JOURNEY TO IT AS A SERVICE POWERED BY

SOFTWARE-DEFINED DATA CENTERS

I NTRODUCTI ON
Modern business is an around-the-clock proposition. Better connectivity, enhanced global
transport capabilities, and increasingly interdependent economic systems have led to
global competition, with enterprises competing with others around the world for a finite
market of potential customers. This places todays IT department under increasing
pressure to enable top-line business results with the applications and solutions it
providesdespite stagnant budgets, staff that is comfortable working in outdated IT
models, and little time or resource to educate them about something new. The need for
IT to change is afoot; and technology exists that can help IT achieve transformative
business results.
Virtualization is a foundation of todays data centers, and the benefits of cloud computing
are becoming gradually more apparent. While these technologies are providing tangible
benefits and efficiencies today, technologies and their resulting benefits can be expanded
as business demands increase. The IT department of the future will require an entirely
new model of operation, shifting from a back-office provisioning and management
organization to a solution-oriented, strategic technology leader of the business. By
leveraging the benefits of virtualization and cloud, IT can transform itself into a service
provider to the business, providing employees, partners, and customers with access to all
IT resources as a service. In this way, IT shifts from the old, reactive provisioning and
management organization to a proactive organization dedicated to innovation and
productivity solutions.
The underlying data center architecture enabling this shift is the software-defined data
center, or SDDC. The SDDC architecture allows most of an enterprise ITs compute,
storage, networking, security, and availability infrastructure and resources to be:
abstracted and defined in software
pooled together as an enterprise-wide resource
delivered as a service that is managed by automated, intelligent, policy -driven
software
For businesses beginning their IT transformation journey, choosing the right data center
architecture today can provide smooth sailing on the course to an IT as a Service (ITaaS)
transformation.


In this white paper, Stratecast examines the business forces that are driving the evolution
of data centers away from traditional models and toward an SDDC architecture that
enables businesses to deliver IT as a Service. We delve into the SDDC architecture from
the standpoint of technology and operational models, and show how a software-based
data center architecture offers IT organizations the transformational efficiencies, agility,
control, and choice necessary to maximize business profitability and operational benefits
derived from an ITaaS delivery model.
CHALLENGES THAT DRI VE I T TRANSFORMATI ON
In order to become more competitive in the global economy, businesses must face
several challenging trends and realities. These business trends include:
24 x 7 x 365 business The concept of the workday is becoming obsolete, as
customers and employees expect to do business around the clock. This means
that IT must keep IT infrastructure, applications and services running with
minimal interruption or downtime.
Geographically dispersed teams, partners, and customers Stakeholders
expect to work from anywhere, via any device and network. This places the
burden on IT to support mobile applications from different operating systems,
while ensuring application performance remains consistent.
Social business Employees, partners, and even customers expect to interact
online at any time that a colleague is available. IT enables this with improved
collaboration and communications tools like unified communication, presence and
video conferencing.
Tech-savvy employees As employees experience new types of consumer
technology, their expectations about how technology should be accessed and
used increases. This consumerization of IT escalates employee expectations and
drives IT to provide new solutions and methods to access them, while caring for
factors like security, privacy and regulatory compliance.
Hypercompetitive global markets As businesses seek to increase agility
and drive costs out of the business, IT is pressured to respond to increasingly
urgent line of business needs.
While these advances have helped to close the gap between business demands and IT
capabilities, the burden remains. Technology must support the following business drivers:
Drive new revenue
Make the business more competitive
Move the business closer to customers
Improve the operational costs of the business
Make employees more productive


In spite of heightened demands, IT budgets have remained largely stagnant in the past
five years. In a May 2013 Stratecast survey of IT decision makers, more than half of
enterprises surveyed expected their budgets to either remain the same or decrease in
the coming year. Capital expenditures face the heaviest constraints, but operating
budgets are also under increased scrutiny. Despite these constraints, the IT department
is expected to help drive business results with each passing year, while maintaining
security and privacy of customer data, and complying with regulatory rules. This
situation, where business needs increase and IT is expected to rise to the challenge,
continues perpetually and is unmanageable for IT.
THE I T EVOLUTI ON J OURNEY
To respond to these challenges, IT departments are beginning to recognize that they
need to transform the traditional, labor- and capital-intense operating model into
something more efficient. Many have turned to newer IT models, such as virtualization
and cloud computing, to introduce cost and operating efficiencies. One of the prime
benefits of these models is that they can be evolved and expanded throughout the data
center to support future business needs.
In this section, we outline the IT Evolution Journey that successful companies will need
to undertake to thrive in a global marketplace.
Layi ng the Foundati on: Vi rtual i zati on
Virtualization of the data center infrastructure, and specifically server virtualization, is
generally the first step enterprises take in their IT evolution process towards an SDDC
architecture.
In a virtualized server environment, application and infrastructure workloads are
deployed on all-inclusive virtual machines (VMs), which contain application code,
operating system, and configuration instructions in a self -contained package. Because the
operating and deployment logic resides with the application code, rather than separately
on the server, the VM can be easily moved and loaded onto any hypervisor -equipped
server hardware, via a management console.
The hypervisor installed on the physical server makes each VM believe it has full access
to the servers processor and memory. This optimizes server capacity, as multiple VMs
can share a single physical server. Best-in-class hypervisors are designed to consume
minimal server resources, enabling the physical server to support the maximum number
of VMs.
The right server virtualization solution can start to transform the data center, enabling IT
to do more with less drain on budget and technical resources. More importantly,
virtualization solutions can help IT respond to many infrastructure challenges. In a
virtualized infrastructure, IT can deploy server capacity as needed, thus making it easier


to scale applications. Because VMs can be easily replicated and deployed, virtualization
facilitates testing and provisioning of apps. Furthermore, virtualization can help optimize
and enhance high availability and disaster recovery environments, as applications can be
easily, rapidly and cost-effectively moved among servers within the data center, and even
to remote centers.
The low cost, fast speed, and ease of implementation have made server virtualization a
popular first step towards a virtualized data center. According to a Stratecast 2013
survey of IT decision makers, 58 percent of businesses have either implemented server
virtualization or plan to do so in the near future, as the first step of the IT evolution
journey. However, in the server virtualization model, other IT components such as
networking, security, and storage infrastructuregenerally remain physical, with less
than 10 percent of these functions being virtualized.
While this model offers cost and operational efficiencies, it can be expanded to increase
the potential business benefits.
Advanci ng the Model : Cl oud Computi ng
For enterprises that have experienced the benefits of virtualization, cloud computing is
often the next natural step in the IT evolution journey.
Businesses turn to a private cloud to gain additional efficiencies and business agility. The
private cloud architecture builds on the virtualization foundation by overlaying service
management platforms and self -servicing capabilities, which offers enterprises additional
operating expense reductions through automation and the implementation of a self -
service data center environment.
As indicated in Figure 1 on the following page, there is significant interest in private
cloud adoption, even if it is longer-term. While just 10 percent of businesses have
already adopted a private cloud, 30 percent expect to implement a cloud in the next two
years, and another 27 percent are considering implementing a private cloud.











Fi gure 1: I mpl ementati on and Pl ans to I mpl ement a Pri vate Cl oud

As the survey results show, businesses are in different places on the IT evolution
journey, and adoption occurs according to each enterprises needs and culture. While
the majority of businesses expect to include cloud in their future, their plans indicate
varying degrees of urgency to move forward.
For those that want or need additional benefits, the right cloud computing infrastructure
offers the ability to move into a hybrid cloud model in which the private cloud operates
together with a public, multi -tenant cloud. In this model, some workloadstypically
those that are more mission critical, access sensitive, private dataremain in a private
cloud environment, while less critical workloads are pushed to a public cloud.
TRAVELI NG BEYOND THE CLOUDS: I T AS A SERVI CE ENABLES NEW
BUSI NESS RESULTS
While virtualization and cloud computingwhether private, public, or hybridmay
adequately meet todays rising business challenges, IT will continue to evolve to better
address business objectives, both today and in the future. Figure 2 below outlines the
prime challenges that businesses face in managing a data center.


Source: Frost & Sullivan


Fi gure 2:
Top- Ranked Data Center Chal l enges Ci ted by U. S. I T Deci si on- Makers

The growth of cloud computing, mobility and big data will continue to prompt high data
demands, in terms of access and storage; and budget and resource constraints are
expected to continue in the short-term.
In order to create the successful results that business expects, the future data center
requires an entirely new service delivery model, called IT as a Service (ITaaS), which
delivers all of an enterprises compute, storage, networking, security and availability as
a servicerunning on nearly any hardware they choose.
An SDDC architecture virtualizes other elements of the data center infrastructure
beyond the compute function, such as networking, storage and security. In the ITaaS
model, manual processes are replaced with automated ones, and IT services are made
available to employees through self -service catalogs or portalsfreeing IT staff to create
new solutions that drive increased productivity and results. When IT successfully
transitions to the ITaaS model, lines of business also transition from seeing IT as a cost
center to being a value creator within the enterprise.
Business results are measured in both top- and bottom-line improvements, as well as in
the driving of innovation and alignment of IT with strategic business goals.
Transf ormi ng the Technol ogy Model
A technology shift is required to move IT to a service-oriented model. Rather than
relying on primarily physical assets, IT must be able to pool all available resources,
N=407
Source: Frost & Sullivan 2013 User Survey


automate and manage those resources to deliver new data and applications in an
automated fashion, which frees IT teams to focus on higher value tasks more associated
with the strategic goals of the business. Achievement of this IT service delivery model
requires a new data center architecture, namely, a software-defined data center
(SDDC). In an SDDC, a software-based infrastructure platform configures, coordinates,
and allocates all infrastructure resourcescompute, storage, networking and security
to enable data and applications to have sufficient capacity, availability, and response time,
without system downtime or lack of access to critical applications or data. The SDDC
architecture also includes comprehensive virtualization and cloud management tools that
help to minimize the clouds complexity. It effectively leverages the available server,
storage, and networking resources as enterprises build out their cloud computing
capabilities. By more effectively managing the whole data center at the software layer, IT
is able to realize improved efficiency and cost savings, while minimizing administrative
complexity.
Transf ormi ng the Operati onal Model
The SDDC architecture virtualizes and automates far more of the data center
environment than ever before. This allows savvy IT leaders to shift resources away from
typical management and maintenance of servers to focus more on innovating new
solutions that will drive results. As a result, IT can shift from operating as an
organization that manages fixed assets to an organization focused on delivering key
services that advance business goals.
For example, ITaaS organizations are driving significant improvements across key metrics:
ITaaS allows an IT department to increase IT staff productivity, as measured by
savings in time-to-deploy new applications, services, and capacity. This can, in
turn, improve overall business results. In one recent survey, VMware customers
claimed that new business opportunities increased by 30 percent, and revenue
generated by the business increased by more than 20 percent after deploying the
ITaaS model.
1

ITaaS organizations surveyed by VMware also reported increased reliability, with
significant reduction in security incidents and downtime.
More efficient use of infrastructure and reduction of maintenance burden allow
IT to improve their high trust computing costs by 50 percent, and their general
computing costs by 70 percent, according to VMwares study.
IT productivity improves, based on simplified management and automation of all
IT resources. This enables IT to shift IT resources away from manual tasks to
more strategic investments.


1
VMware, Journey to IT as a Service, 2012 Research Study


WHAT THE RI GHT SDDC I MPLEMENTATI ON OFFERS I T
ITaaS organizations also recognize increased speed, agility and the ability to say yes to
line of business requests. Enterprise IT organizations report speed and agility
improvements of ten times their previous levels, while IT productivity improves by 67
percent, and administration to server ratios improves by 60 percent.
2

Increased automation of IT resource management and orchestration also leads to
improved control. By setting predictable and enforceable rules for IT infrastructure and
application resource utilization, IT organizations can reduce downtime, provide better
insight, predictability, and control over spend for the line of business, and ensure
compliance with security standards and industry regulations.
Software-defined data center architectures are also helping organizations gain flexibility
in the environments they choose, including those operated within their data center and
those from public cloud providers. A software-defined data center can provide IT with
greater interoperability among multiple infrastructure resources, and the ability to
continue leveraging its existing investments.
Ultimately, an SDDC architecture gives IT organizations the control, freedom and choice
to deploy and deliver business critical applications with greater agility, speed, and quality
of service, regardless of the underlying hardware and software infrastructure.
CHOOSING THE IDEAL SDDC PARTNER TO ACHIEVE IT AS A SERVICE
For IT organizations transforming to IT as a Service, VMware is a good choice as a
partner. VMware is a clear leader in the virtualization and cloud computing space, with
nearly half of respondents in Frost & Sullivans recent survey citing VMware as their
preferred virtualization provider. VMwares expanding portfolio helps to establish an
SDDC architecture by applying proven models for virtualizationabstraction, pooling,
and automationto compute, storage, networking, and security.
Based on customer research, VMwares customers are successfully translating adoption
of its technology portfolio into significant cost savings and operational efficiencies. For
example, users have reported:
50 percent reduction in time to build and provision a new application
30 percent cost reduction for data center operations
41 percent reduction in security incidents
37 percent decrease in Tier 1 application downtime
As VMwares customers become more mature in their use of virtualization, and adopt an
IT as a Service model for IT, they are able to more rapidly deliver new applications and
services for the business, increase line of business satisfaction with IT, and more directly
impact the ability of the business to generate new revenue through applications and
services that drive business goals.
2
VMware, Journey to IT as a Service, 2012 Research Study


To help customers achieve the maximum benefit of this transformation, VMware also
offers a full range of consulting, support, education, and advisory services. This service
portfolio helps customers not just successfully deploy VMwares technologies, but
engineer a next generation data center, develop new skills and adopt new processes and
organizational structures that enable IT to gain the maximum value from IT investments.

Stratecast
The Last Word
The IT industry is currently on a journey of transformation. The destination? IT must
emerge as business-driven enabler of innovation, competition and revenue generation.
Throughout this transformation, IT will continue to face the challenge of how to keep up
with demand for new services while maintaining existing operations, all with fewer
resources than ever.
IT as a Service can help IT reach this destination. Leveraging virtualization and cloud
computing components in a software-defined data center, where compute, storage,
networking and security resources are defined and managed in software, puts todays IT
organizations on the right road to reach the ITaaS destination. But transforming technology
is only part of the journey.
Technology provides a critical foundation for new approaches to IT. But IT organizations
need a new operational model, working alongside new technology, to help it reach its
destination. As an organization, IT must shift from being a department that simply manages
and maintains systems, to being an organization that is closely aligned with business goals,
and that creates new technology-based services that drive toward those goals.
An SDDC architecture, in which data center infrastructure resources are virtualized and
delivered to the business as automated, self -service, consumption-based services, offers
the IT organization a map to ITaaS and the next generation of IT.
Deployed successfully, ITaaS can allow enterprises to realize significant return on their IT
investments, while dramatically improving the quality of IT services, and enabling faster
delivery of new enterprise revenues. It also offers increased efficiency and agility, greater
control over all IT services, and the ability to enhance necessary security and regulatory
controls. And such results do not require a sacrifice in choice; it is not necessary to settle
for only a small cadre of selected service providers or service delivery options. IT
departments can integrate services from a variety of providersboth internal and
externaland deliver them across a variety of channels, in public, private, or hybrid cloud
environments.
Though a variety of providers offer the software to virtualize most components of an
enterprise data center, few approach the level of comprehensiveness, expertise or service
offered by VMware. VMwares proprietary research and business cases for IT as a Service
and the Software-Defined Data Center validate both the model and their technology.
Karyn Price
Industry Analyst
Cloud Computing Services
Frost & Sullivan
karyn.price@frost.com
877.GoFrost myfrost@frost.com
http://www.frost.com
ABOUT FROST & SULLIVAN
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innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break todays
market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the Global 1000,
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profound wave of industry convergence, disruptive technologies, increasing competitive intensity, Mega Trends,
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