Why VMware?

VMware is the common element behind some of the largest and most successful cloud implementations around the world, including private cloud environments operating within businesses of all sizes and the global ecosystem of public cloud providers leveraging VMware technology as a standard foundation.

VMware cloud computing solutions improve IT efficiency, agility and reliability, and help drive innovation. By combining the technologies, services and guidance required to build, operate, staff and manage your cloud, VMware cloud solutions help organisations maximize the benefits of cloud computing. The technical foundation of VMware cloud solutions,VMware vCloud Suite® is the industry’s first complete and integrated cloud infrastructure suite and the platform underpinning the software-defined data center. vCloud Suite dramatically simplifies IT operations and delivers the best service-level agreements (SLAs) for all applications.

Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC)

Over the years, data centres have become largely fragmented environments, with numerous types of proprietary software siloed inside specialised hardware components. Server virtualisation was the first step in simplifying this inherently complex and rigid infrastructure.

While many data centre operations remain constrained by dependencies between software and specialised hardware, IT continues to progress toward greater simplicity and flexibility. Three trends are driving the evolution:

The shrinking cost of raw computing power. Today’s industry-standard x86-based servers offer performance on par with traditional proprietary platforms, at a fraction of the cost. Networking and storage can now also be provisioned on affordable general-purpose hardware instead of costly, proprietary, monolithic machines.

Virtualisation for all applications. Thanks to the tremendous capabilities of today’s virtualisation platforms, just about all applications can and are being virtualised. This extends the benefits of cheaper compute power, by enabling its utilization with vastly greater efficiency and agility than ever before. Not only are business-critical applications like Oracle and Exchange being virtualised; enterprises are increasingly doing the same for Big Data-oriented applications as well.

Virtualisation of hardware appliances. Historically, capabilities such as firewall, load-balancing, WAN acceleration, backup, and deduping have been delivered by physical appliances. Today, ecosystem vendors are building more and more software-defined alternatives that plug into the Software-Defined Data Center.

The cumulative effect is a clear convergence toward a fully software-defined environment—a far more effective, resilient and cost-efficient approach to delivering and managing infrastructure.

The Software-Defined Data Center: Operating Principles

Rather than mask the inherent rigidity of specialised hardware under a tangle of scripts, the Software-Defined Data centre leapfrogs these constraints to change the way all data centre services are delivered.

As implemented in VMware’s vCloud Suite, the virtualisation principles of abstraction, pooling and automation are applied to compute, storage, networking, security, and availability. This creates the Virtual Data Center, a new construct that aggregates these software-defined services and enables intelligent, policy-based provisioning, automation, and monitoring. APIs and other connectors provide seamless extensibility to third-party platforms and public cloud services.

Taken together, these capabilities comprise VMware Cloud Infrastructure, the virtualised infrastructure at the heart of the Software-Defined Data Center. As highly capable as it is, this “engine” is not sufficient on its own. It must be fully managed, which encompasses everything from delivering access to the right services with the right approvals to ensuring the performance, compliance and efficiency of your private cloud.

These management capabilities—delivered via VMware Cloud Management—are specifically designed to provide deep insight into cloud infrastructure performance, while enabling services to be provisioned and accessed in any available cloud.

For many companies, the Software-Defined Data Center will coexist in a heterogeneous environment with multiple hypervisors, hardware from different vendors, and various public cloud services. You can abstract away this complexity by extending VMware Cloud Management beyond your vSphere-enabled Software-Defined Data Center—to impose uniform governance, control, access and self-service over your entire heterogeneous, hybrid cloud environment.

• Cloud Service Provisioning: Automate the provisioning of infrastructure and applications within the Software-Defined Data Center, and beyond it across multiple clouds and platforms.
• Cloud Operations Management: Manage the health, risk, efficiency and compliance of your infrastructure and applications.
• Cloud Business Management: Govern and manage cloud services as a critical element of running IT like a business.

The net result is transformative: the Software-Defined Data Center helps deliver strategic advantage to the business by providing the same benefits for IT as a whole that virtualisation delivered for computing and memory.

Key characteristics of the Software-Defined Data Center include:

• Standardised—Homogeneous infrastructure delivered across pools of standard x86 hardware, to eliminate unnecessary complexity.
• Holistic—A unified platform optimised for the entire data centre fabric, to flexibly support any and all workloads.
• Adaptive—Self-programmable infrastructure that dynamically configures and reconfigures the environment according to changing application demands, for maximum performance, agility, and efficiency.
• Automated—A management framework with built-in intelligence to eliminate complex and brittle management scripts, for cloud-scale operations with less manual effort and significant cost savings.
• Resilient—A software-based architecture that compensates for failing hardware, delivering unprecedented resiliency at minimum cost.

Key IT and Business Benefits

A Single, Unified Platform for All Applications

The Software-Defined Data Center provides unprecedented flexibility, efficiency, and SLAs for every application—both legacy platforms and innovative types such as High Performance Computing, Hadoop, and latency-sensitive applications. Provisioning and management are automated by programmable policy-based software. Changes are made and workloads balanced by adjusting the software layer rather than hardware.

A Future-Proof Data Center

The Software-Defined Data Center equips you to meet tomorrow’s key IT challenges, including delivering new social, real-time applications capable of handling data volumes that are growing by 50 to 60 percent per year.

Seamless Hybrid Cloud Support

Gain the advantages of a truly effective hybrid cloud—with IT services provisioning, software-defined security, automated operations, and compliance spanning the internal data centre and public cloud services. Manage your entire infrastructure with a “single pane of glass” interface and move resources and workloads across your hybrid environment as needed.

Less Maintenance, More Innovation

Built-in intelligence automates provisioning, placement, configuration, and control based on defined policies, minimising manual intervention. Transition your IT workforce from infrastructure management to activities that deliver greater business value.

Greater Simplicity

The Software-Defined Data Center replaces inflexible and complex proprietary hardware with efficient, adaptive infrastructure delivered as software across pools of standard x86 servers.

Unmatched Resource Utilisation and Cost Savings

By pooling and intelligently assigning resources, the Software-Defined Data Center maximises all existing physical infrastructure capacity, extending the value of your IT investment. Freed from the constraints of specialised hardware, applications become elastic and mobile. Workloads can be moved around the data centre, with pooled resources dynamically allocated and shifted to accommodate changing demand patterns.

Unprecedented Resiliency

Software-based architecture compensates for failing hardware, providing failover, redundancy, and fault tolerance for critical operations at minimum cost. Should hardware fail, software automatically redirects workloads to other servers anywhere in the data centre, minimizing service-level recovery time.

Simplify and Automate Cloud Management

Cloud is a transformative approach for delivering IT services that drive business innovation and agility while lowering overall IT costs. The journey to the cloud introduces several key challenges when it comes to managing highly virtualised and dynamic cloud environments though. To be successful, management approaches and tools must mirror the cloud’s ability to quickly adapt to changing conditions based on infrastructure performance, application needs and user demands.

An integral part of our software-defined data centre vision and our new VMware vCloud Suite, VMware Cloud Management solutions build on VMware’s industry-leading virtualisation and cloud infrastructure. The new vCloud Suite delivers a complete, integrated private cloud infrastructure that is extensible to the public cloud, dramatically simplifying IT operations while delivering the best SLAs for all applications. VMware Cloud Management lets you access services and provision them into heterogeneous and hybrid cloud environments while delivering deep insight into the performance of your cloud infrastructure.

VMware Cloud Management extends the power of the vCloud Suite to deliver:

• Cloud Service Provisioning: Automate the provisioning of infrastructure, applications and desktops across multiple clouds and platforms.
• Cloud Operations Management: Manage the health, risk, efficiency and compliance of your infrastructure and applications.
• Cloud Business Management: Govern and manage cloud services as a critical element of running IT like a business.

VMware Cloud Management solutions are designed to meet the demands of cloud computing – self-service, scale, velocity of change, shared infrastructures – as well as the modern applications they support. With VMware you can build and manage an extensible private cloud that provides self-service access to the right services with the right approvals while ensuring the health, compliance and efficiency of your IT infrastructure and applications.

VMware® Private Cloud

Evolve your virtualised VMware and NetApp storage environment to the cloud, improving IT efficiency and time to market.
NetApp and VMware accelerate your path to the cloud. Use the NetApp® Storage Solution for VMware® Private Cloud to deliver and procure cloud services for increased efficiency, greater business flexibility, and faster time to market.

With tight integration of core cloud computing technologies, the joint solution lets enterprises:

• Deploy VMware vCloud® Suite on a data storage foundation designed to reduce cost and complexity.
• Isolate multiple tenants on a secure shared IT infrastructure.
• Perform instant, space-efficient, point-in-time backups and restores with NetApp Snapshot™ copies.
• Provision virtual data centers (vDCs) and underlying VMware vSphere® resources from a single console.
• Expand storage resources for vDCs and vApps from within the VMware vCenter™ software.
• Provision vCloud resources to meet stringent SLAs.
• Leverage NetApp Virtual Storage Console to streamline deployment and management.
• Provide integrated enterprise-class data protection with NetApp Snap Creator™ software.
• Keep services always available with the NetApp clustered Data ONTAP® OS.

VMware® Server virtualisation

Complement VMware data center virtualisation with nondisruptive, scalable, and secure NetApp storage solutions.

An efficient data center based on VMware® virtualisation can boost IT efficiency, optimise your IT investments, and provide a competitive advantage. NetApp® data storage solutions complement VMware benefits, including VMware’s vSphere™ cloud computing foundation.

NetApp lets you turn your virtualised data center into a pool of server, network, and storage resources. Manage, monitor, and provision storage in your vSphere environments through the vCenter Server console using NetApp plug-ins.

NetApp data storage for vSphere environments delivers:

• Instantaneous backup and recovery
• Automation of labor-intensive data management tasks
• The ability to provision storage as fast as VMs
• Data deduplication across primary, backup, DR, and archival storage

Use NetApp clustered Data ONTAP® 8.0 to achieve one unified storage architecture and continuous business operations.

For a smooth transition to your optimal infrastructure, choose NetApp’s specialised virtualisation services. From assessment to implementation to management, our experienced, certified professionals use proven methodologies and best practices to help achieve your virtualisation goals.

If you have any questions about Island Networks and the sevices we provide, please call us on +353 (0)1 9026303 or email us at info@islandnetworks.ie