Software-Defined Data Center: Making Enterprises More Agile

Transcription

1 Software-Defined Data Center: Making Enterprises More Agile

2 Today s IT Environment During the past two years, the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) has offered a simple value proposition with far-reaching implications for IT organizations around the world. It states that in an SDDC, all infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of this data center is automated by policies, as opposed to hardware and devices. That declaration set the stage for a new era in computing and created a wealth of reasons for users to transform their increasingly virtualized data centers into value-added, software-defined private clouds. Contents Today s IT Environment 1 Three Stages of Migration to a Software-Defined Data Center 4 The Role of Management in the Software-Defined Data Center 6 Improving Efficiency in IT Management 8 Benefits of the Software-Defined Data Center 9 Customer Profiles and Lessons Learned 10 Software-Defined Data Centers: The Future Is Now 13 VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 1

3 IT at the Speed of Business Many companies that have deployed virtualization to date are pleased with the results they have achieved and optimistic about making more far-reaching commitments to SDDCs in the near future. However, they are currently tasked with such core issues as optimizing data availability, cost effectively controlling data management, and tightening security in order to maintain their competitive profiles. This pressure to keep pace with the market has fostered the growth of Shadow IT, which exemplifies the rapidly evolving nature of the IT industry and poses thorny challenges to IT executives presiding over traditional, centralized infrastructures. Shadow IT occurs when line of business (LOB) managers take IT acquisition into their own hands by shopping independently of corporate IT for products and services they cannot obtain internally. These aggressive executives some refer to them as rogues are looking for systems that are flexible and can be acquired quickly. This go-it-alone approach is growing at a rapid pace. Gartner predicts that nearly 40 percent of IT spending will be controlled by LOBs by No matter what IT organizations may think of this phenomenon, they need to demonstrate a willingness to help LOBs achieve their business objectives. Customer Choice Customers clearly want choice, and that attracts them to expanding IT capabilities through heterogeneous pools of infrastructure and best-of-breed solutions. These users may work in multiple hypervisor shops; they may be taking advantage of public cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure and, increasingly, open source solutions, such as OpenStack. However, nowhere is the demand for choice more pronounced and unrelenting than in mobility environments, where an IT organization is under tremendous pressure to support an exponentially growing number of users, an explosion of endpoints, and data volume growth that is off the charts. 1 Making matters more complex, overall workloads are doubling every four years. 2 The question becomes: How can an IT organization meet growing business demands when its budgets are fixed or declining? Nowhere is the demand for choice more pronounced than in mobility environments, where an IT organization must support an exponentially growing number of users, endpoints, and data volumes. Driving Innovation through IT The most promising way for an IT organization to match the dynamic pace of business is by adopting the SDDC model of driving innovation within the IT organization, which achieves that by virtualizing all components of the infrastructure. In order for this to happen, the IT organization must extend virtualization from compute to storage/availability and network/security. This is followed by packaging all three domains in a single interface of management and automation. Intelligence can then be pushed into software, which is placed at the top of the hardware stack. At that point, the SDDC is primed for productivity. VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 2

4 How SDDC Can Address IT s Current Challenges Availability: The lack of availability at both application and site levels is a critical pain point for IT departments at a time when data in many organizations must be accessible 24x7. In the case of a failure or disaster, it is essential to ensure that applications running at a site and the site itself are not impacted, and that the business continues to run. Policy-based automation and management: The need for policy-based automation and management, wherein processes, such as device configuration or updates are entirely automated and controlled by an IT department s rules and policies, is another key issue for IT organizations. An IT department typically takes the same requirements for physical environments and ports them to virtual environments. Without automation and management tools, this leads to over-provisioning and large volumes of false alerts. People and process changes: People and process changes also present challenges because IT shops are being restructured so that IT staff can take on new responsibilities relating to SDDCs. IT leaders need to update their soft skills so they can work more effectively with their business colleagues. If they fail to keep up with SDDC developments and support business objectives, they become vulnerable to losing control of IT operations and budgets at a time when LOB leaders are increasingly asserting themselves in the IT decision-making process. Controlling regulatory compliance: Controlling regulatory compliance, such as HIPAA for healthcare and Sarbanes-Oxley for business, is a crucial concern. Regulatory compliance should be on the same level of importance as the enterprise s most missioncritical processes. Responsibilities include adhering to IT policies and standards, stopping configuration drift inconsistent configuration across computers due to continual changes to software and hardware which can make it difficult to manage IT operations, and having the visibility to do that on an enterprise-wide basis. Compliance is a seemingly thankless task for IT organizations. For example, after business units acquire services or applications from public cloud platforms, they reap the initial benefits of speed, flexibility, and time to market, but they turn these services over to IT departments, which become responsible for the business units compliance with security requirements and lifecycle management. Other key pain points: Increasing CapEx and OpEx spending, discussed below Unconsolidated silos of traditional infrastructure and older legacy systems Inflexibility in the deployment model VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 3

5 Three Phases of Migration to a Software- Defined Data Center Phase I Cost Center Organizations adopt SDDC technologies in an evolutionary journey at differing speeds. The first stage of SDDC migration is virtualizing the compute/server side of their environments to consolidate investments and reduce costs (see Figure 1). The next step is marked by adding capacity management and performance monitoring, which is provided by VMware vsphere with Operations Management or vcenter Operations Management Suite. Some of the challenges at this level deal with extended provisioning times, over-provisioned virtual machines, and false problem alerts. IT organizations at this stage have access to capacity management, where they can optimize capacity utilization by reclaiming unused capacity and right-sizing their VMs. They can also diagnose and resolve performance issues before they impact users. In this phase, an IT department reaps the benefits of cost efficiencies provided by new levels of infrastructure utilization and standardization. This is borne out in a study conducted of VMware customers who utilized vcenter Operations Management Suite in addition to vsphere. 3 There were significant increases in key performance metrics such as: Capacity utilization (40 percent) Infrastructure availability (40 percent) Infrastructure performance (38 percent) Figure 1: Software-Defined Data Center is an Evolution VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 4

6 Phase II Business Partner The next phase is a move to the cloud with VMware vcloud Suite. This is where IT organizations virtualize business-critical applications and leverage automation to deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a Service (PaaS). There are also increased management capabilities for compliance as well as a unified console that takes in the information from an IT department s entire physical infrastructure instead of having to manage the servers, networking, and storage separately. vcloud Suite allows IT departments to provide higher levels of availability for business and offer an on-premises cloud with governance and automation. In this phase, IT organizations are acting as true business partners, delivering business-critical applications at the speed of business. Phase III Service Broker The third SDDC migration stage revolves around adopting new technologies by extending virtualization beyond the compute platform to the storage/availability and network/security domains. This is where VMware Virtual SAN, a software-defined storage tier, and VMware NSX, a virtual networking product, are added. VMware Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage tier for vsphere that brings the benefits of SDDCs to storage. By clustering server hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs), Virtual SAN creates a flash-optimized, highly resilient shared datastore designed for virtual environments. Based on a hypervisorconverged architecture embedded in the vsphere kernel, Virtual SAN can make optimum data placement and I/O optimizations. Because it sits directly in the I/O data path, the product is able to deliver high levels of performance, scalability and resilience without taxing the CPU with additional overhead. It also reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 50 percent, 4 and can be managed from a single, central location. VMware NSX is a network virtualization platform for companies with 500 or more virtual machines that delivers the operational model of a virtual machine for the network. Similar to virtual machines for compute, virtual networks are programmatically provisioned and managed independently of underlying hardware. NSX reproduces the entire network model in software, enabling any network topology from simple to complex multi-tier networks to be created and provisioned in seconds. It further enables a library of logical networking elements and services, such as logical switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPNs and workload security. Users can create isolated virtual networks through custom combinations of these capabilities. There are also additional management products, such as VMware vcloud Automation Center, that allow IT departments to manage heterogeneous pools of infrastructure including multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud environments within their SDDC so they can continue to use their entire existing infrastructure. VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 5

7 VMware vcenter Operations Management Suite, is another product suitable for the service broker phase of the SDDC journey. By using its advanced features, IT organizations have achieved: Automated centralized management Better visibility into their operations Flexibility to manage changing workloads and application demands to meet business requirements In this phase, IT organizations gain the true agility needed to be a broker of IT services. After the first phases are complete, the final step to SDDC migration is expanding the number of use cases for which an SDDC can be deployed. This includes not only automating the provisioning of infrastructure and eliminating infrastructure bottlenecks, but also automating application provisioning, providing disaster recovery, leveraging insights from unstructured and structured data, and having the ability to extend to a hybrid cloud when more capacity is required. The Role of Management in the Software-Defined Data Center Layered over the virtualized compute, storage, and network components of the SDDC are management and automation. The shift to the cloud and the SDDC affects the management approaches needed to ensure the success of this new model for the delivery of infrastructure, applications, and user access. This includes: Comprehensive visibility into operations, which traditional siloed monitoring tools cannot provide Convergence of management disciplines, specifically performance, capacity, and configuration management VMware enables customers to move from building IT services to becoming brokers of IT services that deliver and manage their infrastructure environments from private, hybrid, and public clouds. Scale to accommodate increasingly high consolidation ratios and rapid shift of workloads as well as the management of unstructured data Change and dynamism as infrastructure demands become more user driven Three Pillars of Cloud Management VMware s management model further enables its customers to move from their current model of building IT services to becoming more like brokers of IT services that deliver and manage their infrastructure environments from private, hybrid, and public clouds. This process requires breaking down IT management into three core pillars: cloud automation, cloud operations, and cloud business. VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 6

8 Cloud automation applies to the delivery of infrastructure, applications, desktops, and services across multiple platforms, clouds, and provider environments. Cloud operations is about managing the health, risk, efficiency, and compliance of infrastructure and applications, leveraging both structured data (such as metrics and KPIs), and unstructured data (such as logs and messages) for correlation, analysis, and insights. Cloud business is all about the economics of the data center. It includes having more visibility into the cost of delivering services, and comparing the cost differential between data center-based private clouds vs. public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Seeking True Value in Operations Management What is the true value of a virtualized environment with performance and capacity management, and how should users think about managing their IT environments on a daily basis? The way to answer this question is by evaluating IT organizations most important concerns for efficient operations management, starting with quality of service (QoS). QoS is closely tied to mean time to identification (MTTI) and mean time to resolution (MTTR), measurements that are critical to quickly resolving business-impacting issues. It also relies on having visibility across infrastructures and applications through a singlepane-of-glass management console. The goal is to be able to survey the IT infrastructure and gather intelligence on it so that problems can be proactively prevented, controlled, and quickly resolved. Operational efficiency is another key component that governs IT organizations. This is about reducing CapEx and OpEx, working with little to no increases in budgets, and doing more with the resources you have. Don t over-provision, avoid buying unneeded hardware, increase VM consolidation ratios, and make your team more efficient at managing their environment. This is an area where technical experts need to survey their surroundings from a cost-efficiency perspective. Control and compliance is a third area needed for efficient operations management. Making compliance to IT policies and standards visible to IT operations is just as important as adherence to regulatory compliance. The IT organization s job is to enforce these policies across assets and infrastructures through the use of management tools. VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 7

9 Improving Efficiency in IT Management Intelligent Operations vs. Pure Problem Alerting The key to intelligent operations is assessing the added intelligence available in management tools as opposed to falling back on pure problem alerting. With vcenter Operations Management Suite, VMware provides tools for predictive analytics that provide more insight and broad visibility across IT infrastructures. 5 For example, machine learning aggregates information about IT environments and helps IT personnel understand what potential issues they may be facing. Unlike traditional monitoring and alerting tools, this helps IT staff avoid alert storms and false alerts by leveraging the machine learning and dynamic thresholds customized to a specific environment, and by providing alerts coupled with guidance on how to remediate those problems. With vcenter Operations Management Suite, it is also possible to use existing monitoring tools to access data via a single, unified management interface. Policy-Based Automation Policy-based automation is a cornerstone of SDDCs, and despite what some people may fear, it does not lead to a loss of control. In fact, it enables system admins and other IT professionals to automate processes based on rules, which enables continuous compliance and goes to the heart of SDDCs. In addition, VMware has a guided remediation engine that details the best course of action in any given situation, which again reinforces the concept of placing control in the hands of SDDC users, who can elastically scale the degree of automation they require depending on their needs. This results in productivity gains and reductions in resource consumption for the IT organization. Unified Management Unified management is the integration of all these management disciplines performance, capacity, configuration, compliance across infrastructures, applications, virtual environments, physical systems, and public clouds. Whether it is vsphere, Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services, SAP, Microsoft Exchange, or SQL Server, it is absolutely necessary to connect these environments and provide visibility to all monitored data in one tool that provides the intelligence required to unify enterprise-wide management. VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 8

10 Benefits of the Software-Defined Data Center Virtualization Economics Across the Data Center SDDC technology helps attain new levels of infrastructure utilization and staff productivity, quickly and substantially reducing both CapEx and OpEx layouts. For example, the first CapEx savings come immediately when the compute/server level is virtualized, followed by an operational savings, or OpEx return, when the time to provision VMs is slashed. When organizations layer on performance monitoring and capacity management to their naked hypervisor environments, such as with VMware vsphere with Operations Management or with vcenter Operations Management Suite, they re going to see another round of immediate CapEx savings by: Gaining the visibility to reclaim idle VMs. Right-sizing oversized VMs. For example, Boeing, a VMware customer, found that 9 out of their 10 VMs were oversized. By using capacity management, they could immediately right-size those VMs and free up capacity. Increasing their VM density. With capacity management, the IT organization has insight into what its current consolidation ratio is how many VMs are running on a hardware server and can resize that ratio to a desired goal. By doing so, it can pack more VMs onto one server. When implementing vcenter Operations Management Suite, VMware customers realized a 37 percent improvement in consolidation ratios. Other improvements included the level of automation (37 percent), and downtime for tier one apps (36 percent). 6 The other part of virtualization economics is OpEx savings. IT staff can decrease the amount of time spent on a daily basis to diagnose and resolve performance issues. For example, powered by sophisticated analytics, VMware vsphere with Operations Management can detect seasonality in a business and eliminate alert storms because the tool detects that certain spikes in demand are part of the normal course of business. Reducing these alerts frees up the IT organization s time that is usually spent troubleshooting and can instead be spent on supporting the business and other more strategic initiatives. VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 9

11 Other Key Customer Benefits Applications at the speed of business: These economic benefits coincide with the concept of providing applications at business speed, which enables deployment of applications in minutes or even seconds. This is accomplished by policy-driven provisioning that dynamically matches resources to continually changing workloads and business demands. Business-aware IT control: This is another advantage of SDDC. It drives the right layers of availability, security, and compliance for every application via automated business continuity, policy-based governance, and virtualization-aware security and compliance. Your data center on your terms: An SDDC also gives organizations your data center on your terms, which is another way of saying that the SDDC can be leveraged as a private, hybrid, or public cloud. In each of these instances, infrastructure is fully abstracted from applications so they can run on multiple hardware stacks, hypervisors, and clouds. It all comes down to delivering IT-as-a- Service at the speed of business. Customer Profiles and Lessons Learned Symantec Symantec s Enterprise Support Services built a private cloud with vcloud Suite. Previously, this group had to manually cobble together a test system that simulated the problems their customers were experiencing in their environments. The support group did this by grabbing cables and systems and physically hooking them together, or going into a data center lab to start re-wiring, as well as provisioning networking and storage. That process was slow, not cost-effective, and each test environment could not be easily shared or re-used after it was built. It now takes only 30 minutes for them to assemble a customer environment which can be saved and reused if a customer calls in with a similar issue. Symantec tracked the time engineers did not spend deploying test environments. With over 200,000 virtual machines deployed, the solution has saved over 10,000 weeks of work time. Cornerstone Home Lending This U.S.-based, privately owned mortgage bank with over $5 billion in annual loans was dissatisfied with Microsoft Hyper-V because it was unreliable and unstable. Cornerstone was looking for a virtualization platform that was reliable, could improve agility, and would support scalability of their IT platform as the business looked to double their funded loans. VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 10

12 They were also looking to drive down IT costs and optimize their technology investments. With VMware vsphere with Operations Management, they have achieved a 70 percent reduction in hardware costs and now have visibility into their IT infrastructure through a unified console. They have also reduced the amount of time they spend on identifying and resolving system issues from up to 20 minutes daily to a few seconds. Additionally, for the first time, the IT organization can do capacity planning, and forecast what resources it will need for the next one, three, and five years. This allows the organization to act proactively and give the business a clear model of projected costs along with a timeline, which has enabled Cornerstone Home Lending to appropriately invest in IT. Columbia Sportswear Using vcloud Suite, Columbia Sportswear built an on-premises private cloud to handle their tier one and tier two workloads. In addition, they are providing disaster recovery to all their SAP applications within that cloud. They didn t have the resource bandwidth to handle tier three and tier four workloads, so they began porting applications to VMware vcloud Hybrid Services offering and hosted them there. The advantage is that Columbia Sportswear s IT staff has not had to do any incremental training to move from one VMware product to another, as the same tools are used in both the on-premises and hybrid cloud environments. They can offload these applications and provide disaster recovery for their remote branch offices. Software-Defined Data Center Lessons Learned SDDC customers have learned that the journey to SDDC is evolutionary on a phase-byphase basis. It is not a rip-and-replace technology; instead, it helps users bridge their old and new IT environments. If they are running commodity hardware currently, they can continue to do so, but at the same time support next-generation applications. If they are starting to explore Hadoop, for example, they can virtualize Hadoop environments on their commodity hardware, and be able to run them at performance levels comparable to their physical environments. It also means that the applications that they have virtualized can also run in an SDDC. IT organizations can achieve the benefits of efficiency, agility, availability, and security that they need today based on their current environments, and take a phased approach to moving workloads to the SDDC. This first generation of SDDC users is enjoying such tangible benefits as a 40 percent improvement in capacity utilization, a 37 percent gain in virtual machine consolidation ratios, a 30 percent savings in hardware, and a 26 percent reduction in diagnostics and problem resolution time (See Figure 2). Businesses, too, will benefit from decreased CapEx and OpEx as well as increased productivity. 7 VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 11

13 Figure 2: Benefits of running vsphere with Operations Management Impact beyond running vsphere alone 40% 37% 30% Increase capacity utilization Increase consolidation ratios Increase hardware savings Source: Sept 2012 Management Insights Study Other lessons learned include: -26% Reduce diagnostics & problem resolution time People and process updates are critical to driving the phased adoption of the SDDC. Workload mobility is key. This is the ability to port applications from on-premises to off-premises with no changes to applications or tools (as in the Columbia Sportswear example). There is a large and important need to support and manage heterogeneous pools of infrastructure found in many IT environments today. VMware NSX can be used for any application, with any hypervisor, and on any physical network. Also, all of VMware s management capabilities support multi-hypervisors and multi-cloud environments. SDDC customers have learned that the journey to SDDC is evolutionary on a phase-by-phase basis. VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 12

14 Software-Defined Data Centers: The Future Is Now During the past two years, software-defined data centers have turned from a possibility to a reality. As they evolved from their server virtualization roots, SDDCs have increasingly been deployed and are producing real-world results for their first generation of users. Even though, on a grand scale, the major pieces of this game-changing technology such as virtualized networking and storage are still emerging, it has been clear from the beginning that SDDCs would evolve in a phased journey to allow companies to progressively evolve their traditional IT infrastructure to a virtualized cloud computing environment, where they can ultimately deliver IT-as-a-Service. That is exactly what is happening. As a result, users are realizing greater and more strategic value from their IT investments, which provides the agility and scale to support the ever-changing and increasing business demands of today s mobile era. VMware has built this new market and created opportunities for the subsequent wave of both large and small companies that are consolidating the power of their legacy systems with the innovative management opportunities afforded them by SDDCs. For more information on SDDC technologies, please visit About the Author Bruce Hoard is a freelance writer and editor based in Massachusetts. He has been on the cutting edge of technology for 30 years, covering such hot topics as virtualization, cloud computing, networking, and storage throughout their lifecycles. Of late he was the Editor-in-Chief of Virtualization Review, where he was responsible for all editorial aspects of the print magazine and a primary contributor to the publication s website. VMware has been a leader in describing the benefits and working with its customer base to educate and move people along to the software-defined data center, so I really consider them to be a leader in taking what they ve done with server virtualization and moving it to other pieces of the infrastructure. Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group About Activate Activate combines deep buyer insights with a content-led nurturing methodology to engage prospects and convert them to customers Activate Marketing Services LLC activatems.com VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 13

15 1 IDC Predictions 2013: Competing on the 3rd Platform, IDC, November 2012, 2 Equinix.com blog, Cisco VNI 2011, Gartner 2009 and 2011, IDC The Benefits of VMware s vcenter Operations Management Suite: Quantifying the Incremental Benefit of the vcenter Operations Management Suite for vcenter Customers, Management Insight Technologies, September Virtual SAN datasheet, VMware website, April Predictive analytics is also available in vsphere with Operations Management. 6 The Benefits of VMware s vcenter Operations Management Suite: Quantifying the Incremental Benefit of the vcenter Operations Management Suite for vcenter Customers, Management Insight Technologies, September The Benefits of VMware s vcenter Operations Management Suite: Quantifying the Incremental Benefit of the vcenter Operations Management Suite for vcenter Customers, Management Insight Technologies, September 2012 VMWARE APRIL 2014 / 14