ITAAS — USING EHC AND VCE TO BUILD YOUR DATA CENTER Sherif Mohsen Fadi Elhamy Systems Engineer Analyst SE Manager Presales TSSO, EMEA TSSO—EMC TSSO—EMC Table of Contents Executive Summary ................................................................................................................... 3 Converged Infrastructure: Is it the future of Private Clouds? ...................................................... 4 Is it a big market? ....................................................................................................................... 5 The VCE Story ........................................................................................................................... 6 Vblock Systems 340 and 720 Architectures ............................................................................... 7 EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud ...................................................................................................10 Business Challenges.................................................................................................................12 Key Components of EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud ...................................................................14 Data center virtualization and cloud management .....................................................................15 Building the Private Cloud Data Center on Vblock ....................................................................18 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................20 Appendix ...................................................................................................................................21 References ...............................................................................................................................22 Disclaimer: The views, processes or methodologies published in this article are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect EMC Corporation’s views, processes or methodologies. 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2 Executive Summary The IT world is changing, from inflexible older models where IT had to fulfill every request for each employee in the organization, to the rise of Public Cloud providers who offer more flexible alternatives which contribute to agile delivery of IT resources to the business users, to the rise of the Private Cloud model which replicates the Public Cloud model only with additional security as the resources are located within the safe zone of the customer infrastructure. Today, the trend is toward Hybrid Cloud technology, which incorporates the use of the Private Cloud while offloading some resources to the Public Cloud. Although this technology is very appealing, it is also very challenging to implement a complete solution which empowers the business users to request services without needing to revert every time to the IT department. We want the IT department to focus on more value-added services and automate the trivial self- recurring tasks. In this article, we discuss the concept of Converged Infrastructure, VCE Vblock® solutions, and the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. Thousands of hours of engineering work have been invested in these solutions in order to empower the IT to be a broker of services and act as a service provider to business users. 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 3 Converged Infrastructure: Is it the future of Private Clouds? In today’s environments, data centers which serve as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for the companies’ Private Cloud has become very complex. The wide variety and options for selecting storage vendors, networking vendors, servers, and virtualization platforms which motivates the Private Cloud Management and Consumption models, compel companies to look for ways to simplify implementation and management of their Private Cloud environments. In the past, implementing such an environment required weeks or months, taking into consideration that the technical and financial departments must make decisions from a wide variety of vendors. Moreover, a main issue which has always consumed a big part of the planning was how to get support, i.e. if we have an issue in our infrastructure, is it due to the servers, switches, storage etc.? This led to the lack of accountability and sometimes finger pointing regarding the root cause of a problem. Converged Infrastructure emerged to solve these complex issues. The concept was to offload the many hours needed to guarantee integration of the different components of the Private Cloud to the vendor, and deliver data center components to the customer as an appliance in a form factor that can be centrally managed. The goal of a converged infrastructure is to minimize compatibility issues and simplify management of servers, storage systems, and network devices while reducing costs for cabling, cooling, power, and floor space. Now customers have a single point of contact they can refer to in cases where technical support is required. From a vendor perspective, the benefits include the ability to solidify their footprint with a customer in various areas of their IT and grow with the customer business. On a high level, the converged infrastructure market can be divided into three distinct categories: Integrated Workload Systems: Server, storage, and network integrated with database and/or application software to provide appliance or appliance-like functionality. Integrated Infrastructure Systems: Server, storage. and network integrated to provide shared compute infrastructure. Integrated Reference Architectures: Products in which predefined, pre-sized components are designated as options for an integrated system, whereby the user can make configuration choices between the predefined options. 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 4 Is it a big market? As shown in Figure 1, IDC estimates that total worldwide spending on converged infrastructure will reach $17.8 billion in 2016, up from $4.6 billion in 2012. Converged infrastructure will account for 12.8 percent of total storage, server, networking, and software spending by 2016, up from only 3.9 percent in 20121. Figure 11 Figure 2 depicts factors that may influence customers’ selection of Converged Infrastructure vendors: Figure 21 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 5 The VCE Story VCE began in November of 2009 when the leaders of the three companies – EMC, Cisco, and VMware – announced an unprecedented collaborative effort designed to deliver IT infrastructure to customers as a single entity through VCE. The first Vblock system was introduced in 2010 and VCE enabled a global community of systems integrators, service providers, channel partners, and independent software vendors (ISVs) to simplify customer engagement and provide leading sales, service, and support. Figure 3 illustrates some facts and figures for VCE. Figure 32 On a high level, Figure 4 illustrates the VCE offerings (please note VCE continues to sell more Vblock System 720s until such time as EMC makes it economically attractive to transition customers to the Vblock System 740): 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 6 Figure 43 Vblock Systems 340 and 720 Architectures Vblock 340 The Vblock 340 system is a converged infrastructure solution with high agility. It meets the needs of virtualized data centers, cloud environments, and service provider implementations. Vblock 340 features include: VCE engineering expertise are utilized to configure VDI, SAP, Exchange, and mixed workloads based on performance and sizing requirements. Customers can easily scale their resources as required which contributes to high agility and flexibility Supports the EMC VNX® Rockies storage arrays Utilizes vSphere 5.5 to extend support for business-critical applications and new workloads Vblock System Management via the VCE Vision Intelligent Operations Figure 5 provides a high-level overview of the components in the Vblock 340 architecture. 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Figure 54 Vblock 720 The Vblock 720 is an enterprise and service-provider class system which incorporates many components, including: EMC Symmetrix® VMAX 10K, EMC Symmetrix 20K, or EMC Symmetrix 40K (Optional) EMC VNX VG2 Gateway or EMC VNX VG8 Gateway (Optional) EMC RecoverPoint Cisco UCS Manager EMC Unisphere® for VMAX on Windows VMware vSphere Server Enterprise, vSphere 5.5, Plus VMware vCenter Server Figure 6 provides more information: 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 8 Figure 65 2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 9 EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) empowers IT to be a Service Provider for internal employees of the company, providing the best of both worlds; Private Cloud and Public Cloud support. In today’s complex IT environments, providing the IT services requested by employees is a time-consuming task involving methods and procedures that have to be followed by the employee to request the service, and service level agreements (SLAs) which govern the relation between IT and the employee. EHC solves this complex environment by providing a self-service portal where employees requiring service can request it without having to revert to IT. Thousands of hours have been invested by the EMC Engineering Team to facilitate provisioning of IT services and providing a marketplace of services that can be used by employees/users of this service. Moreover, EHC can provide end-users and developers