Remember when phone numbers were tied to a physical location or a specific wireless carrier? It used to be that moving to a new location, getting a new device, or switching carriers required a new a phone number along with a new operating system, time spent manually copying contacts, and a lot of hoping that nothing was forgotten.
To learn more about how your next server refresh can be the first step in building a Digital Foundation visit our website or sign up to one of our Hit Refresh webinar series.
Today, phone numbers travel seamlessly with users to minimize switching costs. In the mobile phone market, standards based on the SIM card provide a digital foundation that allows mobile users to switch devices, select locations, or change carriers without changing numbers or losing contacts.
It’s now time for data centers to adopt a digital foundation so that applications can move effortlessly across the hybrid cloud and across infrastructure that supports a common cross-cloud operational model. It’s time for the software-defined data center to show how the lessons of the mobile phone market can be applied to modern datacenters.
Defining the Digital Foundation
In an ideal world, IT teams would have a common foundation, a Digital Foundation, that extends across systems, whether deployed at the edge, the core, or the cloud. Any application could run on any cloud and on any server, similar to how with today’s phones you have the same number, same contacts, and same apps regardless of the device or the network you use.
To achieve this long-term vision, a true Digital Foundation is needed. This Digital Foundation should break down the specialized data center silos of compute, storage, and networking by virtualizing them all on top of hyper-converged infrastructure, and by providing common, simple management and automation for the entire virtualized stack, extending to multiple public clouds across the globe. To deliver this sleek new operational experience, the Digital Foundation has to be independent of specialized hardware and needs to be fully supported by a large number of vendors on many different server configurations. Only then would the customer have full investment protection to run any app, from any cloud, on any device.
Evolving Your Environment
Building the Digital Foundation takes time, and an evolutionary approach is a natural way to go. Most organizations have started on this journey by virtualizing their environment with vSphere. Being fully integrated with vSphere, VMware vSAN is the natural next step to virtualize storage. And by adding NSX, customers have a complete Digital Foundation that is managed through vCenter.
What about the ability to run your applications on any cloud? VMware is taking care of that part. Our entire software stack is available for consumption on VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud, and hundreds of our partners that participate in the VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP). These partnerships enable our customers to run their applications on the cloud of their choice, take advantage of cloud economics, or build on the availability of public clouds with offerings such as DRaaS.
Taking the First Step
The ideal opportunity to take the next step and to virtualize storage is your next server refresh. VMware has partnered with Intel so that customers can take advantage of the latest development in server and in storage technologies.
To learn more about how your next server refresh can be the first step in building a Digital Foundation visit our website or sign up to one of our Hit Refresh webinar series.
