Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 37 | Page 58

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres Capitalising on the software- defined data centre ///////////////////////////// T he Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC) combines exceptional performance with unprecedented flexibility, enabling IT assets and IT organisations to operate and change at the speed of business. Accelerating business demands are driving rapid Digital Transformation in organisations across the globe, there is a massive push for business and IT to align around applications that deliver modern customer engagement. To keep up, IT needs to deliver digital infrastructure that supports the modern application anywhere. “Traditional three-tier architecture is expensive to build, complex to operate, and difficult to scale,” added Kruger. “Don’t wait for IT infrastructure to support your application demands. Adopt HCI without losing control, increasing costs, or compromising security.” and multiple uses. That leads to distinctive benefits including lower cost, higher availability, increased utilisation, unlimited scalability, more speed for developing apps and provisioning technology services, and the agility to reconfigure and repurpose infrastructure as the business needs. The VMware software-defined digital foundation enables business leaders to innovate freely in the clouds, it brings together best-in-class virtualised compute, storage, and networking with comprehensive cloud management. Troye CEO Helen Kruger says VMware empowers customers to manage and run consistent infrastructure and operations across data centres and public clouds, delivering applications with the speed and agility to support business innovation and growth. “VMware’s solution is built on a software-defined hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) architecture of natively integrated compute, network and storage virtualisation technologies, with self-driving operations and management,” said Kruger. “This innovative approach delivers a consistent operational model on any cloud.” Kruger says VMware’s common operating environment lets businesses rapidly run, manage, connect and secure apps across data centres, clouds, and devices. “But the key feature of SDDC is automation,” explained Kruger. “To increase operational simplicity, the software layer replaces management with automation. Things happen quickly and changes are made with very little human intervention. Automation is the only solution for infrastructure to keep pace with the ever- changing high demands of business.” VMware leads the HCI market with over 41% share and continues to grow two times faster than its closest competitor. With the most customers in production worldwide, the richest ecosystem in the industry, and the broadest set of deployment options on the market, VMware provides the only enterprise-proven, full HCI stack that puts businesses on the path to hybrid cloud. With HCI, business leaders can decrease data centre complexity and increase scalability. Combine storage, compute and networking into a single system with HCI, this simplified solution uses software and x86 servers to replace expensive, purpose-built hardware. 58 INTELLIGENTCIO “The entire data centre is virtualised, not just servers, but the other two traditional stacks of storage and networking as well,” she said. Virtualisation frees workloads from connection with specific hardware and frees the hardware to be put to different Troye CEO Helen Kruger SDDC also protects investment in legacy hardware as it no longer needs to be refreshed. It enables all apps, including mission-critical apps, to take advantage of the flexibility and efficiencies of SDDC. SDDC also provides the freedom of choice to incorporate the latest and most advanced hardware technologies as required. “It is the ideal solution for businesses looking to propel themselves forward, looking to accelerate app delivery and more importantly, to serve as a strategic partner to the business,” said Kruger. “When you eliminate traditional IT silos and manage everything from a single tool, the result is lower OPEX and CAPEX associated with running your IT infrastructure. And with hyperconverged infrastructure, you don’t have to sacrifice security, flexibility, or scalability. The ITaaS model is the future of IT and the SDDC architecture is a proven path to get there. Implementing SDDC is ultimately an investment in business agility and business innovation. We now offer solutions to adopt the SDDC architecture much more rapidly than ever before.” n www.intelligentcio.com