The new business platform: The Software Defined Enterprise

Westcon Imagine 2014 - In a world where agile is everything for business, ‘software defined’ is reaching beyond the data center.

We’re entering the age of the Software Defined Enterprise – transforming businesses while reducing costs, increasing business agility andsafeguarding data security.

Aaron Steppat, VMware Australia and New Zealand’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, Software Defined Data Center, says businesses utilising a software defined enterprise can expect IT to keep pace with their growing requirements and demands, enabling them to gain a competitive edge through reducing their time to market and time to value.

“IT can remove the silos, assign more budget to innovation and go beyond being a solution provider and become a true business partner.”

Steppat says ‘software defined’ liberates resources from the old client-server era of IT and facilitates the transformation into the mobile-cloud era.

“Through our approach of abstraction, pooling and automation, VMware is able to extend virtualisation beyond compute and into networking, security, storage and availability, all while enabling efficiency, agility, control and choice,” he adds.

“This approach means that applications and the infrastructure needed to power and secure them are provisioned faster; operated and managed more effectively; and then presented with contextual awareness of the user and the device to enable the best user experience possible.”

The VMware Journey Benchmark Survey, 4th Wave 2013, showed that software defined enterprises are 37% more responsive to IT requests while saving 30% of both operations and development staff time and increasing revenues 26% due to new applications and IT services.

They were also investing 50% of their budgets in innovation and able to secure nearly 66% more budget than their less mature counterparts.

Steppat says VMware delivers the capabilities needed to build a software defined enterprise on the infrastructure already in place, providing a much better ROI and TCO than competitors.

“VMware also maps out a clear journey for our customers across a variety of use-cases and business aligned outcomes, whatever the customers’ maturity today.”

Steppat says the cornerstone of the software defined enterprise is VMware’s virtualisation platform, vSphere.

“We enable the network virtualisation element through our NSX portfolio, and software defined storage is subsequently delivered through our storage policy based management engine and our hyper-converged VSAN (Virtual SAN) capability.

“In addition to this robust virtualised infrastructure, we wrap our vRealize Cloud Management Platform around it to enable class and market leading automation, operations and business management. This layer provides through policy, the ability to model an application once, deploy it many times and in many places – even in non-VMware infrastructure environments –with governance.

“At the same time as we deploy the application, we also integrate with the networking and storage layers to connect, secure, store and protect the workload to guarantee service levels.

“Next, we provide visibility into the health and performance of the application, and ensure it’s the right size so the infrastructure is maximised for both capacity and efficiency.

“Finally we derive the cost of your infrastructure, how it compares with other providers and the intelligence to track via tagging, who is consuming what.”

The VMware approach

VMware has a multi-pronged approach to the software defined enterprise, harnessing its vCloud suite, Virtual SAN and NSX for the software defined data center, while vCloud Air and VMware Horizon Suite add cloud and mobility.

VSAN provides radically simple storage, with policy-driven per VM SLA, vSphere and vCenter integration, scale-out storage, built-in resiliency, SSD caching and converged compute and storage.

Meanwhile VMware NSX provides the platform for network virtualisation.

vCloud Air – previously vCloud Hybrid Service – built on VMware vSphere, quickly and seamlessly extends your data center into the cloud using the tools and processes you already have.

Rounding out the key offerings is VMware Horizon Suite as the platform for workforce mobility.

For more information visit www.vmware.com