As data center infrastructure is fast becoming the platform on which real time business solutions are being designed, enterprise look for agility that can support their changing dynamics. And today, this agility needs to be provided by data center infrastructure with the help of next generation ready concepts on virtualization and software defined data center approach.
According to Ganesan Arumugam, Senior Director, Partners, VMware, enterprises worldwide began their cloud journey with server virtualization in order to significantly improve IT efficiency and performance, yet the mobile cloud era presents new challenges.
“To meet this challenge, IT organizations need to virtualize the rest of the data center so that all infrastructure services become as inexpensive and easy to provision and manage as virtual machines. The answer is the software-defined data center (SDDC): the ideal architecture for private, public, and hybrid clouds. SDDC extends the virtualization concepts you know— abstraction, pooling and automation — to all data center resources and services,” he explains.
Components of the SDDC can be implemented together, or in phases:
- Compute virtualization, network virtualization and software-defined storage deliver abstraction, pooling and automation of the compute, network, and storage infrastructure services.
- Automated management delivers a framework for policy-based management of data center application and services.
In a software-defined data center, policy-driven automation enables provisioning and ongoing management of logical compute, storage and network services. The result is unprecedented IT agility and efficiency, with flexibility to support today and tomorrow’s hardware and applications.
Benefits include:
- Virtualization economics across your data center – Software-defined data center technology helps attain new levels of infrastructure utilization and staff productivity, substantially reducing both capital expenditures and operating costs.
- Applications at business speed – Enabling deployment of applications in minutes or even seconds with policy-driven provisioning that dynamically matches resources to continually changing workloads and business demands.
- Business-aware IT control – Driving right availability, security and compliance for every application via automated business continuity, policy-based governance and virtualization-aware security and compliance.
- Your data center on your terms – The software-defined data center can be leveraged as a private, hybrid or public cloud—in each case, infrastructure is fully abstracted from applications so they can run on multiple hardware stacks, hypervisors and clouds.
Reaching Out to Partners
“Over the next few months, we plan to ramp up our channel strategy around software-defined data centers (SDDC) as we are seeing good momentum around it. In 2014, we will be strongly focusing on the government and defense sectors In India, and will be working closely with our System Integrator partners and OEM partners. We are also aggressively pursuing the virtualization opportunity in the SMB segment and recently created a SMB unit in India to drive our channel-led go-to-market strategy and have added several new features to our partner rebate program. Earlier, we offered partner rebates on deals above $10,000, now we have lowered the threshold to deals as low as $6,000. We have also added incentives for new accounts signed-up by partners. VMware has also increased rebates for select products such as vSphere with Operations Management (SOM) from 10 percent to 15 percent,” he adds on.
Another strategy that VMware is adopting is to address more partners through its OEM relationships. “To further strengthen VMware Virtual Service Provider program (VSPP), we’ve appointed Ingram Micro along with Kryptos for usage-based licensing business. The program has been uniquely designed to help service providers develop, promote and sell their cloud products, services and solutions. Premier events like our Partner Exchange on Tour, Partner Leadership Summit, Solution Trainings, among others will help enable our partners and their teams to build their business with us. As partners deepen their VMware expertise, they benefit more, and so do customers,” he explains.
Speaking on the importance of data center infrastructure and how it is evolving in today’s enterprise scenario, Neeraj Matiyani, Director, Storage Solutions, Dell India says that today IT no longer exists in clear cut silos of storage, networking and servers. What customers need is a solution that will show them the required benefits taking into consideration all aspects of the datacenter.
“Hence we enable our customers to take a path that will transform their datacenter to increase IT agility while lowering costs, create greater connectivity by enabling secure BYOD in their organisation, helping customers manage the Information through big data analytics and storage efficiency and secure their organisations through protection from organized attacks to cyber theft,” he explains.
Dell is also providing its customers with an end-to-end approach to datacenters which is inclusive of solutions such as servers, storage, networking and security. “Our customers have been receptive to this approach to the datacenter and this has reflected in our business. Additionally, our converged infrastructure (CI) solutions enable organizations to that combine storage, server and in one package enable our customers to more effective and agile management of IT. While most companies provide CI solutions for Large Enterprise, we recently launched the Power Edge VRTX which enables remote and small and medium enterprises to benefit from the converged infrastructure experience,” he adds on.
