From the early success of Cloud Foundation, it is clear that the value of an integrated cloud infrastructure platform has resonated with our customers. But many enterprises are still adopting a traditional approach to building infrastructure, one that requires specialized hardware, manual integrations and extensive ongoing administration. Making the switch to a modern, software defined approach can be a daunting task, one that not only has to be simple and fast, but as more pressure is put on IT budgets, must make business and financial sense as well. Luckily, Cloud Foundation delivers both, offering an enterprise ready cloud infrastructure platform that is easy and quick to set up, while also delivering compelling ROI with TCO savings of up to 40% against traditional approaches.
Building a Business Case:
Building a successful business case requires more than just an upfront cost comparison, but one that takes into consideration the impact on daily operations and the dynamic needs of the business. For Cloud Foundation, there are three key drivers of ROI and TCO savings:
- Integrated software defined stack that is built on a standardized design, leading to 6-8x faster time to market in deploying cloud infrastructure
- Scalable cloud infrastructure platform that allows you to start small and grow as needed while reducing CAPEX by up to 40%
- Automated lifecycle management of all day 0 and day 2 operations of the cloud infrastructure, reducing OPEX costs by up to 50%
Integrated Software Defined Stack:
Traditional infrastructure is built out of individual units; separate storage arrays, servers, networking, and virtualization, each requiring manual configuration and ongoing management. This approach requires complex and time consuming design work, testing, and integration that leads to operational inefficiencies and suboptimal levels of agility. With Cloud Foundation, compute, storage, and networking services are integrated into single platform that is built using a standardized, pre-validated and tested design, eliminating the need to rely on complex interoperability matrixes and lengthy design planning.
Take one of our early customers for example, VMware’s own internal One Cloud, who operates and manages one of the largest private clouds in the world. Prior to adopting Cloud Foundation, it took the One Cloud team over 60+ days to design, test, configure, and deploy their private cloud infrastructure. After deploying Cloud Foundation in their data center, the One Cloud team was able to reduce the time to deploy complete cloud infrastructure services in just 4.5 days!
Scalable Cloud Infrastructure:
Buying separate storage arrays, servers, and networking is not only complex to manage, but can be extremely expensive and rigid. Customers also have to predict the workloads they need for 3-5 years down the road, and then make large upfront investments with enough capacity to meet future requirements. Cloud Foundation eliminates the need to purchase expensive purpose built hardware by leveraging a hyper-converged architecture that transforms industry standard x86 with direct attached storage into cost effective, highly scalable building blocks, producing CAPEX savings of up to 50% against traditional SAN. In addition, this ability to scale as needed gives IT the freedom to start small with as little as 4 nodes, and scale one node at a time, eliminating the need for large initial investments and risk of over-buying.
Automated Lifecycle Management
Lastly, Cloud Foundation demonstrates a new level of ease of use with its unique lifecycle automation capabilities delivered through the SDDC Manager, which can reduce OPEX by up to 50%. The SDDC Manager automates the entire bring up, deployment, configuration, workload provisioning, and upgrade and patching of the cloud infrastructure. No more manual deployments and configurations that require lengthy designing and planning. No more piece meal upgrades that can easily break workloads and take months to rolls out. With the SDDC Manager, these tasks can be accomplished in a fraction of the time, so IT can now refocus their time away from building and maintaining their cloud infrastructure to innovating on top of it.
The combined CAPEX and OPEX savings generates up to 40% lower 3-yar TCO than the alternative traditional 3-tier approaches, and delivers a tremendous value proposition when building out modern cloud infrastructure.
For a deeper dive into the numbers, you can check out our TCO analysis conducted by the Taneja Group.
