Making the move to cloud while maintaining current investments
Historically, organizations running virtualized environments on-premises have experienced many challenges like incurring significant capital expenditures, expending resources, and spending a lot of time maintaining and managing onsite servers. Likewise, in this model, licenses are generally purchased with large and lengthy Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs) that are inflexible and unable to scale quickly to accommodate the ever-changing business needs.
In the era of cloud what does virtualization look like and what is the best way to make the move while leveraging your current investments?
VMware and IBM have partnered together to offer you a streamlined approach for migrating VMware environments to the cloud. By deploying new or existing VMware workloads in a hybrid cloud architecture with IBM Cloud®, you can achieve substantial benefits while using the same familiar tools, resources and capabilities you currently employ with on-premises VMware deployments.
Together, VMware and IBM are empowering IT departments to transform static server and network infrastructure into dynamic, virtualized resource pools. These resources can be provisioned on demand based on evolving business and technical needs.
What is a hybrid cloud?
A hybrid cloud implementation is when workloads are run in both on-premises or co-located infrastructure, and infrastructure that is hosted by a cloud provider. Hybrid clouds enable you to maximize the agility and flexibility of a public cloud environment while continuing to take advantage of existing investments.
Imagine being able to manage all these resources using the same tools that you’ve been using for years. A hybrid cloud can extend VMware infrastructure to IBM Cloud enabling you to address critical business needs. Expanding capacity or consolidating data centers, building a disaster recovery environment and modernizing applications to meet key security and compliance goals are just a few opportunities that a hybrid cloud supports quickly and securely.
Why cloud?
Cloud adoption can greatly benefit enterprises that need to expand capacity quickly to meet demand, gain agility not offered on premises or depreciate heritage architecture. Consider the key benefits of cloud adoption: flexibility, agility, cloud economics and global presence.
Key benefits of cloud adoption
Flexibility
Scale resources up or down without being concerned about over-procurement or under-utilization. Public clouds help eliminate the need to purchase your own hardware, and they can enable you to refocus IT staff on strategic pursuits.
Agility
Expand and contract capacity quickly with pay-as-you-go pricing models. With the cloud, you are freed from procuring your own infrastructure or engaging in long-term contracts.
Cloud economics
Transition from a capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model. Better budget by proactively sizing your environments based on what is consumed.
Global presence
Move workloads to the geographic areas where you need them running. You can meet business requirements by more quickly reaching new locations or reducing network latency.
The IBM and VMware partnership
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions is known for a hardened design based on the requirements of global enterprises, trusted by the most security-conscious organizations and takes advantage of deep VMware expertise at global scale. Nearly 2,000 organizations worldwide depend on this portfolio of flexible solutions.
Working together, IBM and VMware provide flexibility and meets you where you are in your cloud journey. To address varying workload needs, IBM Cloud offers both client-managed and IBM-managed solutions.
The client-managed solution, known as IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions Dedicated, includes VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter options in a monthly subscription model on a single-tenant infrastructure. Both client-managed options are available on bare metal servers enabling secure, single-tenant deployments. Additionally, you can retain the same root level hypervisor access as with your on-premises cloud. These models improve compatibility and increase cloud agility.
The IBM managed solution, known as IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions Shared leverages VMware vCloud Director in an hourly or monthly consumption model on a multi-tenant infrastructure. This cost-effective, self-service solution provides a way to start migrating virtual machines (VMs) to the cloud in a matter of minutes. IBM Cloud manages the hypervisor, so you don’t have to worry about managing, patching or updates. This model is flexible and cost-effective for scalability.
IBM Cloud uses a flexible and secure location for all workloads. With multiple deployment models, more than 100 bare metal configurations, expansive client control and management, IBM provides a secure, cost-effective solution from development and testing to deploying and running mission-critical workloads.
Benefits of running VMware on IBM Cloud
IBM Cloud offers three key advantages: compatibility, security and control.
Compatibility | Many public clouds require you to change to a different hypervisor or unknown API. But IBM Cloud is compatible with existing VMware environments. As a result, you don’t have to retrain, re-architect or create incompatible environment silos. |
Control | Some enterprise leaders believe that moving to the cloud means losing control. But with IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, you stay in control with full VMware access. In the familiar vCenter Server or vCloud Director pane of glass, your environment has the same look and feel as when it is operating in your data center. Your environment runs on an IBM network of secure, interconnected data centers. These same data centers put global expansion and interconnectivity at your fingertips. |
Security | Many times, public clouds are considered less secure than on-premises models, but IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions help you avoid such risk. By providing a range of infrastructure options, IBM Cloud fits the security and compliance needs of your workloads. Additionally, IBM Cloud offers the highest-level of key-management encryption with FIPS 140-2 Level 4 and “bring your own key” (BYOK), so only the client can access their data. |
(The above article is published by IBM Blog)
