Travelling without moving: keeping IT simple to avoid virtual insanity
Transformation has been the watchword for those attending VMworld here in Barcelona. As Europe’s chief event for virtualisation draws to a close, it’s clear many firms want to achieve more from data centre virtualisation but are unsure of the steps they should take next.
Those coming to the Cisco booth have been seeking advice in several areas. Chief among them is how they can achieve their transformation goals while building on their existing investments.
They’re also looking at ways to bring their various IT teams together to adapt to the emerging landscape of hybrid IT – one comprising of multiple clouds, and software defined networking and virtualised infrastructure.
Keep IT simple
As Cisco’s Darren Williams discussed yesterday during his breakout session on hyperconverged, it’s vital to keep things simple by avoiding technology silos and different management tools for different architectures.
Cisco has achieved the simplicity required by combining hyperconverged and converged infrastructures under a consistent management model using UCS Manager and UCS Director.
Williams showed how Cisco’s hyperconverged solution HyperFlex can be installed in just 34 minutes – with networking included. He also explained how it’s possible to scale adaptively with a modular approach, rather than increasing storage for example, when you need more compute.
Using VDI based on VMware Horizon as a perfect use case, Williams showed just how powerful Cisco HyperFlex can be, with an 8 node cluster supporting 1,000 users that’s easy to deploy and easy to manage.
Virtual realities
Cisco CloudCenter has also piqued the interest of visitors seeking simple ways to move workloads between various private and public clouds while maintaining security policies and services profiles.
CloudCenter means you can automate physical and virtual compute, network and storage components. For some, it offers the ability to scale costs with usage, by enabling cloud economics and the pay-per-use model. For others, it assures the security and compliance of data centre control.
There were also some great demos on display for those looking to experience the next generation data centre. NetApp had a FlexPod data centre on its booth and was inviting visitors to try their hand at painting their own data centre in Virtual Reality with the Google Tilt Brush.
Meanwhile, Intel’s Virtual Reality station allowed you to explore the software defined data centre and challenged visitors to optimise its performance by choosing the most appropriate location for specific workloads from racks of storage, compute, or network.
A question of choice
The level of innovation in data centre virtualisation and cloud technologies was evident at VMworld this year. As was the level of interest, with 10,000 people coming to Barcelona to experience it for themselves.
Ultimately, the world of hybrid IT and multi-cloud management, software defined and virtualised is evolving at pace against a backdrop of demand for operational efficiency and speed of provisioning.
With Cisco as your strategic technology partner, you can achieve all of your transformation goals, using any combination of three core infrastructure models – best of breed, architectural (converged), and simplified IT (hyperconverged).
There’s never been a better time to get the hybrid IT advantage.
A huge thank you from the Cisco team to all those that stopped by our booth and attended the breakout session by @StorageDarren at VMworld 2016 Europe. We look forward to catching up with you all soon.
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