Improve IT efficiency and agility while enhancing security and choice with a private cloud built on VMware. Leverage your existing investments while moving toward highly scalable, high performance public clouds built by top service providers on the VMware vSphere platform. By adopting the leading platform chosen by both the largest number of enterprises and service providers, you retain the ability to place each of your workloads in the optimal location, while fully retaining the ability to move workloads between or across private and public cloud infrastructures providers.
- Gartner Report on "Server Virtualization: One Path That Leads to Cloud Computing"
- IT Process Institute Cloud Strategy Brief: "IT Value Transformation Road Map"
“With IT efficiency seen as the most compelling driver of cloud adoption, it’s no surprise that VMware is the vendor most closely associated with this emerging computing environment.”
-- TechTarget Readership Survey, June 2009
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The Vision for Private Cloud
Private clouds presents a shift from a model where everything is customized to one of standardization. Management in such an environment is no longer about avoiding change but instead embracing it to facilitate IT’s twin goals: delivering on the needs of the business and managing the underlying resources in the most efficient way possible.
Service Offerings
The move to private cloud represents an industrial revolution for IT, applying industrial manufacturing techniques to the provisioning of IT services, gaining standardization and automation.
Standardization is central to achieving much greater operational efficiency. Private clouds not only facilitate standardization but dramatically increase the returns on standardization. Deploying standard infrastructure from a templatized catalog of applications is orders of magnitude faster and easier than building each application from scratch. Similar gains are available from centralizing and standardizing high availability, network management, and security.
Management
In the private cloud, management will evolve from preventing and minimizing change to embracing constant change as the natural state of IT. For example, in the physical world moving an application from one server to another means both down-time and risk and needs careful planning and tracking in a Change Management Database (CMDB). By contrast, in a cloud environment change at all levels is embraced and executed automatically based on predefined policies. VMware vMotion is fast, riskless and automated, yielding significant efficiency and availability improvements.
The agility of a private cloud infrastructure lets you provide each application the resources it needs now, adjusting as demand changes. Management becomes focused on two distinct needs: ensuring that each application meets the needs of the business (availability, performance, security etc.) and providing the pool of resources to meet the aggregate needs of the organization in the most efficient and responsive way possible.
Key differences in Management approach:
Traditional Management
- Static bindings between processes, applications, and infrastructure
- Change is carefully planned, risky, manual, and slow
- Heterogeneous elements and processes across silos
- Management software executes to the lowest common denominator
Private Cloud Management
- Dynamic relationships across all layers of the technology stack
- Change is constant and automated
- Massive standardization and high-level abstraction
- Day-to-day is automated; management tools should focus on higher order tasks
To take advantage of the cloud, there needs to be a clear separation of the production versus consumption layer. In the cloud, the consumer (the business) has no idea – and importantly, little interest in or concern with – what hardware platform and management tools are being used to deliver services.
Security
Traditional approaches to protecting the operating system and applications have relied exclusively on agents, which are themselves vulnerable, offer protection only within limited layers of the application + OS stack, and create sprawl and management/update issues on a large scale. The VMware vSphere platform has unique introspection abilities and provides comprehensive and efficient access to security controls while obviating the need for security agents in each virtual machine, identifying hard-to-detect problems precisely and efficiently.
Legacy security solutions have often been synonymous with keeping things locked down and static: static firewall rules, 'air-gapped' hardware and software infrastructure for various application zoning needs. This is no longer appropriate in cloud based models and IT as a service, which require rapid and dynamic reconfiguration of virtual machines across zones and datacenters. Security for cloud-based models cannot stop or prevent change and dynamic movement – it has to embrace it.
