The world is entering an application era, and the pressure is on developers to drive business through the rapid development and release of new applications. Hyper-converged infrastructure supports the growing need for stepped up application development, says VCE.
Developers of new applications to support enterprise productivity and drive business are frequently confronted with the hurdles of an ageing IT infrastructure with performance and data storage demands that the original planners could not have foreseen. Applications are now at the heart of all organisations, and must meet performance requirements and SLAs.
To support this need, VCE's converged and hyper-converged infrastructure offerings allow organisations to deliver applications and services four times faster than if they built the architecture themselves, and its customers are reporting that they are now able to deploy 4.6 times more applications, enjoy a 96% reduction in downtime, and spend 41% less time just 'keeping the lights on'.
VCE says these converged infrastructure benefits directly amplify cloud native application development and DevOps: get more applications to market faster, with higher resilience, while freeing up staff resources to accelerate innovation.
This view is in line with recent IDC findings that hyper-converged infrastructure customers increased time spent on innovation and new projects from 16% to 29%.
Todd Pavone, Executive Vice President, Product Strategy and Development at VCE, says in the VCE blog: "The biggest frustration developers have with internal IT organisations is the amount of time it often takes to allocate resources. It may take only a few minutes to provision a virtual machine, but provisioning the associated storage and networking resources still can take weeks. For that reason, many developers often try to bypass the IT operations team altogether."
He says the key to making IT operations more responsive to the needs of developers is to break down the IT infrastructure silos.
"Instead of isolated teams of compute, storage and networking specialists, a hyper-converged platform integrates those functions under a common control plane," he says. "The days when every IT knob must be set manually before a developer could begin writing code are coming to an end.
"Hyper-converged systems allow the IT operations teams to define polices that are then implemented automatically. Any necessary changes can be substantiated across any number of nodes in a matter of minutes without requiring the IT operation team to learn how to write code or, conversely, force developers to waste their time writing a custom script to automate the provisioning of IT infrastructure using arcane application programming interfaces."
Vblock Systems from VCE provide an enterprise-class converged and virtualised IT-as-a-service (ITAAS) infrastructure that is ideally suited to DevOps. Unified provisioning of compute, network, and storage resources enables IT to rapidly build out development and testing environments. And leading edge storage technologies enable DevOps to use actual production data in a test environment.
The Vblock System's multi-tenancy capabilities enable IT to segment areas and build tiered service profiles based on business needs. Vblock Systems provide a total converged DevOps platform, with industry-leading compute, networking, storage, and virtualisation technology by Cisco, EMC, and VMware.
The systems are pre-engineered, tested, and validated units perfectly suited for a self-service development environment. They support the rapid, iterative process of development that requires reactive scaling and provisioning of all components based on demand. Once DevOps phases have been completed, the ITAAS infrastructure can be quickly de-commissioned and made available for other uses within the enterprise.
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