Virtualisation

Insight Guide

IT by Wire Layer 2

Insight Guide

Instrumentationand Analytics

Virtualisation

ConvergedInfrastructure

Cloud ServiceIntegration

Automation

5 Layer StackInfrastructure: comprises converged platforms (platforms of stability) and hyper-converged platforms (platforms of change) to enable more efficient resource pooling and greater resource control.

Virtualisation: releases resources from being tied to particular physical devices in order to enable portability of services.

Automation: comprises cloud automation and Data Centre automation. Cloud automation provides on premise and off-premise self-service provisioning and lifecycle services for virtual systems and workloads.

Cloud Integration: provides authentication and authorisation services for in-house Active Directory platforms to control user access to cloud services, such as Office365, Salesforce etc.

Instrumentation: this delivers the visibility and control that is needed across the entire Data Centre. The Instrumentation layer includes element managers for the core Data Centre technologies.

With these five layers in place, the IT department will be perfectly positioned to support digital business innovation and respond immediately to changing demand. IT staff will be able to provision and control resources from the Data Centre instantly to support changing demands and priorities. They will be able to control their networks in real-time and finely tune the service available to users to match their specific needs. They will be able to operate service and software defined platforms with considerably less manual intervention. And they will be better equipped to protect against new and changing security threats. The Service Defined Infrastructure operated under the IT by Wire model will make the Data Centre and networks less costly to run, and enable IT to deliver more choice, agility and value to the business.

Insight Guide

Overview

Agility, efficiency and rapid response are all increasingly demanded of today’s enterprise IT service, yet the CIO and the IT team often have to work with an infrastructure which is rigid, slow, difficult and expensive to change or scale, and costly to run.

By virtualising their compute, storage, networking and security resources, CIOs can deliver the flexibility and cost-efficiency required of them.

In the traditional, hardware defined data centre, compute, storage, networking and security resources are tied to specific delivered services. This places several limitations on IT in the enterprise:

● Many data centres deploy a separate server for each application. While this approach avoids the danger of a crashing application taking others with it, it means that most servers operate at only a fraction of their actual capacity. The unused capacity, with all its attendant costs, including power, cooling, rackspace and IT personnel hours, is wasted.

● Deployment of a new service requires the installation and configuration of a physical server.

● Service portability is impossible.

● Service abstraction is limited.

● Resource control is slow and complex.

Insight Guide

The issues

Virtualisation - The benefits

Reduced: Improved:

Power and cooling costs

Physical space requirement

Management overhead

Total cost of ownership

Performance and resource utilisation

Time to market with new services

IT efficiency

Business agility

Virtualisation removes the immutable, one-to-one ties between compute, storage and networking resources, and IT services delivered to the enterprise, improving service abstraction and resource control. The result is a software defined data centre.

Specifically:

● Virtualised compute resources allow IT to rapidlyscale capacity for individual applications up anddown as enterprise requirements change.

● Virtualised storage allows the enterprise to stayahead of growing storage requirements whilekeeping hardware investment costs down.

● Virtualised networks improve networkefficiency and performance .

Virtualisation - The solution

In all three areas, management is simplified, reducing costs and speeding administrative processes. With virtualised resources, IT can quickly and easily provision resources - a new network or security instance, for example - where they need to be, quickly and easily.

With multiple virtual servers running on each physical platform, multiple virtual volumes residing on each physical storage device and multiple virtual networks running over each physical network, resource utilisation can be dramatically improved, allowing more services to be delivered and more data stored with a given amount of physical resource. Hardware purchases can be delayed, and power, cooling and other data centre costs cut.

Virtualisation enhances the flexibility of IT resources, allowing capacity to be scaled to meet expected and unexpected demand, while maintaining business continuity at all times.

How we help

Logicalis’ consultants have extensive experience in business-led IT infrastructure transformation. Vendor agnostic and tightly focused on your business circumstances and objectives, we always provide advice and solutions appropriate to your needs.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you.

01 295 8966 info@ie.logicalis.com www.ie.logicalis.com