Software Defined Data Centres | Asystec Data Management Solutions

WHAT IS A SOFTWARE DEFINED DATACENTRE (SDDC) ?

A Software-Defined Datacentre (SDDC) architecture enables a fully automated, zero-downtime infrastructure for any application and any hardware, now and in the future. SDDC uses virtualisation technologies so all infrastructure services become as inexpensive and easy to provision and manage as virtual machines.

By virtualising a Datacentre, all of the resources of the system – including computing, storage, and networking – can be “abstracted” and represented in a software form.

See below for a overview of the Asystec Cloud & Infrastructure Solutions Portfolio or click on the video to the right to hear Asystec Lead Systems Engineer, Jonathan D’Arcy discuss the portfolio in greater detail.

DO YOU NEED SDDC?

- Is your organisation struggling to deliver new services to customers to maintain competitiveness in the market?
- Are you facing increased pressure to consider moving to SaaS and IaaS based cloud providers to improve time to market?
- Are hardware-defined solutions creating flexibility problems in your environment?
- Are you looking to move to a self-service, multi-tenanted, IT-as-a- service consumption model for infrastructure, but don’t know where to start?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then introducing a Software Defined Data Centre would greatly benefit your organisation.

THE BENEFITS OF SDDC

In a software-defined data centre, policy-driven automation enables provisioning and ongoing management of logical compute, storage and network services resulting in unprecedented agility and efficiency, with flexibility to support hardware and applications for today and tomorrow. Benefits include:

Cost savings – SDDC technology helps attain new levels of infrastructure utilisation and staff productivity, substantially reducing capital expenditures and operating costs.
Improved speed – Enabling deployment of applications in minutes or even seconds with policy-driven provisioning that dynamically matches resources to continually changing workloads and business demands.
Business-aware IT control – Driving right availability, security and compliance for every application via automated business continuity, policy-based governance and virtualisation-aware security and compliance.
Cloud – SDDC can be leveraged as a private, hybrid or public cloud with infrastructure fully abstracted from applications, so they can run on multiple hardware stacks, hypervisors and clouds.

HOW ASYSTEC CAN HELP

There are six major SDDC building blocks that Asystec can assist you with:

Network: Network virtualisation combines network resources by splitting the available bandwidth into independent channels that can each be assigned/reassigned to a particular server/device in real time.

Compute: Server virtualisation masks server resources, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors and operating systems, from server users. The intention is to spare users from managing complicated server-resource details. It also increases resource sharing and utilisation, while maintaining the ability to expand capacity at a later date.

Operations Management: Ensures uptime with Performance, Health & capacity monitoring of your entire Hybrid cloud environment. Moving from a reactive monitoring tool to a proactive management tool that utilises predictive analytics to identify potential capacity or performance issues in your SDDC.

Storage: Storage virtualisation pools physical storage from multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage device managed from a central console.

Automation: Provides a self-service catalog for all IT services, from single micro-services, up to multi-machine application and infrastructure blueprints. These blueprints can be delivered consistently, embedding security policy, and deployed to on-prem or public cloud environments with 3rd party integrations and approval workflows.

Business: Allows organisations to provide IT as a service to multiple cost centres and subsidiaries with a showback or chargeback model to ensure costs are accurately tracked and managed.

The dedicated Asystec cloud infrastructure solutions team can offer you SDDC expertise to transform your business. Ask our team how VMware Cloud Foundation, vSan, NSX, vRealize Operations, vRealize Automation, and vRealize Business can help you deliver a fully automated Software-defined Datacentre, inclusive of assessments, professional services, managed services to ensure a successful implementation.

VMWARE CLOUD FOUNDATION (VCF)

VMware Cloud Foundation makes it easy to deploy and run a hybrid cloud. VMware Cloud Foundation provides integrated cloud infrastructure (compute, storage, networking, and security) and cloud management services to run enterprise applications in both private and public environments.

VIRTUAL SAN

VMWARE VIRTUAL SAN

VMware Virtual SAN is a radically simple, enterprise class shared storage solution for hyper converged infrastructure optimised for vSphere virtual machines.

Remote and Branch Office: Manage your remote and branch offices with little to no local IT staff. vSAN provides a simple, cost-effective, and highly available solution that can be centrally managed from the main data center. Customers can choose from vSAN’s flexible licensing of per VM or per CPU for greater flexibility and value. Learn more about vSAN for remote offices in this solution overview.

Disaster Recovery:Protect data, lower infrastructure costs and simplify disaster recovery (DR) operations and management in remote DR sites with little or no local IT staff. Combined with VMware Site Recovery Manager, vSAN and vSphere Replication can be used to orchestrate and automate the recovery of multiple virtual machines. Learn more about vSAN for DR in this solution overview.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: Reduce infrastructure costs by starting small and growing non-disruptively as your needs evolve. vSAN delivers high performance while lowering TCO over traditional storage arrays and allows IT to deliver desktop services to end users by running virtual machines on consolidated clusters in the data center. Learn more about VDI Workload testing in this evaluation paper.

Business Critical Applications: Run your most critical business applications like Oracle, Exchange and SAP with enterprise reliability, security and performance. vSAN’s all-flash architecture can deliver 150K IOPS per node with sub millisecond latencies. More than 60% of our customers run their business-critical applications on vSAN. Learn more about vSAN and BCA testing in these reference architectures.

NSX

Asystec partner with VMware bringing NSX to the market. VMware NSX is the network virtualisation platform for the software-defined datacentre. By bringing the operational model of a virtual machine to you datacentre network, you can transform the economics of network and security operations. NSX lets you treat your physical network as a pool of transport capacity, with network and security services attached to VM’s with a policy driven approach.

Multi-Cloud Networking: Bring networking and security consistency across heterogeneous sites and streamlines multi-cloud operations.

Security: Application-centric security is delivered at the workload level to prevent the lateral spread of threats.

Compliance: Reduce scope of compliance by isolating the systems that store, process, or transmit sensitive data.

Cloud-Native Apps: Enable native networking and security for containerized workloads across application frameworks.

Automation: Automate networking and security services to remove operational bottlenecks across any application platform or framework.

VREALIZE OPERATIONS

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) delivers intelligent operations management across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure—from VMware vSphere and Hyper-V to Amazon Web Services. It correlates data from applications to storage in a unified, easy-to-use management tool that provides control over performance, capacity, and configuration, with predictive analytics driving proactive action, and policy-based automation.

Open and extensible platform that leverages existing investments, with third-party management packs for Microsoft, SAP, and more.

Automated capacity optimization and planning

Intelligent workload balancing

Enforcement of standards for continuous compliance

Comprehensive visibility across applications and infrastructure in a single console

Proactive identification and remediation of emerging performance, capacity, and configuration issues

VREALIZE AUTOMATION (VRA)

VMWARE VREALIZE AUTOMATION

VMware vRealize Automation, part of VMware vRealize Suite, is a cloud automation platform that accelerates the delivery of IT services through automation and pre-defined policies, providing a high level of agility and flexibility for developers, while maintaining frictionless governance and control for IT teams. Leveraging the extensible framework provided by vRealize Automation, you can streamline and automate the lifecycle management of IT resources from initial service model design, through Day One provisioning and Day Two operations. Whether your IT services are running on private, public, or hybrid cloud, the multi-vendor, multi-cloud solution supported by vRealize Automation assures your services will be delivered with speed, control, and performance.

Control: Embed governance-based policies into IT services across a hybrid cloud environment to ensure compliance, performance, and financial outcomes.

Choice of Developers: Enable self-service that can rapidly deliver building blocks to developers.

Agility: Automate IT service delivery processes (infrastructure, containers, applications, and any custom IT service) to rapidly respond to business needs.

Extensibility: Easily integrate with third-party tools across an IT ecosystem to protect investments in existing and future technologies.

Efficiency: Achieve optimal workload management from initial deployment, ongoing rebalance, to retirement and reclamation with complete lifecycle management using the vRealize Suite.

VREALIZE BUSINESS

VMware vRealize Business provides transparency and control over the cost and quality of IT services. By providing a business context to the services IT offers, it helps IT organisations shift from a technology orientation to a service broker orientation, delivering a portfolio of IT services that align with the needs of line-of-business (LOB) stakeholders.

Providing the business management capabilities necessary to manage the business aspects of today’s emerging hybrid cloud environments, it helps to facilitate IT transformation, enabling customers to reduce capital and operating expenses and improve service delivery performance.

Accelerate IT Transformation: Power CIO agenda by supporting fact-based decisions on current and future IT investments

Drive IT Transparency: Embed financial transparency across the extended enterprise including LOB, IT and third-party vendors

Align IT with the Business: Meet LOB expectations regarding portfolio of services and costs, shifting to a business orientation

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Read our blogs, case studies and whitepapers to learn more about Asystec’s SDDC experience and expertise. You can also read more about the product offerings on our partners web pages:

CONTACT US

Contact the Asystec Cloud & Infrastructure Solutions team today to find out more about SDDC.