Friday, March 15, 2013

VMware vCloud Blog: An Enterprise’s Journey to IT-as-a-Service: From Virtualization to ITaaS

http://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/?p=2194

As an IT Admin, you're in charge of meeting the demands of your business. You have started the process by virtualizing your servers with VMware (According to IDC, more than 60 percent of all workloads running on global servers are virtualized, with over 80 percent of those servers virtualized by VMware. It's incredible: More than half of all the applications running on servers throughout the world are running on top of a VMware platform), which has decreased costs, decreased maintenance and decreased time to build and provision new applications, but you are still being asking to deliver IT faster and now through a service portal.

At this point, you may be contemplating exactly how to meet these requests to take your company's infrastructure toward a service-based model. You may be investigating cloud computing (private, public or hybrid cloud solution) to deliver  IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS). With the help of VMware's vCloud Suite, ITaaS is made easy with a Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) which provides an effective and proven solution.

What might surprise you is that you've already taken the first step towards ITaaS with a Software Defined Datacenter by virtualizing your servers with VMware.

While the leap from virtualization to the cloud may seem intimidating, the transition can be a simple process with the right executive sponsorship and a strategic plan.

Thinking Outside the Box: Virtualization is not just for Servers

The ITaaS journey to the cloud represents an evolution from rigid, inflexible architecture to a modern and agile infrastructure.

Virtualization was once only thought of as a catalyst for consolidating hardware infrastructure but now is recognized as the foundation for SDDC. Some vendors may have you think that the virtualization of servers is all you need. However, in order for your company to truly be ready for the cloud, virtualization needs to go beyond just your servers to impact your organization's storage, networking and security resources in addition to your computing environment.

With each phase of the journey to the cloud, virtualization will penetrate every layer of your infrastructure to achieve the SDDC.

Self-service IT: From Reactivity to Proactivity

Traditionally, IT has been for the most part a reactive process: A request comes in, and IT works to solve the problem by scrambling and pulling together the resources to support the request. Depending on how virtualized the servers are, resolving an issue can take several days or even up to several weeks.

ITaaS with a SDDC is all about abstracting, pooling and automating your infrastructure.  This puts IT ahead of the game and gives them the power to deliver the appropriate service based on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to meet the demands of the business .

With the combination of virtualization, automation and operations and a service catalog gives IT the environment to provide the right level of service at the right time. Virtualizing and automating all aspects of your infrastructure with integrated operations gives your IT department the ability to manage by application requirements and provides flexibility and cost savings for your end-users.

Making Your Way to the Cloud with VMware

Business is demanding a more proactive IT that revolves around services. The journey to ITaaS means viewing IT as an agile software based service delivery model.

If you're ready for the cloud, we're ready to get you there with the VMware vCloud Suite which is built on vSphere, one of the must robust platforms in the history of IT.. As we previously discussed, the vCloud Suite is an all-encompassing cloud IT infrastructure solution that includes our virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management solutions and operates each within Software-Defined Datacenter

Remember, if you've already VMware virtualized your servers, you're well on your way to the cloud. If you're not quite sure where to start, take advantage of our consulting and education services, and we'll help you determine which VMware virtualization solutions you need to get you there.

Some of today's leading organizations that are VMware virtualized have already successfully moved to the cloud with VMware. For more information on their virtualization to cloud journeys, check out our success stories atAnother VMware vCloud and the case studies below:

For future updates, be sure to follow us on Twitter at @vCloud and@VMwareSP!




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