The enterprise data centre is moving to the next stage of transformation. Server virtualisation technology has changed the way applications are provisioned and managed to improve cost-efficiency and business effectiveness.
The fact is, though, some data centre architectures are still in phase one of the evolution. They are still built around complex, heterogeneous silos of servers and storage systems that result in poor utilisation and captive resources.
These resources need multiple provisioning toolsets, data management processes and teams of people to manage them. In addition, massive data growth combined with power, cooling and space limitations exert extreme pressure on the responsiveness of IT.
To ensure their business is still relevant, most organisations today have as a priority to boost business efficiency and cut costs.
Unfortunately, 70% of IT budgets still go towards “keeping the lights on” rather than innovation to ensure relevance.
To a degree, this trend could be attributed to the fact that business does not know where to start. Many vendors and industry experts have published best practices and white papers on how to go about evolving the current state to a new-generation data centre. However, it is a different scenario when a CIO needs to take accountability and responsibly to establish an evolution roadmap that is not only realistic and within budget, but more importantly, executable with no risk to business continuity.
Imagine Virtually Anything (IVA) is an initiative that draws together the intellectual and technology strength of three of the world's leading vendors, Cisco, VMware and NetApp, to deliver a unified architecture in the data centre required to deliver cost-effectiveness and business efficiency.
IVA helps companies respond faster to changing business requirements and radically decrease their overall data centre costs, as reported by Alchemy Solutions Group, by offering:
* One virtualisation platform;
* One consolidated server infrastructure;
* One converged data centre fabric;
* One unified storage architecture:
* One data centre infrastructure to manage; and
* One common shared dynamic infrastructure.
IVA offers the four pillars IT wants, without exception: high availability, secure isolation, service assurance and simplified management.
This is all in line with the global drive towards IT as a service, even in a private cloud (within an organisation). Before, IT was sold as a product stack and bought according to vertical projects, with applications, servers, networks and storage deployed and delivered in silos, according to business need. Today, applications and their effective provisioning to business is the most important factor for IT management when considering the current and future design of infrastructure and orchestration of resources.
Through IVA, business applications can now be delivered horizontally across a virtualised and unified architecture, and decisions are made holistically in terms of the service IT needs to provision for the business, independent of a set and inflexible infrastructure resources.
Does IVA work?
It does indeed. Tucson Electric Power had to address the issue of exponential server and storage growth and an incomplete disaster plan while under tight budget constraints.
Using the IVA approach, the company consolidated 300 servers down to 80. It has saved more than $3 million in server/storage hardware with virtualisation, quadrupled storage capacity without increasing headcount and avoided $1.1 million in labour costs by simplifying management. As an unintended consequence, the power utility has reduced restore time from up to 48 hours to 10 minutes.
The T-Systems success story is equally dramatic. The company delivers IT on demand to 400 global customers, which pay for infrastructure and applications as they grow. It needed to provide cloud-based services that deliver lower costs, greater flexibility, and higher service levels than internal IT.
Its solution was to automate and virtualise data centre infrastructure using the IVA approach.
The benefits were a 30% reduction in overall costs compared to on-premises IT; the ability to scale servers and storage up or down in one day versus 15; a 100%-plus increase in administrator productivity; and recoverability in minutes, not hours.
Conclusion
IVA brings this all together, and while it ultimately involves multiple vendors' solutions, the power of IVA is that it is delivered as a one-stop service, with single-vendor responsibility.
And increasingly, that is what customers want.
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