Kathy Gibson reports from VMworld 2014 in Barcelona – In an increasingly liquid world, IT professionals need to be confident and brave to meet the challenges ahead.
Carl Eschenbach, president and chief operating officer of VMware, tells delegates to VMworld 2014 in Barcelona that there are four pillars to reaching the brave new world: to be fluid, instant, secure and offering choice.
“The way to do this is with a software-defined approach,” he says.
VMware has three focuses on the path to the software-defined enterprise. These are the hybrid cloud, the software-defined data centre (SDDC) and end user computing.
The technology that makes up the software-defined enterprise may be new, but companies are already using it to enable their businesses, Eschenbach says.
One of these is SAP, which has 250 000 customers in 190 countries – so it has a complex IT infrastructure.
Martin Heisig, senior vice-president: infrastructure services at SAP, explains that his team runs a huge infrastructure – not only SAP’s internal IT, but also the public cloud that SAP offers its customers.
“We are running more than 70 000 virtual machines, with a virtualisation rate of 85%. We have reduced costs by about 30%,” he adds. “Our goal is to increase agility and speed of innovation – and VMware has helped us to do that.”
SAP supports more than 20 000 training sessions every year, and now it is available on-demand – users can pick and choose their training and decide when they want to take it.
In terms of development: with 30 000 machines it is a heterogenous environment. “If we embark on new products, it used to take 72 hours or more – now it takes just minutes,” Heisig says.
“It is now a very dynamic environment.”
SAP is leveraging the SDDC to offer solutions to its own customers. “SAP is a big player in the cloud environment, so we are introducing new cloud solutions.
“We are building new data centres in new regions and on new platforms. New acquisitions build on different technology stacks. To optimise this, we need to take lessons from the internal business and to improve service levels.”
HANA is SAP’s in-memory database offering, and SAP offers it as a service in the public cloud.
“There is variety in how customers want to consume the services,” Heisig says. “We have recently certified the 1Tb version of VMware for HANA – this will help us to better manage our infrastructure.”
Hybrid cloud is central to SAP’s future.
“Our goal is to provide software and solutions- not infrastructure,” says Heisig. “The hybrid cloud is attractive to us on this point.”
NSX – network virtualisation – is the next step for SAP, Heisig says. “Network virtualisation is attractive. We are looking at NSX.
“We tapped into virtualisation a couple of years ago and have achieved tremendous benefits from it,” he says. “Network virtualisation is the next step.”
Vodafone is using VMware technology to offer hybrid cloud solutions to its customers.
Tom Stockwell, head of product management at Vodafone, says his company has built a true SDDC environment to enable the hybrid cloud solution.
“When we speak to our customers, we see private cloud as the first thing driving customer demand,” says Stockwell.
He points out there are three reasons Vodafone has banked on VMware: they company has built a reputation in the market; Vodafone has virtualisation skills; and VMware has made some smart acquisitions that give Vodafone the right platform for managing and delivering data centre capabilities.
He adds that the SDDC architecture allows Vodafone to simplify the automation and provision of self-service to deliver agility to its own customers.
“It also leads us to the hybrid cloud, virtualising not just the compute, but network and storage – allowing us to move back and forth from the private to the public cloud.”
He says the reason for the technology selection is to drive towards the hybrid cloud. “The simplicity of moving workloads between the two platforms is critical.”
Stockwell points out that the pace of technology change is fast, so a clear plan on the business outcomes is vital – this technology then needs to fit in with this.
In addition, customers need assistance, so services need to complement the product offerings.
“Always listen to what customers are asking for, so you can meet their needs.”
Stockwell issued a challenge to VMworld delegates: “Think about what IT can do to make your business successful – my bet is that it’s not around the IT infrastructure, but the business.”
