This blog begins with an honest disclaimer: there is no such thing as a shrink-wrapped Cloud.
But there are pre-integrated solutions on the market today that can dramatically reduce the cost, risk, and time associated with deploying a Cloud solution in your network. This is good news for CIOs who are concerned about going off into the Cloud on their own, since there is a lot at stake, from mission-critical business applications to data security.
So what should you look for in a pre-packaged Cloud solution?
- It should be easy to manage, since the idea behind the Cloud is to re-think your infrastructure strategy, not re-train your entire team;
- It should support hybrid Cloud environments: a mix of private and public Cloud platforms that interoperate seamlessly and enable consistent business and security policies between platforms;
- It should strengthen your disaster recovery strategy;
- And it should improve business application performance, including scalability as application and data demands increase.
Where can you find a Cloud solution like that today? From EMC and VMware. The two companies offer a pre-integrated and pre-validated Cloud platform featuring VMware’s vCloud suite, EMC’s ViPR virtual data storage solution, and VMware’s NSX network virtualization solution. Together, the two companies provide a jointly integrated private Cloud solution that supports public Cloud interoperability to create a hybrid Cloud environment.
There are many scenarios where a pre-built hybrid Cloud solution makes sense for an enterprise. For example, global enterprises may need to provide local access to data and applications in regions where it may not make financial or business sense to build a dedicated data center. In those cases, moving data and applications to a public Cloud provider in the local region while retaining centralized control of security, policies, and data integrity in the private Cloud offers the best of both worlds. Other examples where businesses may wish to link public and private Cloud platforms include disaster recovery (for geo-redundancy) and testing/development sites (for rapid build up and tear down of infrastructure).
The EMC/VMware Cloud solution supports these scenarios by allowing enterprises to interoperate seamlessly between Clouds through support for the industry-standard OpenStack architecture (via VMware vCloud), automated data storage and data management in the Cloud (via EMC ViPR), and centralized control of business and security policies (via VMware NSX). The EMC/VMware platform also allows enterprises to leverage their existing storage and virtualization skills, as EMC and VMware products are already found in many IT environments today.
Of course, as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, there is no such thing as a shrink-wrapped Cloud. Fortunately, that’s where we come in. At Rolta AdvizeX, we help enterprises tie everything together with planning, network and application assessments, installation, managed services, and more. Named the EMC Services Partner of the Year in 2013 and the VMware SDDC Partner of the Year in 2014, Rolta AdvizeX delivers the experience and expertise needed to truly remove risk and accelerate your path to the Cloud.
To learn more about our hybrid Cloud solutions, read “How to Safely and Securely Build a Hybrid Cloud Architecture.” ▪