by Rich Bourdeau
Active Networks improves IT Service delivery while increasing data center security by leveraging VMware vRealize Automation and NSX.
It’s all about delivering applications faster
Increasingly it’s not sufficient for IT to just get faster at delivering compute, storage, security and network infrastructure services. These infrastructure services lay the foundation for business applications. However, by themselves they are just components, pieces to a larger puzzle. After the infrastructure services have been delivered, it is very common for developers and other engineers to takes 2-3 weeks configuring these infrastructure resources into a complete working application environment.
Many companies with DevOps initiatives are focusing on accelerating the delivery of the entire application environment. This includes the machines that will run the various components of the application (e.g. web, app, DB), the interaction and dependencies of these component machines as well as the network connectivity and security necessary to deliver secure high performing applications to developers, test engineers and even production environments.
Active Networks a leader in Activity and Participant Management™ and data solutions, was looking at accelerating the delivery of new functionality to their 55,000 customers. As a cloud based services provider, the ability to deliver on demand access to complete application environments for their developers and business users was key to the success of their business. A summary of their story is provided below, but the full story is available here.
The Objective
- Remove bottlenecks and manual processes to getting developers new application instances
- Improve consistency and quality of deployed applications
- Secure Active Networks multi-tenant cloud environment through the use of isolation and micro-segmentation
- Optimize the utilization of the company’s current infrastructure and improve the return on capital.
The Solution
- VMware vRealize Automation – standardizes and automates the delivery of complete application environments for development, test and production.
- VMware NSX enforces multi-tenant security and provides application centric network and security that is automatically updated through adds, changes and deletions
- vRealize Automation powers the reclamation of inactive resources increasing IT efficiency and savings
The Results
- Improve Application Delivery from weeks to minutes
eliminating bottlenecks that resulted in delays of new services for their customers - Automate the application of NSX security policies
Standardized policy enforcement with both tenant and application level granularity - Reduce Infrastructure costs
By eliminating the need for developers to keep inactive applications hanging around to avoid the long delay in getting a new one.
“We developed our own security model that VMware vRealize Automation could adhere to and then security policy was just automatically applied to any new instance via NSX. With this approach we’re taking our application deployment times down from as much as 10 weeks to as little as a few minutes.”
Tommy McNicholas, Manager of Global IT Operations, ACTIVE Network
“Using this new SDI strategy, we decrease our build time by an order of magnitude, enhance our build quality assurance, and do so with a lower resource commit.”
Nate Motyl, Vice President of Global Technology Operations, ACTIVE Network
Learn More
To learn more about how vRealize Automation and NSX can be used to deploy and maintain your micro-segmentation security see the following resources:
- Whitepaper: Data Center Micro-Segmentation
A Software Defined Data Center Approach for a “Zero Trust” Security Strategy. - Tech Note: vRealize Automation and NSX Micro-Segmentation
How to configure vRealize Automation policies for Micro Segmentation. - VMware vRealize Automation
- VMware NSX network virtualization platform
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