Software-Defined Infrastructure

Tracie Stamm

David Zolnier

L E A R N I N G M A D E E A S Y

VMware Special Edition

Maximize current investments

Deliver operational consistency

Accelerate business impact

With digital transformation accelerating across every industry, practically every modern business initiative has become an IT project, and IT is now more crucial to the success of the business than ever before. Businesses must bring innovative products and services to market faster than their competitors, which, in turn, means that IT must rapidly and continu-ously deliver applications and services that drive productivity and efficiency.

The problem is that many IT environments are unable to deliver the level of respon-siveness that businesses demand. That’s because traditional IT infrastructure is often laden with purpose-built hardware and fragmented management tools, resulting in complex deployment and operational processes that ultimately slow the delivery of IT applications and services. Managing disparate and siloed infrastructure is also resource-intensive, forcing IT staff to waste valuable time and effort fighting fires and performing manual, repetitive tasks, instead of using their knowledge and expertise to contribute to more strategic, innovative business initiatives.

A recent IDC report found that in many enterprises, IT professionals spend 70 percent of their time dealing with operational issues instead of focusing on more strategic projects.

To help your business stay competitive, your IT organization needs a modern data center that can provide the agility, security, and scalability required to drive innovation and growth in the digital era. It all begins with the infrastructure foundation. A modern infrastructure is based on a software- defined, hyper-converged architecture that spans compute, storage, networking, and security with unified management. This architecture enables an enterprise-ready, high-performance data center that is

• More flexible, because it’s hardware- independent

• More agile, because it’s highly automated and programmable

• More cost-effective, because it’s scalable and built on commodity hardware

• More secure, because network and security policies are attached to individual workloads

IT must partner with business stakeholders to innovate, to accelerate time to market for products and services, and to consistently deliver an engaging and superior customer experience. IT can position itself to deliver the speed, unified operations, and scalability that are essential for businesses in the digital economy by modernizing their data centers with a software-defined infrastructure.

What Is a Software- Defined Infrastructure?Enterprises need a modern, software- defined infrastructure that abstracts and connects traditional hardware silos, offering a cohesive platform that can respond to the dynamic needs of the business, support both legacy and new applications, and be extended to the cloud. A software-defined infrastructure helps companies embrace a hyper-converged data center strategy that brings together

• Compute virtualization, which uses software to simulate the existence of hardware and create a virtual computer system that can run more than one virtual system—and multiple operating systems and applications—on a single server to reduce costs through server consolidation, increase workload availability and performance, and minimize or eliminate downtime.

• Storage virtualization, which pools together server-attached flash devices and/or hard disks to provide a highly resilient shared datastore suitable for a variety of workloads to easily scale without disruption, significantly simplify daily operations, and future-proof your infrastructure.

• Network virtualization, which repro-duces the physical network in software, embedded in the hypervisor layer and

abstracted from the underlying physical hardware. This enables IT to reduce provisioning time from days to seconds, improve operational efficiency with auto-mation, and enable a more secure hybrid cloud architecture with policies attached to each workload that ensure they meet security criteria wherever they are.

• Cloud management platform, which provides a common approach for building and running an enterprise-grade hybrid cloud, ensuring agility, efficiency, and control across both traditional and cloud-native, container-based applications.

This hyper-converged infrastructure strategy extends virtualization across the entire infrastructure using common hard-ware that is managed with existing tools and skill sets. This allows organizations to speed deployments and unify and ease operations, monitoring, and IT manage-ment, while also improving their ability to scale.

Evolving to a modern, software-defined private cloud is the ultimate end goal for many organizations, enabling them to achieve

• Faster and more responsive deployments

• Unified and easier operations, monitoring, and IT management

• Seamless scalability and adaptability to changing business demands

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is the easiest path to a software-defined private cloud. HCI integrates compute, storage, and networking onto industry-standard x86 servers with direct-attached storage (DAS) and common management tools, enabling a building-block approach to soft-ware-defined private cloud with scale up and scale-out capabilities and automated management and orchestration (see the following figure).

With HCI, all key data center functions run as software on the hypervisor in a tightly integrated software layer.

How Do You Start the Journey to a Software-Defined Private Cloud?The application layer is the defining decision point for most organizations as they determine the future of their data centers, hybrid cloud(s), and infrastructure.

Forward-thinking organizations are looking to “do the right thing” for their applica-tions, and these apps are defining where investments are prioritized for the future. When organizations look at the landscape of their apps, they quickly realize that, as they virtualize them, they can also consolidate hardware and eliminate many of the dependencies these apps have on any specific infrastructure layer. Being able to deploy and manage an entire set of appli-cations without worrying about traditional infrastructure requirements like storage replication, network, quality of service (QoS), and so on introduces new levels of business flexibility.

Here are three important considerations when determining the best path to a soft-ware-defined private cloud:

• Organizations need to make the right infrastructure decisions to support the needs of apps and better connect to busi-ness objectives.

• Some organizations are looking to build fewer apps and actually purchase new apps within “as-a-service” consumption models. When this scenario comes up, it’s important to conduct a landscape review of your apps and construct a road map of what you’re going to do with them.

A hyper-converged infrastructure enables a building-block approach to a software-defined private cloud with virtualized compute, storage, and networking on x86 servers.

• Organizations may have apps that can’t be completely removed from the infrastructure due to some type of unique hardware dependency or requirement, so the need to maintain a data center becomes a priority. These organizations should still look to remove as many of the surrounding hardware dependen-cies as possible, thus recovering the time required to speed up time to market and drive the savings/benefit that the organi-zation still requires of IT.

Although the road from a traditional infrastructure to a modern software- defined infrastructure can be a bit complex, we’ve mapped out two paths that allow you to extend the life of your prior investments, leverage your existing IT knowledge and skills, and minimize business disruption along the way:

• Deploy an all-in-one approach via a fully hyper-converged and life cycle–managed architecture using VMware Cloud Foundation that is the simplest and fastest path to a complete software-de-fined private cloud and hybrid cloud.

• Leverage a reference architecture–based approach, using VMware Validated Designs, to extend the life of existing investments. VMware Validated Designs provide comprehensive, tested blue-prints to build and operate a software- defined data center.

No matter which path you choose to develop a fully capable software-defined private cloud, there are four key compo-nents that must be part of your plan:

• Consolidate hardware silos to reduce complexity.

• Adopt self-driving operations to assure enhanced performance and capacity optimization.

• Automate to deliver agility and opera-tional efficiency.

• Enable life-cycle management of the entire software-defined infrastructure stack, making it simple for the cloud admin to build and maintain the infrastructure.

The Benefits of a VMware Software- Defined InfrastructureFor businesses to remain competitive, IT needs a modern, software-defined infrastructure that leverages the power and efficiency of virtualization across the data center — compute, storage, and networking — with common management across all three. A modern, software-defined infrastructure enables businesses to

• Accelerate business responsiveness with faster deployment, easier operations, and better scalability of hyper-converged infrastructure.

• Evolve infrastructure without risk by extending your existing VMware environments and skill sets to include hyper-converged storage, network virtualization, and automated life-cycle management.

• Prepare for the hybrid cloud era with a solution ready for enterprise and next- generation applications, while leveraging common skills and tools across private and public clouds with a consistent architecture.

• Unify data center monitoring and management including data center performance, real-time analytics, auto-mated workload placement and balancing, and capacity and cost optimization for better-informed IT decision making.

• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) through server-side economics, on- demand scaling, simpler management, and consolidation of hardware silos.

• Build a robust, future-proof infrastruc-ture to serve as the platform for even the most critical applications and databases.

Test drive software-defined, modern infrastructure in a hands-on lab at w w w.vmware.com/go/modernize - infrastructure-hol.

Download the following guides from VMware to help you start the journey to modernizing your infrastructure today:

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