JOURNEY TO IT AS A SERVICE POWERED BY SOFTWARE-DEFINED DATA CENTERS INTRODUCTION Modern business is an around-the-clock proposition. Better connectivity, enhanced global transport capabilities, and increasingly interdependent economic systems have led to global competition, with enterprises competing with others around the world for a finite market of potential customers. This places today s IT department under increasing pressure to enable top-line business results with the applications and solutions it provides despite stagnant budgets, staff that is comfortable working in outdated IT models, and little time or resource to educate them about something new. The need for IT to change is afoot; and technology exists that can help IT achieve transformative business results. Virtualization is a foundation of today s data centers, and the benefits of cloud computing are becoming gradually more apparent. While these technologies are providing tangible benefits and efficiencies today, technologies and their resulting benefits can be expanded as business demands increase. The IT department of the future will require an entirely new model of operation, shifting from a back-office provisioning and management organization to a solution-oriented, strategic technology leader of the business. By leveraging the benefits of virtualization and cloud, IT can transform itself into a service provider to the business, providing employees, partners, and customers with access to all IT resources as a service. In this way, IT shifts from the old, reactive provisioning and management organization to a proactive organization dedicated to innovation and productivity solutions. The underlying data center architecture enabling this shift is the software -defined data center, or SDDC. The SDDC architecture allows most of an enterprise IT s compute, storage, networking, security, and availability infrastructure and resources to be: abstracted and defined in software pooled together as an enterprise-wide resource delivered as a service that is managed by automated, intelligent, policy -driven software For businesses beginning their IT transformation journey, choosing the right data center architecture today can provide smooth sailing on the course to an IT as a Service (ITaaS) transformation.
In this white paper, Stratecast examines the business forces that are driving the evolution of data centers away from traditional models and toward an SDDC architecture that enables businesses to deliver IT as a Service. We delve into the SDDC architecture from the standpoint of technology and operational models, and show how a software -based data center architecture offers IT organizations the transformational efficiencies, agility, control, and choice necessary to maximize business profitability and operational benefits derived from an ITaaS delivery model. CHALLENGES THAT DRIVE IT TRANSFORMATION In order to become more competitive in the global economy, businesses must face several challenging trends and realities. These business trends include: 24 x 7 x 365 business The concept of the workday is becoming obsolete, as customers and employees expect to do business around the clock. This means that IT must keep IT infrastructure, applications and services running with minimal interruption or downtime. Geographically dispersed teams, partners, and customers Stakeholders expect to work from anywhere, via any device and network. This places the burden on IT to support mobile applications from different operating systems, while ensuring application performance remains consistent. Social business Employees, partners, and even customers expect to interact online at any time that a colleague is available. IT enables this with improved collaboration and communications tools like unified communication, presence and video conferencing. Tech-savvy employees As employees experience new types of consumer technology, their expectations about how technology should be accessed and used increases. This consumerization of IT escalates employee expectations and drives IT to provide new solutions and methods to access them, while caring for factors like security, privacy and regulatory compliance. Hypercompetitive global markets As businesses seek to increase agility and drive costs out of the business, IT is pressured to respond to increasingly urgent line of business needs. While these advances have helped to close the gap between business demands and IT capabilities, the burden remains. Technology must support the following business drivers: Drive new revenue Make the business more competitive Move the business closer to customers Improve the operational costs of the business Make employees more productive
In spite of heightened demands, IT budgets have remained largely stagnant in the past five years. In a May 2013 Stratecast survey of IT decision makers, more than half of enterprises surveyed expected their budgets to either remain the same or decrease in the coming year. Capital expenditures face the heaviest constraints, but operating budgets are also under increased scrutiny. Despite these constraints, the IT department is expected to help drive business results with each passing year, while maintaining security and privacy of customer data, and complying with regulatory rules. This situation, where business needs increase and IT is expected to rise to the challenge, continues perpetually and is unmanageable for IT. THE IT EVOLUTION JOURNEY To respond to these challenges, IT departments are beginning to recognize that they need to transform the traditional, labor- and capital-intense operating model into something more efficient. Many have turned to newer IT models, such as virtualization and cloud computing, to introduce cost and operating efficiencies. One of the prime benefits of these models is that they can be evolved and expanded throughout the data center to support future business needs. In this section, we outline the IT Evolution Journey that successful companies will need to undertake to thrive in a global marketplace. Laying the Foundation: Virtualization Virtualization of the data center infrastructure, and specifically server virtualization, is generally the first step enterprises take in their IT evolution process towards an SDDC architecture. In a virtualized server environment, application and infrastructure workloads are deployed on all-inclusive virtual machines (VMs), which contain application code, operating system, and configuration instructions in a self-contained package. Because the operating and deployment logic resides with the application code, rather than separately on the server, the VM can be easily moved and loaded onto any hypervisor -equipped server hardware, via a management console. The hypervisor installed on the physical server makes each VM believe it has full access to the server s processor and memory. This optimizes server capacity, as multiple VMs can share a single physical server. Best-in-class hypervisors are designed to consume minimal server resources, enabling the physical server to support the maximum number of VMs. The right server virtualization solution can start to transform the data center, enabling IT to do more with less drain on budget and technical resources. More importantly, virtualization solutions can help IT respond to many infrastructure challenges. In a virtualized infrastructure, IT can deploy server capacity as needed, thus making it easier
to scale applications. Because VMs can be easily replicated and deployed, virtualization facilitates testing and provisioning of apps. Furthermore, virtualization can help optimize and enhance high availability and disaster recovery environments, as applications can be easily, rapidly and cost-effectively moved among servers within the data center, and even to remote centers. The low cost, fast speed, and ease of implementation have made server virtualization a popular first step towards a virtualized data center. According to a Stratecast 2013 survey of IT decision makers, 58 percent of businesses have either implemented server virtualization or plan to do so in the near future, as the first step of the IT evolution journey. However, in the server virtualization model, other IT components such as networking, security, and storage infrastructure generally remain physical, with less than 10 percent of these functions being virtualized. While this model offers cost and operational efficiencies, it can be expanded to increase the potential business benefits. Advancing the Model: Cloud Computing For enterprises that have experienced the benefits of virtualization, cloud computing is often the next natural step in the IT evolution journey. Businesses turn to a private cloud to gain additional efficiencies and business agility. The private cloud architecture builds on the virtualization foundation by overlaying service management platforms and self-servicing capabilities, which offers enterprises additional operating expense reductions through automation and the implementation of a self - service data center environment. As indicated in Figure 1 on the following page, there is significant interest in private cloud adoption, even if it is longer-term. While just 10 percent of businesses have already adopted a private cloud, 30 percent expect to implement a cloud in the next two years, and another 27 percent are considering implementing a private cloud.
Figure 1: Implementation and Plans to Implement a Private Cloud Source: Frost & Sullivan As the survey results show, businesses are in different places on the IT evolution journey, and adoption occurs according to each enterprise s needs and culture. While the majority of businesses expect to include cloud in their future, their plans indicate varying degrees of urgency to move forward. For those that want or need additional benefits, the right cloud computing infrastructure offers the ability to move into a hybrid cloud model in which the private cloud operates together with a public, multi-tenant cloud. In this model, some workloads typically those that are more mission critical, access sensitive, private data remain in a private cloud environment, while less critical workloads are pushed to a public cloud. TRAVELING BEYOND THE CLOUDS: IT AS A SER VICE ENABLES NEW BUSINESS RESULTS While virtualization and cloud computing whether private, public, or hybrid may adequately meet today s rising business challenges, IT will continue to evolve to better address business objectives, both today and in the future. Figure 2 below outlines the prime challenges that businesses face in managing a data center.
Figure 2: Top-Ranked Data Center Challenges Cited by U.S. IT Decision -Makers N=407 The growth of cloud computing, mobility and big data will continue to prompt high data demands, in terms of access and storage; and budget and resource constraints are expected to continue in the short-term. In order to create the successful results that business expects, the future data center requires an entirely new service delivery model, called IT as a Service (ITaaS), which delivers all of an enterprise s compute, storage, networking, security and availability as a service running on nearly any hardware they choose. An SDDC architecture virtualizes other elements of the data center infrastructure beyond the compute function, such as networking, storage and security. In the ITaaS model, manual processes are replaced with automated ones, and IT services are made available to employees through self-service catalogs or portals freeing IT staff to create new solutions that drive increased productivity and results. When IT successfully transitions to the ITaaS model, lines of business also transition from seeing IT as a cost center to being a value creator within the enterprise. Source: Frost & Sullivan 2013 User Survey Business results are measured in both top- and bottom-line improvements, as well as in the driving of innovation and alignment of IT with strategic business goals. Transforming the Technology Model A technology shift is required to move IT to a service-oriented model. Rather than relying on primarily physical assets, IT must be able to pool all available resources,
automate and manage those resources to deliver new data and applications in an automated fashion, which frees IT teams to focus on higher value tasks more associated with the strategic goals of the business. Achievement of this IT service delivery model requires a new data center architecture, namely, a software-defined data center (SDDC). In an SDDC, a software-based infrastructure platform configures, coordinates, and allocates all infrastructure resources compute, storage, networking and security to enable data and applications to have sufficient capacity, availability, and response time, without system downtime or lack of access to critical applications or data. The SDDC architecture also includes comprehensive virtualization and cloud management tools that help to minimize the cloud s complexity. It effectively leverages the available server, storage, and networking resources as enterprises build out their cloud computing capabilities. By more effectively managing the whole data center at the software layer, IT is able to realize improved efficiency and cost savings, while minimizing administrative complexity. Transforming the Operational Model The SDDC architecture virtualizes and automates far more of the data center environment than ever before. This allows savvy IT leaders to shift resources away from typical management and maintenance of servers to focus more on innovating new solutions that will drive results. As a result, IT can shift from operating as an organization that manages fixed assets to an organization focused on delivering key services that advance business goals. For example, ITaaS organizations are driving significant improvements across key metrics: ITaaS allows an IT department to increase IT staff productivity, as measured by savings in time-to-deploy new applications, services, and capacity. This can, in turn, improve overall business results. In one recent survey, VMware customers claimed that new business opportunities increased by 30 percent, and revenue generated by the business increased by more than 20 percent after deploying the ITaaS model. 1 ITaaS organizations surveyed by VMware also reported increased reliability, with significant reduction in security incidents and downtime. More efficient use of infrastructure and reduction of maintenance burden allow IT to improve their high trust computing costs by 50 percent, and their general computing costs by 70 percent, according to VMware s study. IT productivity improves, based on simplified management and automation of all IT resources. This enables IT to shift IT resources away from manual tasks to more strategic investments. 1 VMware, Journey to IT as a Service, 2012 Research Study
WHAT THE RIGHT SDDC IMPLEMENTATION OFFER S IT ITaaS organizations also recognize increased speed, agility and the ability to say yes to line of business requests. Enterprise IT organizations report speed and agility improvements of ten times their previous levels, while IT productivity improves by 67 percent, and administration to server ratios improves by 60 percent. 2 Increased automation of IT resource management and orchestration also leads to improved control. By setting predictable and enforceable rules for IT infrastructure and application resource utilization, IT organizations can reduce downtime, provide better insight, predictability, and control over spend for the line of business, and ensure compliance with security standards and industry regulations. Software-defined data center architectures are also helping organizations gain flexibility in the environments they choose, including those operated within their data center and those from public cloud providers. A software-defined data center can provide IT with greater interoperability among multiple infrastructure resources, and the ability to continue leveraging its existing investments. Ultimately, an SDDC architecture gives IT organizations the control, freedom and choice to deploy and deliver business critical applications with greater agility, speed, and quality of service, regardless of the underlying hardware and software infrastructure. CHOOSING THE IDEAL SDDC PARTNER TO ACHIEVE IT AS A SERVICE For IT organizations transforming to IT as a Service, VMware is a good choice as a partner. VMware is a clear leader in the virtualization and cloud computing space, with nearly half of respondents in Frost & Sullivan s recent survey citing VMware as their preferred virtualization provider. VMware s expanding portfolio helps to establish an SDDC architecture by applying proven models for virtualization abstraction, pooling, and automation to compute, storage, networking, and security. Based on customer research, VMware s customers are successfully translating adoption of its technology portfolio into significant cost savings and operational efficiencies. For example, users have reported: 50 percent reduction in time to build and provision a new application 30 percent cost reduction for data center operations 41 percent reduction in security incidents 37 percent decrease in Tier 1 application downtime As VMware s customers become more mature in their use of virtualization, and adopt an IT as a Service model for IT, they are able to more rapidly deliver new applications and services for the business, increase line of business satisfaction with IT, and more directly impact the ability of the business to generate new revenue through applications and services that drive business goals. 2 VMware, Journey to IT as a Service, 2012 Research Study
To help customers achieve the maximum benefit of this transformation, VMware also offers a full range of consulting, support, education, and advisory services. This service portfolio helps customers not just successfully deploy VMware s technologies, but engineer a next generation data center, develop new skills and adopt new processes and organizational structures that enable IT to gain the maximum value from IT investments. Stratecast The Last Word The IT industry is currently on a journey of transformation. The destination? IT must emerge as business-driven enabler of innovation, competition and revenue generation. Throughout this transformation, IT will continue to face the challenge of how to keep up with demand for new services while maintaining existing operations, all with fewer resources than ever. IT as a Service can help IT reach this destination. Leveraging virtualization and cloud computing components in a software-defined data center, where compute, storage, networking and security resources are defined and managed in software, puts today s IT organizations on the right road to reach the ITaaS destination. But transforming technology is only part of the journey. Technology provides a critical foundation for new approaches to IT. But IT organizations need a new operational model, working alongside new technology, to help it reach its destination. As an organization, IT must shift from being a department that simply manages and maintains systems, to being an organization that is closely aligned with business goals, and that creates new technology-based services that drive toward those goals. An SDDC architecture, in which data center infrastructure resources are virtualized and delivered to the business as automated, self-service, consumption-based services, offers the IT organization a map to ITaaS and the next generation of IT. Karyn Price Industry Analyst Cloud Computing Services Frost & Sullivan karyn.price@frost.com Deployed successfully, ITaaS can allow enterprises to realize significant return on their IT investments, while dramatically improving the quality of IT services, and enabling faster delivery of new enterprise revenues. It also offers increased efficiency and agility, greater control over all IT services, and the ability to enhance necessary security and regulatory controls. And such results do not require a sacrifice in choice; it is not necessary to settle for only a small cadre of selected service providers or service delivery options. IT departments can integrate services from a variety of providers both internal and external and deliver them across a variety of channels, in public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. Though a variety of providers offer the software to virtualize most components of an enterprise data center, few approach the level of comprehensiveness, expertise or service offered by VMware. VMware s proprietary research and business cases for IT as a Service and the Software-Defined Data Center validate both the model and their technology.
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