White paper Simplifying journey to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure

White Paper Simplifying journey to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure

The world is going hybrid with workloads running on-premises, off-premises and in the public cloud. That is why it is extremely important that IT infrastructures you deploy on your premises are Hybrid IT enabled. Let us investigate how Fujitsu’s PRIMEFLEX family of integrated systems can help you simplify the journey to hybrid cloud

Content

The world is going hybrid 2

Inside-out and outside-in 2 What is the impact of Hybrid IT on IT operations? 3 On-premises infrastructures need to be “Hybrid IT Enabled” 4 VMware environments 4 environments 5 Nutanix environments 5 Self-service portal 6 SAP environments 7 Which PRIMEFLEX are “Hybrid IT Enabled”? 7 Fujitsu – a one-stop shop for Hybrid IT 8 Summary 8

Intel® Xeon® processor

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White paper Simplifying journey to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure

The world is going hybrid Workloads have always been the reason for IT to exist. With today’s flexibility in placing workloads differently, there is no longer a need to simply run all workloads in your own data center, which was the dominating option for placing workloads in the past. This share has been decreasing over time in favor of off-premises, meaning hosting in the data center of a service provider, and public cloud. Analysts predict that by 2022, the 3 workload placement options will be at par in terms of spending, with an ever increasing share of off-premises and public cloud thereafter, while the share of on-premises will go on shrinking.

However, the combined share of on-premises and off-premises will still be greater than the public cloud share in the foreseeable future. This is basically in line with what we have perceived from the market in the recent past: a decrease in the importance of public cloud (after a serious rise had been predicted at the beginning of the hype). In the past we often saw analysts overestimating new trends. If we assume at least a slight overestimation here too, the importance of on-premises and off-premises combined will even be greater than the one of public cloud.

As on- and an off-premises infrastructures only differ in the location where they are hosted, either in your own data center or in the data center of a service provider, we will no longer make the distinction of both in this paper. Whenever we speak of on-premises, we include all placement options except to public cloud.

However, the fact that all workload placement options still have a considerable share is not surprising, because there is not the one and only ideal placement option for any workload. The ideal solution for an enterprise is a blend of different placement options; and that’s exactly what hybrid IT is about. Analysts predicted that by the end of 2020, about 90% of organizations would adopt a hybrid infrastructure, which underlines that the world is going hybrid.

Inside-out and outside-in There are basically two approaches of organizations going hybrid, depending on where they are coming from. Those that have had a strong focus on traditional IT operations in their on-premises data centers will take the inside-out approach, extending their existing infrastructure with common management experience to the public cloud. And there are good reasons for it. They may want to add capacity for peak times without investing in additional equipment which would be unutilized most of the time. They may want to reduce their primary data center footprint in general. They may need to expand their IT to other geographies (distributing applications closest to the end user) instantly without going through the lengthy process of closing a contract with a local hosting provider. They may want to build DR (disaster recovery) capacities in the public cloud rather than in an own secondary data center, reducing their costs drastically. Or they just want to achieve the agility to rapidly react on new business demands, e.g. using DevOps.

Those that have primarily consumed public cloud services (applying to start-ups or small agile companies) will take the outside-in approach, expanding cloud-native footprint and public cloud benefits to their on-premises locations. Reasons may be workloads that have to cope with short latencies, or disconnected solutions where a permanent connectivity to the public cloud is not ensured. In these cases, it is rather recommended to process data locally where it is generated and aggregate the results for further analytics in the cloud. Moreover, there may be regulatory requirements, or security and privacy demands which do not allow running certain workloads in the public cloud. And finally, in certain cases, there may also be the wish to have full control over the respective workloads.

With micro-services and DevOps methodology, we see an ever increasing number of applications developed in a cloud environment. These “cloud-native” applications (or applications born in the cloud) are developed also for being run on-premises; they are one of the key drivers for the outside-in approach.

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White paper Simplifying journey to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure

What is the impact of Hybrid IT on IT operations? With traditional IT operations, business users request services from the IT organization, which in turn manages the data center infrastructure and plans the required capacities. The IT organization also provisions the IT services on the infrastructure, which is usually a virtualized one, based on virtualization technologies from VMware, Microsoft, or others. The data center infrastructure will deliver the IT services which will then finally be consumed by the business users.

Traditional IT operations can be improved by using converged infrastructures with external storage, hyper-converged infrastructures or even completely software-defined data centers (SDDC) with everything virtualized, giving you much more flexibility compared with traditional operations from the past. It’s true that the consumption model with a hyper-converged infrastructure or an SDDC based on a hyper-converged architecture may look similar to the cloud model; however this is not Hybrid IT yet.

We speak of Hybrid IT, if the data center infrastructure spreads across your own data center and one or multiple public clouds. What needs to be done in order to prepare for consuming cloud services? You create a cloud account, receive authentication data, establish the connectivity between your on-premises data center and the public cloud, and then you may already order the cloud services. This can easily be done by each line of business, but ideally this is done by the IT administrator, who will also handle the resource allocation overall. Management happens holistically and consistently across locations. Between the business unit and the IT organization, the interface remains unchanged. I.e. for business users it is totally transparent where IT services they consume are delivered from, whether they are delivered from the on-premises data center or the public cloud.

Another level of quality can be achieved by introducing a self-service portal which allows service provisioning without involvement of the IT organization. The administrator will once define the services that may be requested, and he will govern, but no longer handle the allocation of resources.

Business users will request services via the portal, and the service requests will be forwarded to the infrastructure underneath. Depending on how the services have been defined, they will be delivered either from the on-premises data center or the public cloud in a consistent manner, and can then be consumed by the business users. In this use case, the self-service portal represents the abstraction layer between the business unit and IT, which ensures consistency and transparency.

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White paper Simplifying journey to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure

On-premises data center infrastructures need to be “Hybrid IT Enabled” As described in the previous section, on-premises data centers and the public cloud should not be separated worlds. They should be integrated and complement each other. This requires that your on-premises infrastructure has the capability to be easily used in a hybrid IT scenario. We denote an infrastructure having this capability as “Hybrid IT Enabled”. A hybrid IT enabled on-premises infrastructure ensures the consistency needed to let both sides appear as of one cast.

As nowadays people intend to get data center infrastructures built fast and without any risk, the hybrid IT readiness of integrated systems deserves a particular attention. That’s why we will have a closer look at FUJITSU Integrated System PRIMEFLEX and figure out which portfolio elements of the PRIMEFLEX family deserve the “Hybrid IT Enabled” stamp.

VMware environments At first, let us have a look at a VMware environment on-premises with multiple virtual servers based on VMware vSphere, while VMware vCenter is used for infrastructure management.

If you want to extend your existing VMware-based on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud for any of the reasons described earlier, it is recommended to choose a cloud service, which is also based on VMware technologies, e.g. VMware Cloud on AWS (). Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, this cloud service integrates vSphere, vSAN and NSX along with VMware vCenter management, so that IT teams can manage their cloud-based resources with familiar VMware tools.

Included in the subscription for VMware Cloud on AWS is VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX), a , enabling a transparent networking, which is the foundation for a consistent management across locations. The live-migration of virtual machines between locations without any disruption does not even require the same version of VMware vSphere; any-to-any vSphere is supported. The only prerequisite is that the vSphere version must be v5 or higher.

Attractive in this context is the “Hybrid Loyalty Program”. Customers with an on-premises VMware environment will consume cloud services from VMware Cloud on AWS at reduced fees. Thus, they benefit twice from going hybrid: they achieve a transparent management with the same toolset, and they can reduce their expenditures.

VMware Cloud on AWS is hosted in AWS data centers. Hence, workloads running in VMware Cloud on AWS can quickly and easily access a broad range of modern AWS cloud services. Since the modern workloads are typically analytics and the like, they can benefit from the fact that the majority of the data they need is already in the AWS data center, and thus long transmission times and large transmission costs can be avoided.

By using VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) in addition to VMware Cloud Foundation, the business user himself is able to request new services on the application layer via the self-service portal of vRealize Automation. VMware vRealize Automation will ensure an automated application deployment and resource handling. Metering and charging functionality is provided by vRealize Business for Cloud. Workload balancing between on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS is achieved by vRealize Operations.

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White paper Simplifying journey to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure

VMware’s vRealize Suite is deeply integrated with VMware products on all layers, and its focus is clearly on a pure VMware stack.

In terms of integrated systems, Fujitsu addresses VMware environments in on-premises data centers by PRIMEFLEX for VMware vSphere (a converged infrastructure system based on VMware vSphere, with external storage from Fujitsu), PRIMEFLEX for VMware vSAN (a hyper-converged infrastructure system based on VMware vSAN) and PRIMEFLEX for VMware Cloud Foundation (a software-defined data center based on VMware Cloud Foundation), which consequently can all be called “Hybrid IT Enabled”.

Microsoft environments Let us have a look at on-premises Microsoft environments now. Multiple virtual servers based on Hyper-V are deployed, where either Microsoft System Center or Admin Center is used for the infrastructure management.

When it comes to extending your existing Microsoft-based on-premises infrastructure to support public cloud to create a hybrid environment for any of the reasons described earlier, Microsoft’s Azure stack HCI solution can be provisioned to access or connect to Azure cloud services. Choosing this route, Windows Admin Center can be enabled to connect to Azure Cloud and a consistent management across locations. By connecting your on-premises infrastructure to Azure, various hybrid scenarios are immediately enabled. Examples are Azure Network Adapter (VPN to Azure), Azure Backup, Azure File Sync, Windows Storage Replica, Azure Update Management and Azure Site Recovery, which includes the replication capability for virtual machines (Hyper-V replica), hence increasing availability.

Windows Admin Center can be downloaded and used free of charge.

In terms of integrated systems, Fujitsu addresses Microsoft environments in on-premises data centers by the hyper-converged infrastructure system PRIMEFLEX for Stack HCI, which consequently can be denoted as “Hybrid IT Enabled”. Fujitsu also enables customers running Microsoft’s hyper-converged infrastructure leverage RedHat Openshift to connect to Azure or any other cloud services of choice.

Nutanix environments After having dealt with VMware and Microsoft environments, we are going to have a closer look at on-premises environments with multiple virtual servers based on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS. Nutanix supports multiple hypervisors including their own Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) or other hypervisors, such as VMware ESX. On each physical server with AHV, a controller virtual machine (CVM) is required that takes over the storage management. Nutanix Prism is used for infrastructure management, infrastructure monitoring and capacity management, all done through a few mouse clicks. For automated application deployment and application-specific orchestration, Nutanix Calm may optionally be added.

If you intend to leverage Disaster Recovery (DRaaS) instead of building a secondary data center for DR purposes, Nutanix Xi Leap is worth consideration. You just select the desired subscription service, connect the on-premises cluster to Nutanix Xi public cloud, and Xi Leap takes care of the rest. Infrastructure management will be fully transparent. Because Xi Leap runs the same Nutanix as the on-premises cluster, you need not worry about any impact of a different application platform.

Both Prism and Calm include a self-service portal enabling easy deployment of resources through easy-to-use and customizable templates defined by IT.

Especially for organizations that are using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Nutanix Clusters on AWS will be an attractive hybrid cloud extension for on-premises Nutanix-based infrastructures. You just connect to AWS while using your existing AWS account, VPC (), VPN (Virtual Private Network) or Direct Connect configuration, request your virtual machine on a bare-metal EC2 instance (Elastic Compute Cloud)

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White paper Simplifying journey to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure and deploy the Nutanix software in the virtual machine. Prism Central ensures a transparent management across locations. An additional advantage of going this route is that you have a direct access to other AWS cloud services.

In terms of integrated systems, Fujitsu addresses Nutanix environments in on-premises data centers by PRIMEFLEX for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud (a hyper-converged infrastructure system with pre-installed Nutanix software), which consequently can all be called “Hybrid IT enabled”. Fujitsu is the 1st vendor in the market to offer Nutanix based Intel SELECT solution which is optimized for analytics, workspace and general-purpose hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) workloads. The system is also optimized and certified on SAP HANA which boosts performance for data-rich business applications such as the in-memory data analytics applications.

Self-service portal If the end user is to be able to request new cloud services, a self-service portal will be needed. As shown before, the vRealize Suite from VMware incorporates such a function, but in a real hybrid scenario, its usage is primarily focused on pure VMware stacks.

If you need a self-service portal, which triggers deployment and allows acknowledgement and metering fully automated across multiple platforms, such as VMware, Microsoft, OpenStack and others, Fujitsu’s Enterprise Service Catalog Manager (ESCM) should be taken into consideration. Existing infrastructure silos will still be managed separately (e.g. a VMware silo, a Microsoft silo and an OpenStack silo); the ESCM will be a single window offering IT services based on one or even several of these infrastructures, bringing things together in this heterogeneous environment. For the end user it will be fully transparent where the services he consumes are provided from.

However, Fujitsu’s ESCM cannot only provide IaaS to end users; it finds its place also beyond. It includes a large number of connectors to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS platforms, as well as to other software frameworks. SAP is a prominent example beyond IaaS.

And ESCM is not restricted to the on-premises world. With its various connectors, it can connect to cloud services like SFDC (.com) and Microsoft Office 365, thus enabling your IT team to become a real cloud service broker (as opposed to a pure service provider). This way, the consumption of cloud services is tracked, and governance is much easier to accomplish by avoiding shadow IT.

ESCM can be completed by FUJITSU Cloud Service PICCO (Profile, Insight, Cost and Capacity Optimization), enabling a dynamic optimization of IT costs in a multi-cloud environment in real-time.

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White paper Simplifying journey to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure

SAP environments SAP software is run by many businesses of different sizes. If you run your SAP software on-premises and there is a demand for additional SAP systems, the end user will request new resources in the cloud via the ESCM self-service portal and trigger LNW-Soft PMS Cloud Bridge, able to orchestrate resources across locations. LNW-Soft PMS Cloud Bridge will move SAP systems into the cloud and allow an unattended software deployment. During operation, it will take over the movement of data whenever needed, and conduct an end-to-end monitoring – on-premises and in the cloud.

Typically, SAP-related data center infrastructures are designed in a way that e.g. tier-1 SAP systems can be deployed on-premises, while tier-2 systems are placed in the cloud.

If you run both, tier-1 and tier-2 SAP systems on-premises and the business experiences performance bottlenecks, it is common to move tier-2 systems into the cloud, while freeing resources on-premises for tier-1 systems. In order to avoid long-lasting data migration when moving the SAP systems into the cloud, it is highly recommended to proactively request and replicate data into the cloud.

Fujitsu’s PRIMEFLEX family of integrated systems includes two SAP-related portfolio elements: PRIMEFLEX for SAP HANA and PRIMEFLEX for SAP Landscapes powered by Fujitsu’s unique FlexFrame Orchestrator software. They fit perfectly into the described hybrid IT scenario and therefore deserve the “Hybrid IT Enabled” stamp.

Except to that, both the hyper-converged infrastructure systems PRIMEFLEX for VMware vSAN and PRIMEFLEX for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud are certified for SAP HANA and can run SAP HANA, SAP applications and even non-SAP applications. By means of LNW-Soft PMS Cloud Bridge they can also be easily extended to major public cloud services.

Which PRIMEFLEX are “Hybrid IT Enabled”? We started with the objective to figure out how PRIMEFLEX is positioned in the hybrid IT world and which of the PRIMEFLEX systems would be “Hybrid IT Enabled”. After having worked through all scenarios, the answer to the initial question is crystal-clear: All PRIMEFLEX systems, without any exception, deserve to get the “Hybrid IT Enabled” stamp. They seamlessly integrate with any public cloud service, ensuring a consistent user experience across locations. PRIMEFLEX is excellently positioned in all scenarios. Hence, PRIMEFLEX is a family of Hybrid IT Enabled Integrated Systems.

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White paper Simplifying journey to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure

Fujitsu – a one-stop shop for Hybrid IT It is not just PRIMEFLEX integrated systems, which are excellently positioned for hybrid IT; it is Fujitsu as a whole. Hybrid IT is a simple term, but incorporates many aspects and components. These are data center products, such as servers, storage, network and software. These may be integrated systems an all-encompassing infrastructure management, reducing complexity, time and risk when building data center infrastructures, and increasing operational efficiency. Product-related services are needed as a supplement to the products. As not every organization has the resources, skills and capabilities to manage infrastructures, Managed Infrastructure Services may be required. Hosting services are needed, if you don’t have enough space on your premises. Cloud services are needed whenever new IT services should become available fast and cost-effectively. Hybrid IT consulting services may be needed to identify the optimum blend of sourcing options. And workload migration services are demanded to move workloads between infrastructures in a simple manner. And last but not least: a service catalog management which brings all sourcing options together making the consumption of IT services fully transparent for the end user. Fujitsu covers all of this, either by itself or strong alliances with leading edge partners, being a one-stop shop for Hybrid IT.

Summary As workloads are different, we will need different workload placement options; and this means we need Hybrid IT. It is important that Hybrid IT is driven by IT in a controlled way, aligned with other stakeholders. Depending on where an organization is coming from, Hybrid IT is either achieved by an inside-out or an outside-in approach. Hybrid can happen on the infrastructure level managed by IT, or on the workload level via business self-service.

The challenge for every organization is to choose the ideal blend. By means of its neutral hybrid IT consulting, Fujitsu will support you in overcoming this challenge. Fujitsu is a one-stop shop for Hybrid IT, having all the capabilities to master Hybrid IT. And when it comes to on-premises data center infrastructures, Fujitsu offers PRIMEFLEX which is a family of hybrid IT enabled integrated systems, which can be deployed and operated in an easy and efficient way.

For more information » http://www.fujitsu.com/primeflex

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