Virtualizing Tier 1 Applications on Converged Infrastructure

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1 White Paper Virtualizing Tier 1 Applications on Converged Infrastructure Sponsored by: Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Gary Chen February 2015 Eric Sheppard IDC OPINION Server virtualization is one of the fastest adopted technologies in datacenter history, becoming the overwhelming default build for servers in just a little more than a decade. Customers aggressively moved virtualization from test and development (test and dev) workloads to production workloads. Today, most of the remaining workloads to be virtualized are mission-critical tier 1 workloads. These workloads are challenging from a performance and availability point of view, but the efficiency and agility benefits from virtualization are as compelling as ever. Successful virtualization of these applications requires a holistic approach that addresses the entire stack from hardware to system software to management. Virtualization software has advanced significantly in performance, reliability, and scalability to handle the high-performance needs of tier 1 applications. In addition, integration into critical subsystems such as storage and networking has also improved. Beyond system performance, management tools have evolved to provide insight into and monitoring of both virtualized environments and physical environments as well as to provide key elements that support the operation of tier 1 applications. Hardware has also evolved to support virtualization, accelerating many virtualization functions in silicon. Beyond the silicon, converged systems that integrate compute, storage, and networking are making it easier and faster for customers to roll out physical infrastructure for virtualized datacenters. Preintegrating these elements eliminates the need for customers to do the work themselves, and systems can be tested and managed as one element, reducing integration problems. In addition, these systems include management software that spans multiple functions and also integrates with the virtualization software layer. The many advancements in hardware, software, and management allow the virtualization of tier 1 applications that weren't addressable before. Success will require an end-to-end approach across the entire operating stack. While consolidation gains may be nil to modest because of the large footprint of these applications, the agility benefits around time to service and quality of service (QoS) are extremely compelling and leading customers to begin to address these workloads with virtualization. February 2015, IDC #253431

2 SITUATION OVERVIEW In the span of a little more than a decade, server virtualization has risen to become the default server deployment model. IDC expects that the share of new logical server shipments that are virtualized will increase from 80% in 2014 to 88% by Buyers were initially attracted to virtualization's consolidation benefits and flexibility for test and development. However, additional uses were developed, and today virtualization is used extensively for agility benefits such as faster provisioning, high availability, and disaster recovery. It is also the foundation underpinning private cloud initiatives. With customers already highly virtualized, the challenge now is to push virtualization into the last reaches of the datacenter the "last mile." The remaining applications to be virtualized are the tough high-performance, mission-critical, complex applications tier 1 applications such as SAP. The virtualization of these applications involves a number of challenges and can be seen through three general metrics: Time to service. This refers to the time required to deploy the infrastructure and the application into production. It also includes test and dev stages, which, for tier 1 applications, can be a large part of the application life cycle because these applications are often heavily customized. In addition, the software is continually developed over time, so the ongoing development and updating of the application are also key factors. Quality of service. Mission-critical applications must be highly available because the business depends on them. Availability can range from local high availability to offsite disaster recovery, to data protection, and even to security threats that can bring down an application. Tier 1 applications also must generally be high performing, so designing for and maintaining high performance are fundamental goals. Cost of service. The overall cost of deploying and maintaining a critical application includes not only the obvious hardware and software license costs but also IT staff costs. IT staff costs relate directly to the skills and time involved in performing tasks. Challenges with Virtualizing Tier 1 Applications As virtualization has matured, more and more production workloads have been virtualized, and now customers are tackling their most challenging applications. According to IDC's 2013 Virtualization and the Cloud Multiclient Study, 66% of customers have virtualized more than half of their mission-critical tier 1 applications. There are many challenges associated with virtualizing tier 1 applications, but the many advances in virtualization technology make it possible to virtualize these applications with success. Nearly 62% of customers today believe that all workloads are good candidates for virtualization. However, there are still applications that customers struggle with for a variety of reasons: Performance. Hypervisors incur overhead, and customers fear that virtual machine (VM) performance won't be enough for their application. In IDC's 2013 Virtualization and the Cloud Multiclient Study, respondents identified performance as the number 1 reason why a workload is not virtualized. However, hypervisor overhead has been dramatically reduced, not only because of software optimizations but also because of hardware acceleration. Today, modern x86 CPUs all accelerate virtualization by offloading hypervisor functions onto the silicon, and they continue to improve with each new processor generation. In addition, each new processor generation improves general raw performance across the board IDC #

3 Additionally, the performance of critical subsystems such as storage and networking is also a concern with virtualization, especially in the area of I/O performance. These subsystems have been improved substantially as virtualization has evolved. With virtualization now the default in datacenters, storage and networking vendors assume a virtual environment, and products are now developed and optimized from the ground up for virtualization rather than being bolted on afterward. With software optimizations and the ability to offload tasks to hardware for better performance, the hypervisor has also become much more intelligent when interacting with these subsystems. The other common concern is that consolidation means computing resources must be shared among VMs, which could further affect performance and introduce resource contention. Hypervisors have improved considerably in QoS features, allowing customers to tag VMs with different priorities and have the hypervisor allocate compute, storage, and network resources accordingly. In addition, the live migration feature can also rebalance VMs across physical machines if necessary, another step in maintaining service levels. With tier 1 workloads, IDC has also observed the deployment of single-guest configurations with one VM per physical host for very large workloads that can fill the entire machine. While there are no consolidation benefits in this case, customers virtualize anyway for the agility benefits such as faster provisioning, live migration, etc. Management. Because virtual environments are very different from physical environments, new tools are required to manage and monitor them. Tier 1 apps, being so critical to the business, require an extensive and comprehensive application-aware management framework and high-performance solutions to effectively ensure their operation. These tools must deal with a very wide range of management functions, including provisioning of infrastructure and software, real-time performance and availability monitoring, troubleshooting and root cause analysis, life-cycle management, and automation. Management tools on the market today have become more virtualization aware, and new tools have been built from the ground up specifically to operate in a virtual world. Today, virtualization is so prevalent that the market is no longer divided between nonvirtualized and virtualized management solutions. Management of tier 1 applications is always a challenge, whether the applications are virtualized or not, but the ecosystem of virtualization-aware and virtualization-optimized tools has already become inherent in nearly all solutions as virtual servers have overtaken physical servers. Infrastructure services. Enterprise applications, particularly if they are mission critical, depend on a number of external infrastructure services such as high availability, backup, disaster recovery, and security. These must be replicated in the virtual domain to support the application when virtualizing it. Over time, as virtualization rose to become the default server build, these solutions became virtualization aware and more robust. Both first-party and thirdparty products are now available in a thriving ecosystem. Nearly all vendors/products today support virtual environments, so the tools that customers are familiar with likely already are virtualization aware, and a number of new solutions are built from the ground up for virtualization. Many of these solutions actually work better in a virtual environment, taking advantage of the agility features of virtualization, such as live migration. Support, certification, and licensing. While the technology of virtualization has advanced greatly, the technology means nothing if the application vendors don't embrace it. For an enterprise to virtualize a mission-critical application, the application will need to be fully supported by the application ISV and have a certified stack of hardware and software that are guaranteed to be compatible. ISV support still varies; most mainstream packaged software 2015 IDC #

4 supports virtualization, but many vertical niche applications do not. In addition, support and certification terms are not uniform. Each vendor has a matrix of hardware, hypervisor, and other parts that it will support. Licensing can also complicate the issue because different vendors have different virtualization licensing policies that can complicate the cost calculations of moving from physical to virtual. Institutional resistance. Overall, the biggest impediment to virtualization is institutional resistance from application owners. Server and infrastructure operators are generally very knowledgeable about and comfortable with virtualization, but they often have to convince application owners. Application owners are wary of virtualization for several reasons. One is just outdated perceptions about virtualization that are no longer true. They may have heard stories about virtualization failures from technology generations ago. They also worry that sharing hardware and introducing a new layer of software will affect performance. There is also the perceived loss of control; some application owners feel like they need to own the physical box. However, as virtualization has undeniably expanded its footprint, proven compelling value, and taken on tougher and tougher workloads, these perceptions have diminished significantly over the years, according to IDC customer data. Virtualization as a Better Platform for Applications Virtualization isn't just about consolidation and hardware savings. The unique nature of virtualization allows it to provide a more robust and agile platform for tier 1 applications that is unmatched in the physical world. For example, provisioning is a tricky thing to get right for mission-critical applications. If estimates are wrong, the applications will need to be reprovisioned on a server with more resources a major task with physical servers. Thus, many customers routinely overprovision, which wastes resources. With virtual servers, applications can be moved to a different physical server easily and VMs can also be adjusted dynamically by hot adding CPU and memory. In addition to these dynamic scale-up/scale-down features, more application instances can be spun up to meet demand for scale-out functionality. Virtualization can also radically transform the test and development side of mission-critical applications, which is often overlooked when compared with the production environment. The velocity of business is ever increasing today, and applications must evolve faster to support the business. Being able to use the dynamic and agile features of virtualization can greatly speed up the time to service as applications are continually developed over time. As the industry moves to cloud architectures and service models for both on-premises private clouds and public clouds, virtualization is a key enabler. Virtualization is often equated with cloud, but virtualization is not cloud. It is a foundational technology for cloud that enables the self-service provisioning, dynamic services, and high automation of cloud. It also unlocks the software from the hardware, which can help with migration to public clouds. The mantra of cloud is speed and agility, the same value propositions that virtualization started. While there are many forms of cloud today, including SaaS and cloud-native applications, the need for agility will also extend to traditional enterprise applications. The complexity of tier 1 applications is a challenge for virtualization as well as cloud, but arguably these applications are the most important and must change the fastest, and virtualization is the first step toward enabling them to be run on a cloud platform IDC #

5 The Rise of Integrated Systems Many well-known datacenter technologies have driven substantial benefits over the years. Technologies such as server and storage virtualization, for example, have helped drive considerable savings by enabling better infrastructure utilization rates, improved datacenter agility, and higher levels of application resiliency. Interestingly, organizations that were quick to see the benefits of server and storage virtualization technologies are now looking for additional infrastructure solutions to complement the benefits gained to date with additional operational benefits and better alignment of IT processes with business-centric needs. Although it might not be readily visible to all industry stakeholders, many organizations have turned to integrated systems to help achieve such goals. Indeed, adoption of integrated systems is well under way today and expected to materially impact the future size and growth rate of the external enterprise storage systems market. At a broad level, integrated systems represent the consolidation of disparate datacenter technologies that can be acquired, deployed, managed, and supported as though they were a single system. Fundamentally, integrated systems are differentiated from traditional hardware platforms and architectures in that they are designed to be deployed quickly using a modular building-block approach to rapidly scale up resources and workloads. Real-world integrated systems deployments typically include servers, disk storage systems, networking equipment, and system infrastructure software (e.g., operating system, management software, virtualization software). These systems can be designed and deployed to support general-purpose, distributed workloads that present disparate service-level agreement (SLA) profiles, or they can be engineered to run optimally for a single workload such as a critical corporate database. HITACHI UNIFIED COMPUTE PLATFORM Hitachi Data Systems is helping drive the broad market deployment of integrated systems through its Unified Compute Platform (UCP) family of systems and accompanying management software, Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Director. Hitachi UCP and Unified Compute Platform Director combine four core datacenter technologies storage systems, servers, networking, and management software into a single solution. To be clear, UCP is not a simple bundling of disparate systems. Hitachi has put substantial resources and time into the engineering of UCP and Unified Compute Platform Director to ensure they can be deployed, scaled, managed, and supported as a single system. Extensive Hitachi engineering efforts are paying off for companies leveraging UCP and Unified Compute Platform Director by enabling far higher levels of efficiency, agility, and resiliency than a comparable set of nonintegrated systems. Hitachi extends UCP beyond its core components by leveraging long-standing relationships with key independent software vendors such as SAP, VMware, and Microsoft. Customer flexibility is ensured through comparable relationships with third-party infrastructure vendors such as Brocade and Cisco. Simplified Configuration and Integration Customers leveraging Hitachi Unified Compute Platform should expect to see benefits early in the adoption phase because many of the initial efforts targeted at architecting and implementing a set of independent infrastructure components have largely been thought through in advance by Hitachi. While some customization is to be expected, UCP essentially eliminates the need for organizations to purchase and deploy storage, networking, and servers independently. The preintegration done by 2015 IDC #

6 Hitachi greatly simplifies the implementation process and ultimately speeds up the time it takes to get a complete system up and running. This benefit is often further extended by organizations that need to rapidly deploy additional systems around the world where expertise is lacking and standardization is needed to improve stability, visibility, and availability of a remote datacenter. The mature virtualization capabilities found in Hitachi high-end and midrange storage systems are incorporated into all UCP offerings and can further drive improvements to operating expenditure by reducing the amount of time required to migrate data to the new systems. It should be noted that initial capital costs may appear higher when implementing integrated systems because of the process of purchasing servers, storage, networking, and associated software in a single motion rather than in multiple waves or phases. That said, integrated systems can ultimately drive reductions in capital expenses through infrastructure consolidation and improved applications/virtual machine density. Additional capital expenditure reductions are seen when storage optimization technologies such as virtualization, tiering, or deduplication are introduced. Continuous Availability Designing datacenters to provide true continuous availability can be a time-consuming, resource-intensive process. Yet such challenges are small compared with those that arise when an organization is unable to recover from serious datacenter failures. Because businesses of all types and sizes now rely on access to corporate data to generate revenue or make core business decisions, cutting the flow of data (even for a short period) can have massive cost implications. Not surprisingly, today's businesses have a very low tolerance for data loss of any kind, especially their most mission-critical applications. Hitachi has a long history as a technology provider with the offerings and knowledge needed to build infrastructure capable of providing true continuous availability. Indeed, Hitachi is a trusted enterpriseclass infrastructure partner for many of the most demanding datacenters around the world. Hitachi has a well-earned reputation that stems from the company's ability to build datacenter infrastructure that provides levels of resiliency, performance, and efficiency not always built into alternative products. These enterprise-class offerings are complemented by the deep understanding Hitachi has of the industries in which such assets are most commonly desired. Hitachi has leveraged these strengths when designing and bringing its enterprise-class integrated infrastructure to market. Because Hitachi Unified Compute Platforms can be built with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000 (VSP G1000) storage systems (in addition to Hitachi Unified Storage - VM storage systems), users can leverage the enterprise-class array's global-active device feature to achieve active/active availability between geographically dispersed environments. This feature, which exists natively within each VSP G1000 storage system, allows application reads and writes to span multiple pools of shared storage that are local or metro distances away. This ensures applications will continue to operate without disruption if a system or site goes down, thus preventing the accrual of costs associated with unplanned downtime IDC #

7 Managing Critical Virtual Infrastructure for Tier 1 Apps and SAP with Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Director Management is another area where the benefits of the background Hitachi has in enterprise datacenters stand out. Hitachi understands that many organizations have migrated tier 1 enterprise applications onto virtualized environments and now rely upon management suites such as VMware's vcenter to control numerous aspects of their virtual environments. As such, Hitachi has designed its Unified Compute Platform Director software to plug directly into VMware's vcenter or Microsoft's System Center management suite where users can deploy, provision, and manage their UCP resources directly from a console that they use to manage many other parts of their virtual environments. This helps keep productivity high by allowing users to work within a platform they already know well and by ensuring physical and virtual assets can be controlled within a single pane of glass. Through native integration, Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Director seamlessly extends the capabilities of VMware's vcenter and Microsoft's System Center to provide key UCP management tasks such as provisioning, monitoring, protecting, and problem remediation of an organization's integrated infrastructure. Health and status information of their UCP systems is provided through the same integration into vcenter or System Center. From this same pane of glass, users get an aggregated view of all components. Those leveraging Unified Compute Platform Director to manage their systems are able to drill down and inspect all elements of the system within the servers, storage switches, top-of-rack switches, and storage systems. This unified view can be extended to multiple systems and datacenters through the use of Unified Compute Platform Director operations center feature, which allows customers to monitor and operate multiple UCP systems from the same single pane of glass. In short, Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Director provides customers with a truly unified view of the entire converged stack (servers, storage, and networking) and ensures that all components of these systems can be managed efficiently from a single, familiar pane of glass. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Director also provides customers with the ability to automate certain tasks. This is an important capability because automation has become an imperative for organizations looking to effectively scale datacenter infrastructure beyond what has traditionally been possible. The automation capabilities of UCP with Unified Compute Platform Director allow customers to increase the scale of the systems they deploy without commensurately scaling personnel. The automation capabilities of integrated Hitachi systems also help ensure that customers don't introduce human error often associated with managing datacenter infrastructure at a large scale. Hitachi automates UCP firmware updates, for example, to ensure that updates for each of the system components are done centrally and nondisruptively. Hitachi does this by first testing all new firmware and then providing customers with Update Packs that address all components of the system at once and without taking the system offline. Implication of Integrated Systems for the Broader Business Decisions made within IT departments have never been more important to the broader business than they are today. The modern-day IT department must react quickly to new business initiatives that are designed to drive bottom-line improvements and generate new revenue streams. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform solutions with Unified Compute Platform Director are helping ensure that IT departments are agile enough to support such goals by greatly reducing the time required to provision new infrastructure and launch new applications/services IDC #

8 Large datacenters must support a diverse set of workloads with a broad range of SLA needs. The work involved with keeping track of so many SLAs and ensuring they are met becomes very difficult when applications are dispersed across many different sets of infrastructure components that are likely managed as silos. Such environments present untenable risks and inefficient use of resources. Deploying Hitachi UCP with Unified Compute Platform Director can help eliminate these types of risks by providing a consolidation platform for mixed workloads that also ensures: Interoperability of infrastructure components throughout their entire life cycle Centralized management of firmware and drivers IDC notes that integrated systems such as UCP with Unified Compute Platform Director can drive a new level of standardization between geographically dispersed datacenters or offices. This standardization can help drive faster time to service, as mentioned previously, but it can also support business continuity initiatives and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) processes cost effectively. REAL-WORLD IMPACT: OXYA CUSTOMER STUDY oxya is a France-based hosting company that serves the European and U.S. markets. oxya specializes in SAP applications, managing SAP remotely on customers' premises or hosting SAP in its own datacenters for customers. Virtualizing SAP oxya began virtualizing SAP as soon as SAP certified oxya's applications for production VM usage on VMware, roughly six years ago. Today, virtualized SAP is less than half of oxya's customer base because many customers did not want to virtualize an existing installation that was running well. However, for new SAP deployments, virtualization is the new standard, used in more than 90% of deployments. oxya saw significant consolidation savings for the test and dev infrastructure, but not as much on the production side because SAP applications are generally very large and could consume the whole machine. However, virtualization was key to faster provisioning and deployment at oxya a process that used to take six weeks for physical infrastructure requires only days or hours for virtual infrastructure. Performance and reliability were the main concerns with virtualizing SAP. SAP is a challenging application due to its sheer size and its ability to consume a large number of cores as well as a large amount of RAM and storage. SAP stretches the scalability limits of hypervisors, which can also cause reliability problems. oxya initially had some problems with stability, but the hypervisors have matured, and stability hasn't been an issue for the past five years. Vendor certifications are key to oxya's ability to successfully virtualize tier 1 applications such as SAP, both allowing them to be fully supported by SAP and for the security of knowing that their full stack configuration has been tested to work together IDC #

9 Leveraging Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Converged Infrastructure oxya dedicates physical infrastructure for each customer, and any virtualization is done only within that customer's dedicated infrastructure. Prior to adopting converged infrastructure, oxya was running the usual assortment of various vendors' servers connected to a SAN. oxya was introduced to Hitachi about seven years ago through the use of Hitachi storage in its SAN and was pleased with the reliability and performance. So when a customer suggested that oxya use converged infrastructure for its deployment, oxya began to research offerings on the market. Due to oxya's positive experience with Hitachi storage, oxya chose Hitachi Unified Compute Platform as the first converged system to be deployed because of its strength in storage performance. Since then, oxya has deployed four more UCP systems for virtualizing customers' SAP applications, all with excellent performance and reliability track records. The hardware reliability was also enhanced by the virtualization layer, which could provide high availability, vmotion, and other features. The combination of storage performance and hardware reliability gave oxya a lot of agility options and double insurance to survive any kind of failure. Being preintegrated also greatly improved deployment time, taking only two weeks from order to being operational on oxya's floor. The other key factor in choosing the UCP system was the Unified Compute Platform Director software, which oxya felt was different from other offerings and easy to use. Unified Compute Platform Director was unique for oxya in that it allowed a single portal to manage the physical layer (servers, storage, networks) all the way up to the VM. It allowed oxya to consolidate what was normally done in multiple consoles into one unified interface. It also improved operations because multiple specialists did not have to be called in to deploy a system. An operator trained in Unified Compute Platform Director could quickly configure and deploy across compute, storage, networking, and VMs. Benefits Gained from Virtualizing on Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Converged Infrastructure With the operational efficiencies from Unified Compute Platform Director, oxya was better able to allocate its IT staff members, freeing them to concentrate less on mundane tasks and more on maintaining SLA and being more responsive to customers. IT staffers are more efficient and can be shifted to where they are really needed. The efficiencies from both virtualization and converged systems have also led to capital and operational cost savings for oxya, allowing the company to pass on these savings to customers as well as improving oxya's own margins. Support is also simplified with oxya having Hitachi provide support for the UCP system, networking, and VMware virtualization. In addition to a better support experience, oxya is freed from having to sign and manage multiple agreements, making sure they are all renewed and up to date. For the future, oxya is planning to continue to virtualize more SAP and expand the footprint of converged systems. The key to managing all this is Unified Compute Platform Director, and oxya is hoping that Hitachi continues to integrate more physical and virtual management functions to eventually make it the core management console through which oxya can do everything IDC #

10 CHALLENGES/OPPORTUNITIES Overcoming Early Up-Front Costs and Legacy Organizational Processes Will Drive New Benefits As noted previously, initial capital costs may appear high when implementing integrated systems because of the process of purchasing all infrastructure components at once rather than in multiple phases. This will drive a need for many organizations to spread the costs over multiple workloads, projects, and business units. As a result, integrated systems will become visible to a larger number of stakeholders with differing sets of expectations around SLAs, pricing, deployment timelines, and control. While it may seem easier in the short term to change technology than to align the needs of multiple stakeholders, it will be critical to keep an eye on the longer-term benefits of integrated infrastructure. As stated previously, these benefits include: Long-term reductions in capital expenses through infrastructure consolidation and improved applications/virtual machine density Reduced operational costs associated with consolidating the management of servers, storage, and networking under a single pane of glass Elimination of downtime-associated errors made during initial system deployments, firmware upgrades, and migration Better alignment of business needs through improved datacenter agility and quicker time to service Dissimilar Refresh Cycles of Core Infrastructure Components The core components of an integrated system (compute, networking, and storage systems) are still purchased and upgraded independently of each other by the vast majority of today's datacenters. Importantly, these core infrastructure building blocks frequently have differing refresh cycles. This may be the result of autonomous datacenter teams focusing on one type of infrastructure while their counterparts focus on another, or it may be the result of fundamentally different life-cycle expectations. It's common, for example, for servers to be refreshed more frequently than storage systems, which are typically refreshed more frequently than datacenter networks. Such differences have not impeded the rapid growth of new integrated system sales, but they do present a challenge for datacenters looking to leverage integrated systems for any of the benefits mentioned throughout this paper. Over time, organizations could see adoption of integrated systems result in a harmonizing effect on some parts of their datacenter infrastructure refresh cycle. But in the short run, such disparity will lengthen the time it takes to tip the balance in favor of adopting integrated systems. Suppliers interested in showing real-world benefits of integrated systems outweighing such early difficulties should focus on demonstrating success within modern workloads that may drive investments focused on 100% netnew infrastructure IDC #

11 Integrated Systems Drive a Need for Cross-Functional IT Staff and Management Tools While many gains have been made around the usability and capabilities of infrastructure management software, IT administrators often leverage little more than the captive software that comes with their storage, servers, or networking equipment. Some within the IT department have learned to use these management tools effectively over many years, thus becoming adept at quickly accomplishing tasks related to their area of expertise within the datacenter. But such gains are isolated to silos of infrastructure and do little to eliminate redundancy between teams of storage, server, or network experts. IDC has found that many datacenters currently leveraging integrated systems have been heavily influenced by astute CIOs or IT directors aware of the inefficiencies associated with relying upon such a datacenter structure. IDC believes that there is a great need for companies such as Hitachi to help these visionaries drive change within their organizations and ultimately move toward a structure of multidisciplined IT staff. Such a change doesn't happen overnight and will likely require considerable training and a set of management tools that can support a move to IT departments with a cross-functional skill set. CONCLUSION The virtualization of tier 1 applications has never been more possible. By taking a holistic approach and leveraging the latest technologies, companies can bring the agility benefits of improved time to service and quality of service to high-performance mission-critical workloads. Key success factors that can help with the virtualization of tier 1 applications include: The latest generation of virtualization software has improved the reliability, performance, and scalability of CPUs and memory that tier 1 workloads need. Also, storage integration is improved, with better integration with storage arrays that can offload tasks to hardware, improved I/O throughput, enhanced QoS, and better management. Careful attention should be paid to the choice of hardware platform. The platform must perform and be scalable to the needs of large applications as well as have the RAS features demanded by mission-critical applications. This must apply across compute, storage, and networking as tier 1 applications often will stress all areas simultaneously. Converged infrastructure can greatly increase the reliability of systems because integration engineering is part of the system and performance can be optimized during design. Thus, these blocks of infrastructure can be deployed much faster and more easily. Management tools are key to improved operations. Converged infrastructure can reduce the number of elements to be managed as well as simplify management tasks by orchestrating across compute, storage, and networking. Good tools will also integrate physical and virtual management for better insight and coordination. Higher-level virtualization-aware tools are also needed at the application level to provide the necessary monitoring and maintenance of sensitive applications. Converged systems and the latest virtualization software offer a potent combination with which to address tough-to-virtualize applications. The performance of Hitachi Unified Compute Platform and its integrated Unified Compute Platform Director management software is a prime example of an infrastructure enabler that can drive virtualization to new areas of the datacenter IDC #

12 About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make factbased decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. Global Headquarters 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA idc-insights-community.com Copyright Notice External Publication of IDC Information and Data Any IDC information that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the proposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to deny approval of external usage for any reason. Copyright 2015 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden.