Enterprise Datacenter Solutions
The growth of computing and storage in enterprise datacenters has been exponential over the last decade. Complexity has substantially increased and budgets have had to increase to address this complexity.
Issues
- Budgets have been frozen or cut due to the recent economic challenges, but the needs of the business have not reduced. Moreover, to compete effectively in the current market, it is critical to do more with less.
- Low utilization, for example from provisioned virtual machines which subsequently become inactive, without the IT organization being notified.
- Increased complexity, particularly “virtual machine sprawl” has resulted in the need for more IT infrastructure personnel, but there is no budget for them. As a result, existing personnel are overstretched.
- Extended provisioning times, causing a lack of agility and frustration by “customers”.
- Lack of standards and interoperability has resulted in significant vendor lock-in, keeping both purchase and support costs artificially high.
- The electricity, cooling requirements and physical space required for Datacenter operations is becoming increasingly scarce.
Solution
The Abiquo solution provides:- A shared pool of physical computing resources controlled and managed by the IT organization.
- Delegated management of virtualized enterprises within appropriate resource limits.
- Automatic workload distribution according to policy.
- Self-service provisioning (and decommissioning) by the consumers of computing resources in their own timescale.
- Open standards and interoperability, including features such as automatic conversion between hypervisor types.
Benefits
- Significant reduction in the workload of the IT infrastructure organization, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks.
- Dramatically reduced provisioning times, increasing business agility and making short term and “what-if” projects feasible.
- Elimination of vendor lock-in. Even if the organization does not immediately plan to move to lower cost solutions, the fact that they have the ability to do so materially improves their negotiating ability.
- Compelling improvement in utilization, both through policy based workload management, and by the incentive for “customers” to decommission unused machines to release resources for their own re-use
- Reduced electricity, cooling and space requirements.
- Reduction in capital and running costs arising from the benefits above.
