Demands for IT efficiency and agility are impacting enterprises of all sizes and hybrid clouds are proving to be great enablers of IT Transformation. Join this session to hear how integrating Puppet automation into VMware-based cloud environments can deliver agility, standardization, and reduced operations costs. You’ll also hear how you can accelerate achieving these benefits with Dell EMC’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud.
Digital transformation is affecting every industry. Recent Dell Technologies’ research proves that for some this new digital reality can also appear as a looming digital disaster. The research findings result from an independent survey by Vanson Bourne of 4,000 business leaders -- from mid-size to large enterprises -- across 16 countries and 12 industries.
The results highlight what CEOs are thinking about and working on when it comes to their digital future. Here are just a few of the key findings from the research study, which show that some companies are feeling badly bruised by the pace of change and the adoption of digital technologies:
Almost half (45%) of global businesses surveyed fear they may become obsolete in the next three to five years due to competition from digital-born start-ups with 48% of have no idea of what our industries will look like in three years.
78% of businesses believe digital start-ups will pose a threat to their organization, either now or in the future. This phenomenon is propelling innovative companies forward and accelerating the demise of others.
More than half (53%) of the people asked say they’ve already seen significant disruption in their industries.
Almost everybody, or 92%, say that they consider digital ways of doing business are critical to their success.
Given the rate of change and the threat of disruption, many business leaders believe a digital rescue plan is needed to advance their transformation initiatives.
In order to be ready and start executing on digital transformation initiatives, IT organizations need to have a balanced approach to managing this transformation.
This means that over the next few years, businesses must get serious about optimizing traditional applications – and by that we mean bringing down the cost of running these applications. This can then enable IT teams to shift more of both people and financial resources towards a new set of investments-- those that help make possible the more transformative aspects of the business including the development of new, smarter cloud-native applications built to deliver new mobile experiences, with better data analytics, and deeper digital innovation for the products and services they provide – key tenets of a digital business.
But in doing this, IT executives face a complex set of priorities. These differing sets of priorities, one focusing on efficiencies in traditional applications and the other focused on driving innovation and new application models, creates a significant dilemma.
Also, the tension that exists between modernizing as rapidly as possible-- without starving core business applications-- is a challenge for most companies. In order to continue delivering value to the business, IT leaders are realizing that they must undergo significant transformation across the IT landscape– from on- and off premises infrastructure investment, to staffing changes, skills training, LoB collaboration, and ITaaS delivery.
The challenge is, 71% of IT budgets is for existing applications. Traditional apps are expensive to maintain from both a cost and resource perspective leaving little funding and staff for innovation.
How can we get this under control? How can we become more efficient with the IT resource needed to support traditional applications?
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This is where Dell EMC can help.
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is a unique, turnkey hybrid cloud platform that enables IT teams to be more agile and efficient in providing the business self-service access to IT services.
Dell EMC engineering teams have designed, integrated, and tested all components, so that you don’t have to expend that effort.
You also get access to a holistic portfolio of services designed to help prepare for your hybrid cloud journey and quickly deploy the platform. These are services that can extend the platform to meet unique business requirements for ongoing operational success.
You also benefit from single contact support so that if you encounter an issue, just contact Dell EMC for issue diagnosis, triage, escalation, and collaboration with 3rd party technology vendors
But what are the benefits of this being turnkey? Well…
Beyond the benefits of a hybrid cloud, when you choose a turnkey hybrid cloud platform like Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, customers implementing IT-as-a-Service (with VM provisioning, data protection, four vCenters, application services and encryption) have been able deploy a hybrid cloud 2 times faster than when customers try to build it themselves (EHC customer council feedback March 2016).
This faster time to deliver a Hybrid Cloud platform allows our customers to start delivering value to the business faster and more cost effectively. This was further proven in the Principled Technologies study with the following findings that compared buying Enterprise Hybrid Cloud vs. a build your own platform:
67% total cost savings over 3 years compared by reducing the costs related to design, implementation, level 2 and level 3 support as well as 2 upgrades – we’ve done all the engineering work so you don’t have to.
74% faster time to upgrade Enterprise Hybrid Cloud vs. a build your own platform. With each release Enterprise Hybrid Cloud tests upgrades from one version to the next with services to reduce risk and speed the upgrade process.
42% upgrade savings over 3 years (2 upgrades total)
100% savings for level 2 and level 3 platform support compared to a build your own platform because Enterprise Hybrid Cloud provides this at the platform level providing all the hardware and software products are under maintenance. This eliminates the need for you to maintain this level of support in-house.
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud architecture showcases the powerful combination of Dell EMC’s Hyper-converged and Converged infrastructure with VMware & Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud platform software.
Out of the box it delivers infrastructure-as-a-service across one, two or more vCenters (up to 4)* through a fully automated self-service portal with operational management to ensure SLAs are met and financial transparency.
What’s underneath the covers? It starts with Dell EMC’s world-class hyper-converged and converged infrastructure through support of VxRail appliances, VxRack Flex, and VxBlocks.
The physical storage hardware is virtualized with either VMware vSAN or Dell EMC ViPR Controller and then integrated fully with VMware vSphere for server virtualization and VMware NSX for software-defined networking to deliver a software-defined data center.
Next, the platform uses VMware’s vRealize Automation to deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service through an on-demand self-service portal along with vRealize Operations to give Enterprise IT visibility into the health of the system and vRealize Business for Cloud to enable financial transparency into the costs of IT and the cost to deliver IT-as-a-Service – so that you can easily price your services and then charge your business for them should you so choose.
What we did in the lab was write code to orchestrate the entire system together to deliver these IT services – in the form of predefined workflows that automate the entire process of delivering infrastructure on demand – thus enabling self-service and rapid IT.
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud enables IT organizations to simplify delivery of IT-as-a-Service with add-on modules. They include:
Disaster Recovery with Dell EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines
Backup as a Service through Dell EMC Avamar or Data Domain
Continuous availability with Dell EMC VPLEX which enables you to deploy active workloads running on dual-sites
Encryption services through Dell EMC CloudLink
These modular add-ons are prepackaged options that are maintained and supported with the platform.
*Note: Only backup, encryption, and disaster recovery services are available for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud on VxRail infrastructure.
Integrations
The Enterprise Hybrid Cloud’s Integration Program provides a way to extend capabilities beyond the platform. Most are customer driven services which are integrated by EMC Global Services. Formalizing a program like this provides a mechanism to deliver expanded capabilities out-of band with the platform release cycle. Published APIs provide the integration path into the platform for 3rd party offerings. Third party support and future compatibility is owned by each of the individual 3rd Party vendors.
These include customized extensions for:
Puppet Enterprise for OS and application configuration lifecycle management
ServiceNOW for IT service management
Palo Alto Networks Security for network firewalls for protecting against cyberattacks
InfoBlox IP Address Management
This enables IT organizations to continue to leverage their existing investments in these technologies while improving operational processes ultimately helping achieve better ROI.
Co-existing Solutions are additional solutions, which are not tightly integrated into the platform, but can share infrastructure with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. These include:
Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which in combination with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, provides on-demand access to enterprise-grade infrastructure resources allowing developers to build cloud native applications with confidence.
VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) providing the ability to run both a VMware-based and OpenStack-based environment using the same tools your VMware shop is used to
VMware vRealize Code Stream providing release automation and continuous delivery to enable frequent, reliable software releases while reducing operational risks
Through the self-service portal, users can access IT resources on-demand by taking advantage of the automation capabilities of the platform to accelerate and simplify operations and increase the agility of the business.
Through this expandable catalog of services, IT teams can pull in resources from multiple INTERNAL and EXTERNAL clouds into an interface that allows for both simple Infrastructure as a Service, as well as more complicated application and service provisioning.
Integrated financial transparency and Self-Service data protection bring your cloud users CLOSER to the IT Resources, while enabling IT to maintain levels of control, compliance, and cost control.
In many IT organizations, application service provisioning is a manual process that requires the assistance of several people, in several roles, and involves multiple steps.
Manual provisioning results in slow response times to the users requesting the services. It could take days or even weeks to move a request from the initial submission through the actual activation of service. This not only results in increased frustration for those requesting the service, but also decreased productivity and ultimately decreased agility for the business. In addition, manual provisioning is also error prone, which can result in unpredictable environments, inconsistencies in configurations, and increased project risk.
With Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, the self-service portal simplifies both application management and IT services delivery. With the ability to streamline the provisioning and de-provisioning of applications and IT resources including security policies, you can accelerate the management of complex, multi-tier applications down to minutes.
This is accomplished through pre-built application blueprints and workflows that IT teams can either take “as is” or customize working with Dell EMC or VMware services teams.
These blueprints/workflows automates access to the virtualized pool of infrastructure resources and provides applications with the needed hardware and software resources required with no need for manual intervention.
If, at any point, you need to change/modify your configuration, you simply access the self-service portal to make your changes – simplifying how you manage your applications.
The benefit of this simplified, self-service approach is that application owners can now easily manage their applications helping minimize costs and risk while benefit from a more responsive IT model.
Positioned as #1 in the private cloud market and drawing on over four years of experience helping customers simplify their IT transformation journey, Dell EMC’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud continues to provide the latest innovations and capabilities that deliver real business results faster while reducing costs and risk.
In this latest release, Dell EMC is adding:
Functionality that simplifies operations through accelerated installation of VxRack SDDC-based deployments and the addition of automated upgrades to VxRail-based Enterprise Hybrid Cloud deployments.
Updates to the platform’s core Dell EMC and VMware software components providing customers the latest innovations that deliver greater flexibility, simplicity, and scale.
Enhanced Puppet integration through support of VMware vRA version 7.3
Additionally, core software updates to both Dell EMC and VMware components enables customers to benefit from the latest functionality and innovations.
As mentioned previously, this includes the update to vRealize 7.3 which not features native integration of Puppet Enterprise so that you can benefit from the full power of this industry leading automation.
It also includes updates to VMware NSX, vSphere and Dell EMC CloudLink, ViPR, and Avamar. Also included in this latest release (ver 4.1.2), is functionality that simplifies the installation of and upgrades of VxRail-based infrastructure within Enterprise Hybrid Cloud.
In addition, the platform is now supporting VMware’s vRealize Suite version 7.3 which includes the addition of Microsoft Azure as a public cloud end-point as well as parameterized blueprints to enhance reusability and reduce VM sprawl among other capabilities.
Specific versions -
Cloud Management software
VMware vRealize Automation 7.3 which includes the addition of Microsoft Azure as a public cloud end point
VMware vRealize Operations Manager 6.5
Virtual Infrastructure software
VMware NSX for vSphere 6.2.7
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0.x
Dell EMC ViPR 3.6
Platform Updates include:
Release Certification Matrix alignment
VxBlock 6.0.5 – 6.0.13
VxRail, 4.0.301
Dell EMC Avamar 7.4
Dell EMC Recover Point CL/EX 5.0.0
Dell EMC Recover Point for VM 5.0.1
Dell EMC VPLEX GeoSynchrony® 6.x
CloudLink 6.0
The addition of Puppet Enterprise into Enterprise Hybrid Cloud combines the benefits of quickly standing up your cloud platform and extending automation capabilities that allow you to:
1. Define the desired state of the infrastructure/environment configuration using Puppet's declarative language.
2. Simulate configuration changes before enforcing them.
3. Enforce the deployed desired state automatically, correcting any configuration drift.
4. Report on differences between actual and desired states, and any changes made enforcing the desired state.
All with the goal of making sure that you can eliminate configuration drift and compliance in your environment.
But what does this all mean? It’s the difference between taking hours/days to try to keep up with configuration changes and application deployment to having it take minutes with continuous, automated drift management.
To summarize, when you take the turnkey nature of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud that enables you to stand up a hybrid cloud faster that can then enable IT resource users and developers to access what they need when they need it via a self-service portal AND combine with the automation capabilities of Puppet Enterprise, you create a holistic solution that provides agility, standardization, and more flexibility and choice.