by Rich Bourdeau
It’s all about the Applications
As an IT manager, your goal is to empower the business to become more agile by providing IT services to the business quicker. However, if you are only automating the delivery of infrastructure services you are only solving part the problem.
While it may only take minutes to provision a virtual machine our customers tell us their process for delivering a fully configured VM to their customers takes on average 2-3 days. When complete, IT hands over these VMs to the Development group where it typically take another 2-3 weeks to configure a complex multi-tier application environments including the dependencies, security,network configurations and testing required to make sure they work.
Getting faster at delivering infrastructure helps improve the time required to deploy an application, but it’s really only addressing about 10-20% of the total problem. Unfortunately many companies have been organized in silos where IT Operations takes the responsibility for providing the infrastructure. Then Development takes that infrastructure and configures it into the application environments that they need to develop, test, and run the applications they drive the business.
Here are examples of two companies who have taken steps to break down the barriers between IT Operations and Application Development with a private cloud that empowers them to become more agile at delivering applications quicker.
EMC Turns to VMware vRealize Suite to Transform Database Provisioning and Management
EMC had virtualized its mission-critical databases. Even so, the process of spinning up a new database server typically took two weeks, involving 14 teams and seven distinct phases. The lag was becoming unacceptable. Lines of business couldn’t wait for IT and started exploring alternatives.
By automating database provisioning and management EMC’s IT department was able to slash the time it took to spin up a new database server by 99 percent to under an hour. It eliminated 14 to 24 hours of manual effort for each request. Every new database is now built identically, providing much greater stability and reliability. Operational monitoring provided IT admins the information and guidance needed to keep their databases running at peak performance. To learn more about EMC deployment of DB as a Service here is additional information.
- EMC Accelerates Database Delivery – Case Study (2 Pages)
- EMC IT Database-as-a-Service Deployment Guide (39 pages)
Automated Application Delivery a Big Win for Both IT Development and Operations at VMware
VMware needs to continually deploy and update a portfolio of 40+ in-house and packaged applications. In the past when a developer or test engineer needed an application environment, they would schedule a meeting with IT Operations to kick off the multi-week provisioning process. Delivery was coordinated across multiple administrators using a work order ticketing system.
Now users can go online and request a new application environment and receive a fully tested system in less than 24 hours. Users now receive a link to their new application environment which includes log-in credentials and a dashboard that can be used to monitor the performance. The result was over $6M in cost savings in both infrastructure and operational costs. While cost savings are important, Improving service delivery times and predictability/quality of the application environments was VMware’s primary motivation. To learn more about how VMware broke down the barriers between development and IT Operations here is some additional information.
- VMware IT Automated Application Delivery Case Study (2 Pages)
- Automated SDLC Provisioning – A Big Win for both Dev and Ops at VMware (Video 10:00 min)
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