Datacentre virtualisation: achieve higher efficiency while reducing complexity

Constantly under pressure to deliver more with less, forward thinking organisations are successfully using virtualisation to drive efficiencies into their datacentres — achieving full IT management automation, faster application and service delivery, energy savings and higher levels of business continuity.

Delivering quick, efficient, and cost-effective services to the organisation requires constantly matching the supply of IT resources with the growing demands of business applications. A tough task on its own, the current challenging economic cycle has put IT departments under additional pressure to satisfy this growing demand by squeezing more out of the resources they currently have.

Datacentre virtualisation enables IT departments to successfully achieve this by dramatically improving operational efficiency. Virtualisation drives efficiencies into the datacentre by consolidating server sprawl and reducing hardware requirements, streamlining management processes by standardising the environment, and exploiting under-utilised resources.

SYSDBA’s proven datacentre solutions, built on the industry’s leading virtualisation platform, VMware, enable IT teams to create a zero-touch compliant infrastructure for delivering self-service, with policy-driven controls that meet the most stringent business requirements. There are three integrated aspects to this solution: consolidation, management and business continuity, each building on the benefits of the other.

Key benefits:

• Reduce costs by consolidating hardware and increasing server utilisation

Don’t let server sprawl and platform dependencies prevent your organisation from achieving its goals. Cut capital and operating costs while increasing IT service delivery without being locked into limited choices of operating systems, applications, and hardware.

- Reduce hardware requirements by a 10:1 ratio or better
- Reduce hardware and operating costs by as much as 50% and energy costs by 80%
- Increase utilisation of existing hardware from 5-15% up to 80%
- Accelerate provisioning time by 50-70%

• Simplify IT management and automate your virtual infrastructure for peak performance

Manage and monitor virtual machines with different operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Netware, through a unified, single virtualisation platform. Enjoy the benefits of a single point of control and zero-touch automation designed into each architectural layer of the infrastructure.

- Manage virtual machines from a central location
- Monitor the performance of virtual machines and their hosts
- Avoid planned downtime with live migration of virtual machines
- Enable dynamic policy-based allocation of IT resources with automated load balancing
- Eliminate many repetitive configuration and maintenance tasks
- Enforce corporate security and licensing policies from central point of control
- Deliver policy-driven service assurance

• Reliable business continuity and disaster recovery

Implementing plans to ensure business continuity for IT infrastructure is an essential requirement for organisations today. Downtime of important applications is a costly proposition and extended downtime can even be fatal. Protect your data with non-disruptive backups, maintain high availability with live migration and fault tolerance capabilities for virtual machines, and build rapid and reliable automated disaster recovery plans without the cost of duplicating your datacentre infrastructure and the complexity of manual recovery.

- Enjoy full data protection for your IT infrastructure
- Build reliable and efficient disaster recovery plans
- Eliminate planned and unplanned downtime with high availability

Solution Components:

• Consolidation:
  
  - VMware vSphere™
  vSphere is the most complete and robust virtualisation platform, offering the highest levels of availability and responsiveness. The most demanding datacentres around the world depend on vSphere, virtualising business-critical applications with dynamic resource pools for unprecedented flexibility and reliability.
  
  - VMware vCenter Server
  Used daily by tens of thousands of customers worldwide, vCenter Server has become the proven management platform at the heart of the virtual datacentre, and the only choice for centrally managing services across the private cloud. vCenter Server also includes vCenter Orchestrator, giving administrators the ability to use out-of-the-box workflows to automate any of more than 800 virtualisation management tasks.
  
  - CiRBA Datacentre Intelligence
  CiRBA Datacentre Intelligence is analytics software that simultaneously analyses configuration, business and utilisation constraints, using sophisticated rules and algorithms, to optimise workload placements and resource allocations, whether planning transformations or managing capacity over the long term. Find out more
   
• Management:
  
  - VMware vCenter Product Family
  Simplify IT management with VMware vCenter virtualisation and cloud management solutions, creating a zero-touch infrastructure, with the built-in automation and policy-based control required to deploy a self-service model and deliver IT as a service. vCenter solutions help you accelerate IT service delivery, transform operational efficiency, automatically assure compliance, and reduce business risks.
  
  - VMware vCloud Director
  Pool virtual infrastructure resources in your existing datacentre and deliver them to users as a catalogue-based service. VMware vCloud Director enables you to build secure private clouds, transforming the way IT delivers and manages infrastructure services and the way users access and consume these services.
  
  - Zeus Traffic Manager
  Zeus Traffic Manager allows you to deliver fast, secure and available applications to your users at minimum infrastructure cost across any combination of physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. Find out more
   
• Business Continuity:
  
  - VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
  vCenter Site Recovery Manager makes disaster recovery rapid, reliable and manageable by providing leading disaster recovery management and automation for virtualised environments. Site Recovery Manager simplifies the setup of recovery procedures, enables non-disruptive testing of recovery plans, and automates failover when failures occur.
  
  - Zeus Global Manager
  Zeus Global Load Balancer is a powerful, easy-to-use Global Load Balancing solution that provides business continuity and improved customer experience by enabling failover and load balancing across globally-distributed datacentres. It is a DNS-based Global Server Load Balancing product that allows organisations to host business-critical services from multiple locations. Find out more
  
  - CiRBA Datacentre Intelligence
  CiRBA Datacentre Intelligence is analytics software that determines the optimal workload placements and resource allocations required to safely maximise the efficiency of cloud, virtual, and physical infrastructure. Find out more

Take back control of your IT infrastructure

Contact us to learn more about how your organisation will benefit from datacentre virtualisation.

SYSDBA is a certified VMware VAC (Value Added Consultant).