Got Private Cloud?
by Linda Xu on Apr 4, 2012
Note: This is a guest post by Bob Laliberte (@BobLaliberte), Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), who focuses on data center infrastructure management, automation software, data center infrastructure and technologies, and professional services. Take it away, Bob…
The tight integration of IT with business is essential for the success of any modern organization. In fact, ESG research (subscription required) indicates that organizations use business process improvements as the top justification for IT purchases, beating out OPEX and CAPEX concerns.
This is reflective of organizations moving to highly virtualized and dynamic environments (clouds – private or public) to better serve the business. More and more, the CIO is looking for efficient problem resolution and is becoming a broker of IT services, balancing speed and agility with security and control when deploying new applications. Typically, this requires less architecting, designing and testing of numerous disparate pieces and more about deploying solutions that can rapidly scale to meet the needs of the business.
Converged data center solutions can play a big role in helping organizations accelerate the time to value and still maintain control. These are solutions that combine virtualization, compute, network, storage and management to provide a solution for enterprises and service providers. Typically, these infrastructures are used to create a foundation beyond simple consolidation and cost containment. More specifically, solutions like virtual desktop environments, server virtualization efforts and even business critical applications are becoming common–essentially they enable organizations to build out a private cloud environment. Again, ESG research confirms the need for solutions like these as survey respondents report that increasing the use of server virtualization, desktop virtualization and private cloud computing all rank in the top 10 for 2012 IT initiatives. ESG has seen further evidence at end-user events, more information can be found on the New England VMUG site.
While business process improvement is critical, organizations do not have unlimited budgets, so in many cases they have to work within the confines of existing infrastructure to create these private cloud infrastructures. Therefore, the ability to create a private cloud leveraging existing server, network and storage should be appealing as well. This requires more of an open model capable of integrating and orchestrating industry standard infrastructure to enable an end-to-end solution.
HDS has a range of converged data center solutions designed to automate, simplify and accelerate the adoption of cloud computing. The company’s objective is to provide solutions that enable faster deployment, automation and scalability to help organizations adopt cloud infrastructures at a pace that works for them, with predictable results and faster time to value. These converged solutions help eliminate some of the roadblocks to private cloud deployments that come from a lack of infrastructure standards, expertise and best practices. HDS vision includes three levels of solutions:
- Level 1: Reference architectures – designed for key applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Oracle as well as virtualized environments such as Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud and VMware. Currently includes Hitachi Solutions Based on Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track.
- Level 2: Hardware integration – solution specific, validated bundles of integrated hardware platforms. Hitachi Converged Platform for Exchange is one example.
- Level 3: Management integration – orchestrating various components across the boundaries of technology domains. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform enables organizations to leverage multi-vendor or existing hardware.
Regardless of the path taken, organizations are in the process of transforming their environments to better respond to the needs to the business. HDS offers multiple paths that can help organizations achieve the desired end state, a private cloud infrastructure, at their own pace and budget.
For more on this topic, check out this white paper and video.
