanisms, which will provide customers with a resilient and flexible platform to run their businesses:
- Virtualize all components of IT: Customers already know the benefits of compute virtualization. VMware can extend the same concept to storage and network for optimal utilization of hardware, based on the SDDC concept.
- Automate IT: Virtualizing every component will drastically reduce your CapEx but you need to automate the process to reduce the Opex cost. A self service provisioning portal will help you to provision infrastructure as a service to different LOBs and this will reduce the dependency of LOBs on the IT team. It will speed up IT service delivery, which enables users to meet time to market demand and admin to monitor and manage for these services.
- Support heterogenous environment: Today's digital business world demands collaboration between LOBs, developers, IT Infra teams, and support for digital business transformation and innovation. VMware has a private cloud solution with open APIs, to use OpenStack (VMware Integrated OpenStack APIs) and developers can reap the benefits of containers.
We can build a private cloud integrated with all the required hardware components in a single/multiple engineered box by using the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) concept (http://view.ceros.com/vm-ware/vmware-hci/p/1). It has seamless, integrated, unified management, virtualized storage, network, and compute. Customers can build HCI solutions with VMware hyper-converged software (vSphere and vSAN) on any x86 (Intel/AMD processors) server or, they can buy a fully integrated solution with all the required hardware and software from any VMware partner, such as DELL, HP, Cisco, Fijitshu, Hitachi, Nutanix, Lenovo, and so on.
VMware Cloud Foundation plus the hyper-converged concept gives you SDDC in a box, which simplifies the installation, update, and software life cycle management of a private cloud, as well as reducing Opex. It brings together compute, storage, and network virtualization, enabling customers to effectively leverage virtualization technologies for efficiency, availability, performance, and scale.
It is also integrated with the vRealize cloud management platform and VMware SDDC Manager software, which helps customers to automate the deployment, configuration, and day-to-day management of a cloud across different environments. Developers get more options to innovate in the private cloud infrastructure and administrators get a single operating platform to manage private and hybrid clouds.