BTEX 2019: How a Hybrid Cloud Solution Can Help You Be Like Bruce Lee

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To begin his session at BTEX 2019, Chris Green, Systems Engineer for HCI and Hybrid Cloud at VMware, quoted martial arts master Bruce Lee.

“You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.”

Green used the well-known quote to emphasize how VMware’s technology enables businesses to adopt a modern, fluid architecture in their data centre. They “become like water” by combining elements of public and private cloud to achieve their IT goals. The flexibility of an IT infrastructure built on a hybrid cloud model affords organizations the ability to deploy new services quickly and easily.

It’s popular to say organizations are on a journey to the cloud, meaning they slowly add cloud services as they go, but Green emphasized cloud should not be thought of as a destination or an end point in a journey. Instead, he encouraged the audience to think of adopting a cloud operating model in their data centre. Instead of a journey, cloud is merely a way of delivering IT services that didn’t exist before.

VMware: A flexible operating model for hybrid cloud

Green discussed how VMware can help achieve this different way of doing business. It begins with VMware’s traditional virtualization and extraction technology, allowing IT to make the most of their hardware investments, and adding levels of automation and connectivity.

Automation is particularly important for modern hybrid IT environments. Automation allows IT services to be provisioned within minutes instead of months. Green said using VMware technology takes automation a step further, enabling a new level of seamless connectivity across organizations, where services can be provisioned in a single location and deployed across different physical locations in an enterprise.

Green explained how VMware enables organizations to adopt a more fluid way of consuming IT by emphasizing key areas such as provisioning services instead of infrastructure, adopting a hybrid cloud model so IT can operate proactively and consuming applications and resources on-demand.

How smaller organizations can embrace the cloud

Green said data centres need to be more fluid, but they can’t achieve that fluidity unless they fully embrace the cloud. To that end, VMware is helping even smaller organizations adopt a cloud-focused IT model with technologies such as VMware VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation), a stack of software which combines compute, storage and network virtualization in a single platform so it can be easily deployed.

With a fluid approach to the data centre, organizations can expand and contract their IT requirements if they have seasonal needs (such as a bank needing additional compute power during tax season), or as they grow. Servers and other infrastructure can be deployed and redeployed to the processes where they are most needed, and IT can take advantage of public cloud services when it needs resources beyond its capacity.

Green was specific about the benefits of a fluid approach to data centre. “As your business needs change, your compute can change to match it,” he said.

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