We believe there are some clear steps to evolve to a digital foundation. Most likely, you’ve virtualized your servers – many companies have virtualized 75% or more. You may also be using public clouds for a variety of use cases: the most common include test/dev and backup and recovery. Chances are, however, that your public cloud workloads are quickly becoming another silo to manage, and it’s not at all integrated with your on-prem workloads. Your data center is complicated, the cloud is making IT even more so. How do you transform to a unified experience with a digital foundation?
We believe there are clear steps forward. The first you’ve likely already done by virtualizing your servers with a hypervisor. The next step is to modernize your infrastructure through hyper-convergence with vSAN, then add networking and advanced management capabilities with NSX and vRealize. Finally, extend your SDDC to public cloud and the edge to build a Digital Foundation for a true hybrid cloud architecture, integrating your currently siloed public cloud workloads and adding more over time.
HCI eliminates the silos of three tier architecture and enables centralized management of compute, storage and networking resources. You’ve likely already realized the benefits of policy based management with compute resources, automatically provisioning VMs. Within the same vSphere Client, admins can now manage their storage infrastructure and govern policies down to the VM level. You can turn on FIPS 140-2 validated encryption with a single click, protect data with erasure coding, and reduce capacity up to 7x with dedupe and compression.
vSAN also offers high availability through stretch clusters. vSAN, with enrollment in the Customer Experience Improvement Program, also offers proactive support through over fifty health checks integrated into workflows to prevent
HCI clusters are managed with vCenter, the same tool used to manage vSphere, and customers can manage global deployments from a central location. vRealize Operations offers advanced monitoring, troubleshooting and capacity management.
Networking virtualization is also embedded in the hypervisor, and NSX can automate their network processes to deliver fast, consistent, and secure provisioning of resources. In fact, IT can blueprint entire network topologies and rapidly deploy on demand.
Finally, all of these capabilities can run seamlessly in the public cloud, creating a true hybrid cloud architecture.