Software-‐Defined Datacenter Demystified With HTVCenter HTVCenter | Software-‐Defined Datacenter 2 The term software-‐defined datacenter (SDDC) rose to prominence this year during annual virtualization conference VMworld 2012 with large companies touting it as the next best thing in IT. A software-‐defined datacenter is an IT facility where the elements of the infrastructure – networking, storage, CPU and security – are virtualized and delivered as a service. The provisioning and operation of the entire infrastructure is entirely automated by software. “HTVCenter, HTBase’s SDDC solution, brings a high degree of agility and flexibility to the infrastructure and businesses are ready to take advantage of such technology” Bruno Andrade Product Director HTBase What we see today when it comes to IT’s approach to datacentres, we can define it as “a museum of IT”, comprising legacy hardware and mainframes and the obvious conclusion is that we need to make all aspects of infrastructure flexible and that’s HTBase’s goal when implementing HTVCenter for clients. We understood that building large-‐scale datacenters from standard high-‐
volume servers was inefficient and complex, both for cloud service providers and large enterprises and also, not very reliable. The software-‐
defined approach has driven people to think differently about how we build networks (wide-‐area networks and network fabrics in the datacenter), bind them with applications and manage them Common Complexities: • Infrastructure Planning • Resource Silos • Storage Management HTVCenter HTBase’s response to Software-‐defined datacenter strategy HTVCenter, HTBase’s SDDC includes technologies to provide datacenter managers with software-‐
defined computing capabilities, software-‐defined storage and networking elements as well as management and cloud components. HTBase’s strategy for a fully automated datacenter can be traced back to the beginning of the development of HTVCenter, investing effort and knowledge on building a suitable and powerful solution to clients, which enable companies to run the network and application from a software perspective and remove the control from hardware elements. As software becomes sophisticated, building in more management capabilities, the role of hardware in a cloud-‐like datacenter is shrinking. Storage products are already software-‐backed. www.htbase.com HTVCenter | Software-‐Defined Datacenter 3 “But what’s interesting about HTBase’s SDDC proposition is that it brings all the software pieces together into your infrastructure,” says Samuel Ayres, Director of Sales at HTBase. “Two years ago, integrating storage, network and security products was very difficult, but today, HTVCenter can make that a reality to any client,” he says. HTVCenter brings together what customers need to build, operate and manage a cloud infrastructure – virtualization, automation, policy-‐based provisioning, disaster recovery, and applications and operations management. “The main difference between HTVCenter and other SDDC providers is that, they still try to sell you their solution installed in their own hardware, locking you, again, in a hardware specific scenario, while HTVCenter is pure software, you can install it on any server of your choice or have HTBase to provide you the hardware together” – says Samuel. HTVCenter for Enterprises and Applications According to Gartner, by 2017, web-‐scale IT (SDDC) will be an architectural approach found operating in 50% of global enterprises, up from less than 10% in 2013. Until recently, SDCC was a possibility for only a handful of Internet companies that had the scale and business need to justify the cost of adopting a radically new IT approach. The IT environment in Internet companies differed from traditional enterprise datacenters. Unlike most enterprise datacenters that run a wide range of standard off-‐ the-‐shelf and in-‐house applications, these environments had a small set of services that were core to their business. They did not run applications on standard virtualization platforms, but instead ran either bare metal or on lightweight abstraction technologies. Finally, unlike traditional enterprises, Internet companies made extensive use of REST-‐based programmatic interfaces to extensively automate workflows and manage their infrastructure, rather than using more manually intensive graphical user interfaces. HTVCenter Benefits: • Cost reduction • Ease of scale • Reduction in power costs • Up and running in hours • Predictable scale • Increase business agility • Lower TCO • Intelligence in software [Type text] HTVCenter | Software-‐Defined Datacenter 4 But now, businesses are facing many of the same challenges as Internet companies. Budgetary pressures are forcing enterprise IT to find ways to do more with less and keep costs down. As technology becomes more pervasive, businesses are finding ways to use technology to accelerate business growth. This in turn is driving demand for agility in IT services. As businesses grow, IT resources need to scale predictably. While businesses may not match a Facebook or Google in absolute scale of operations, they face many of the same challenges and limitations of traditional infrastructure. Companies are looking for ways to get more web-‐scale infrastructure capabilities in their environment without needing a complete overhaul. They use standard server virtualization from companies like VMware and Microsoft, and run a host of common off-‐
the-‐shelf applications. They have little to no control over how these applications are designed, and don’t have a team in place to learn about new web-‐scale technologies. These customers can easily make use of HTVCenter, which delivers a familiar computing environment on which to run standard applications. HTVCenter Integrations: • Major storage technologies • Virtualization support for KVM, Xen, Citrix, VMWare and others • Self-‐service portal for end users where they can provision new servers and applications stacks in minutes • Billing system that maps CCU/h to real currency HTVCenter delivers the benefits of web-‐scale IT but offers the added advantage of requiring no change on the part of the customer to get these benefits since HTVCenter is built to support a wide range of standard and custom enterprise applications in virtualized environments So, is SDDC or HTVCenter another name for private cloud? “SDDC and HTVCenter go beyond traditional abstraction above core hardware assets and establish a single toolkit that also encompasses hybrid clouds,” says Bruno Andrade. HTVCenter Differentials: An HTVCenter implementation can allow servers and other hardware to be shut down • Split HTVCenter clouds or run at lower power levels, which has implications for energy use, according to Bruno. into multiple logical zones Some experts see HTVCenter as a more secure option to cloud. “HTVCenter provide organizations with their own private cloud, allowing them to have far more control over • For each cloud zone, hosted data,” says Samuel Ayres. When data is stored in HTVCenter, organizations can dedicate hardware and have on-‐demand access, rather than requesting the cloud provider for permission. network pools “This is far more flexible and it means enterprises have the power to access their data • Central point for billing when they need it,” adds Samuel. It also means an organization can decide the level of security rather than relying on the security put in place by a cloud hosting provider. Are Enterprises HTVCenter ready? “More often than not, CIOs are looking for an efficient, robust business function to be delivered. However, far too often, they move first, and think later, to the detriment of process delivery and more critically, the user experience,” says Samuel. www.htbase.com HTVCenter | Software-‐Defined Datacenter 5 Implementing HTVCenter implies rethinking IT processes such as automation, orchestration, metering and billing, and executing on operating model step changes (such as service delivery, service activation and service assurance). “Upskilling for SDDC with HTVCenter is only one aspect of the evolution needed to deliver on the promise of applying flexibility to networks and datacenters. It starts with the understanding of customer requirements and how to translate them into a system and a commercial and technical service wrap. Executives need experience across networks, systems and applications to operate SDDC and there cannot be single skills/operations teams silos”, says Bruno, and that’s why HTBase invested so much in not only building a strong software solution but also built an implementation practice that will help organizations reach that desired level in efficiency and this puts HTBase in the leading-‐edge for many CIOs as a key partner. [Type text] HTVCenter | Software-‐Defined Datacenter 6 Contacts Bruno Andrade Product Director HTBase Canada e-‐Mail: [email protected] Web: www.htbase.com Samuel Ayres Sales Director HTBase Latin America e-‐Mail: [email protected] Web: www.htbase.com www.htbase.com