In the world of sports, speed is an absolute good.
In the world of IT, speed can be good or bad. Speeding up your time to market is definitely good, but not if it also means rushing through compliance testing. This can be a hard concept to sell to line-of-business folks, however, especially when getting new applications to market and accelerating application performance can translate directly into new revenue and more market share.
Many IT departments are finding that the best way to speed things up to is look up… to the Cloud. Moving business applications to a Cloud environment enables IT departments to be responsive and responsible at the same time by deploying applications quickly on standardized systems. VMware, a leader in virtualization and Cloud technology, now makes it easier for businesses to launch Cloud solutions quickly through their service-based vCloud Air solution.
vCloud Air represents a growing trend toward Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). [For more on this topic, read my last blog, “New Survey Shows That IaaS Is Gaining Steam.”] As IT departments get out of the operations business and into the innovation business, more of them are moving their business applications onto virtual and hosted platforms to reduce hardware, software and the operational responsibilities that go along with them (i.e., maintenance, upgrades).
Unlike some of the commercially deployed IaaS Cloud offerings available today (e.g., Amazon Web Services), vCloud Air is built to accommodate the needs of all businesses large and small. vCloud Air elevates your IT environment in several important ways:
- Flexibility. You can deploy Air as a Dedicated Private Cloud where you don’t share your hardware resources with anyone or as a Virtual Private Cloud where the hardware resources are shared but you are logically separated using the functionality provided by vCloud Director.
- Simplicity. If you’re already running VMware’s vSphere in your data center, vCloud Air acts as a natural and seamless extension of your IT environment. You can manage all of your virtual resources (on premise and in the VMware Cloud) from a single vCenter screen, and move data and applications from your data center to the Cloud through simple, single-click replication.
- Interoperability. vCloud Air supports 90 different operating systems. Compare that to Amazon (33) and Azure (7). With more OS support, vCloud Air makes it easier to migrate legacy applications into the Cloud.
- Security. You would expect security from VMware’s Cloud offering, but there are also some unexpected advantages to vCloud Air including the ability to choose your own security gateway and, when used with vCenter’s Configuration Manager, the ability to test virtual machines against various compliance templates.
- High Performance. There are several ways that vCloud Air can improve your data center’s performance. For example, you can seamlessly scale into the Cloud when data center capacity is reached (also known as “cloudbursting”). Have an application that has high storage I/O? Take advantage of high performance storage with auto-tiering options that incorporate SSD drives.
Of course, one of the best reasons to use vCloud Air is because it allows you to do a lot of different things without doing things differently. You use the same interface, the same VMware skills and the same point of support for VMware in your data center and in the vCloud Air.
Rolta AdvizeX can help you size, plan and integrate your vCloud Air solution now through our Cloud Advizer service, or you can visit one of our data centers and see Air in action. ▪