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 data center infrastructures need to be “Hybrid IT Enabled” 4 VMware environments 4 Microsoft 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 Page 1 of 8 http://www.fujitsu.com/primeflex 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. Page 2 of 8 http://www.fujitsu.com/primeflex 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. Page 3 of 8 http://www.fujitsu.com/primeflex 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 (Amazon Web Services). 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 virtual appliance, enabling a transparent networking, which is the foundation for a consistent management across locations.