Among the most common and important challenges facing IT teams as they seek to modernize business-critical applications is this: How do you leverage cloud capabilities without sacrificing the benefits of traditional on-premises infrastructure or walking away from existing investments?
The challenge is especially pertinent for applications such as Oracle, SAP HANA, online transaction processing, business intelligence and finance, plus verticals such as Epic in healthcare or homegrown apps that have deep roots and interdependencies with other apps across the organization.
You may not be able to migrate these applications to the public cloud and, at most, would consider moving only specific workloads to a hybrid cloud platform. Reasons for hesitation can vary: performance, control, data protection, security, skills, costs, compliance, risk of moving data off existing storage platforms or some combination of all the above.
However, there are also good reasons why you would want to add modern cloud capabilities to these applications, including adding a mobile front end, offering a path for developers to use modern tools such as Kubernetes, or enabling self-service capabilities, elastic scalability or consumption-based pricing.
The ‘mission-critical cloud’
Today’s reality is that you don’t have to abandon three-tiered engineered infrastructure to add modern cloud capabilities to business-critical applications. You can enjoy the best of both worlds with solutions from Dell Technologies and VMware. Think of it as the “mission-critical cloud.”
An important breakthrough in this regard is the announcement that Dell’s VxBlock 1000 converged infrastructure platform is now available with support for VMware Cloud Foundation on a modernized management platform based on VMware vSAN.
Key benefits of this approach are:
- Accelerates hybrid cloud modernization: A refreshed architecture allows VxBlock customers to pivot more quickly to a hybrid cloud environment that is simpler to deploy and maintain. A refresh not only enables hybrid cloud; it also lets customers more easily use automation and cloud management to reduce costs and improve efficiencies.
- Increases agility: Organizations can leverage improvements in flexibility, scale and choice of resources to meet a mix of on-premises and hybrid workloads. IT teams have greater flexibility than ever to choose the right storage and server options for the right workload, without having to make compromises.
- Protects existing investments and maximizes performance: Existing VxBlock 1000 customers, as well as new customers, can extend the lifecycle of existing array-based storage such as Dell EMC PowerMax and PowerStore. IT can preserve storage investments while meeting the needs of mission-critical apps. Customers can use third-party storage management platforms if that is what they have installed.
- Leverages modern development tools: VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu enables VxBlock 1000 customers to support both traditional and cloud-native applications. VMware Cloud Foundation offers a single consistent architecture for containers and VMs, so customers can support modern development with VM apps residing alongside containerized apps in the same infrastructure.
- Reduces complexity: VxBlock 1000 converged infrastructure delivers a turnkey customer experience with a system that is engineered, manufactured, managed, supported and sustained as one. It combines compute, networking and storage with an advanced management platform and an “evergreen architecture” that can be refreshed as a whole or in part, using a single point of management.
- Future-proofs your investment: VxBlock 1000 customers can protect and dynamically allocate demanding workloads on VMware Cloud Foundation external storage using engineered vVols and VMware storage-based policy management.
Taking the next step
IT modernization is a process. Each application and workload has different needs, requirements and interdependencies. If you’re in IT, you are not necessarily looking for a silver bullet. Rather, you are looking for solutions that give you flexibility and allow you to move at your own pace, based on the needs of your organization.
Mission-critical applications are a special case, because you can’t afford to take unnecessary risks or be too hasty in trying to attempt a massive migration. Fortunately, the combination of Dell Technologies VxBlock 1000 with VMware Cloud Foundation gives you another viable path to hybrid cloud modernization with minimal risk and maximum benefits.
For more information on how the combination of Dell and VMware can help you achieve your mission-critical cloud, please visit DellTechnologies.com/VxBlock.
