Software News South Africa

Capitalising on the Software-Defined Data Centre

The Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) combines exceptional performance with unprecedented flexibility, enabling IT assets and IT organisations to operate and change at the speed of business.
Helen Kruger CEO of Troye
Helen Kruger CEO of Troye

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.

Helen Kruger, CEO of Troye, 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 hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) architecture of natively integrated compute, network, and storage virtualisation technologies, with self-driving operations and management. This innovative approach delivers a consistent operational model on any cloud."

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.

"Traditional three-tier architecture is expensive to build, complex to operate, and difficult to scale. Don't wait for IT infrastructure to support your application demands. Adopt HCI without losing control, increasing costs, or compromising security," she adds.

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.

Kruger says VMware's common operating environment lets businesses rapidly run, manage, connect and secure apps across data centres, clouds, and devices. "The entire data centre is virtualised, not just servers, but the other two traditional stacks of storage and networking as well."

Virtualisation is the answer

Virtualisation frees workloads from connection with specific hardware and frees the hardware to be put to different 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.

"But the key feature of SDDC is automation. 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," she explains.

The SDDC approach enables IT teams to transcend the rigid constraints of the old hardware-centric model. This applies to every aspect of your IT environment, from networking to storage to compute to the management platform that ties it all together.

This is the only way IT can provision its offerings as business services. With the SDDC approach, one increases the business value of existing IT assets by seeing them and managing them via software, which is inherently faster and more flexible than hardware.

SDDC also protects the investment in legacy hardware as it no longer needs to be refreshed, virtualisation is the answer. 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.

Propel your business forward

Kruger says SDDC is simply the best data centre architecture available today. "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."

SDDC must be a core part of any businesses cloud strategy, it has been designed from the ground up to serve as an industrial-grade bridge between the past and future, between on-premise and off-premise assets - and there is huge value and power in that model.

"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 hyper-converged infrastructure, you don’t have to sacrifice security, flexibility, or scalability," she says.

With SDDC, business leaders now have a golden opportunity to take the skills and capabilities of their IT team and deliver all of that on-demand, in the form of easy-to-consume business services. And it also enables them to shift resources to applications and services that create real business value.

"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," she concludes.

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