 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific II 2014 |
| Article no.: | 9 | |
| Topic: | Business at the speed of life | |
| Author: | Muneyb Minhazuddin | |
| Title: | Product Marketing Director | |
| Organisation: | VMWare | |
| PDF size: | 238KB |
About author
Muneyb Minhazuddin, Product Marketing Director, Software Defined Data Centre, APJ
Muneyb is responsible for the overall strategy, growth and profitability of the Software Defined Data Centre product portfolio for VMware across Asia Pacific and Japan.
Muneyb has more than 18 years of IT experience having previously held positions at Apple, CSIRO and most recently as the APAC CTO for Avaya. He started his career with a very strong technical background filing 33 international technology patents and developing industry standards. He quickly evolved to a business savvy professional who built several new differentiating solutions that generated more than $100M net new revenues globally during his three year tenure in USA. He has 8 years of experience successfully launching global products in APJ and is very familiar with the different go to market strategies required for each country. As the CTO, he spent most of his time consulting as well as conducting technology and business workshops with the top CxOs across APJ.
Muneyb holds a Master of Engineering in Telecommunications and a Master of Business Administration in Strategy Management. Muneyb has actively participated in open standard organizations, contributing to Linux Kernel development and authoring several Internet
Article abstract
IT can now effectively meet demands of the business and drive competitive advantage.
However, one of the biggest questions faced by operators is how they can manage extremely high data growth in their mobile services.
Full Article
Server virtualization has significantly improved IT efficiency and performance, yet the mobile cloud era presents new challenges. Deliver new products and services faster. Get closer to customers.
Make increasingly mobile workers more productive.
The pressures faced by IT today, has never been greater, and this is dictated by the demands set by the business. Today, the employee base is mobile, digital and social – they expect IT to keep up with the rapid pace of life, and enable business to operate at the same speed, responsiveness, and ease as we do in our personal lives.
In the telecommunications industry, one of the biggest questions faced by operators is how they can manage extremely high data growth in their mobile services. For instance, data traffic in the Asia Pacific region expanded by 142 percent between 2010 and 2012. And the number of new subscribers jumped by 21 percent during the period of 2005 to 2012 . Thanks to the mobile-cloud, there are now millions of mobile consumers, apps and services that are putting enormous demands on IT.
To meet this challenge, IT organizations need to virtualize the rest of the data center so all infrastructure services become as inexpensive and easy to provision and manage as virtual machines.
The answer is the software-defined enterprise. By thinking across the spectrum, from the data center to the desktop to the device, today’s IT department can innovate and provide change to the organization and drive the business. In this software-defined world, companies innovate and differentiate with a software-defined enterprise approach, where hardware is virtualized, and enabling employees to transact business at the speed of life.
According to the Cloud Index we conducted in 2013, 72 percent of Asia Pacific and Japan organizations have already deployed cloud computing and ‘as-a-service’ approaches or plan to. Additionally, 84 percent say cloud computing and ‘as-a-service’ approaches will enable their organization to optimize their existing IT efficiency and effectiveness, suggesting that the region as a whole is ready to take IT transformation to the next phase and prepare for the mobile cloud era.
Free your data center from hardware
In a software-defined data center, one can extend the cost and operational benefits of server virtualization across the data center infrastructure—compute, networking, security, and storage—through an open architectural approach; also using automation that enables IT to move at the speed of business. In this environment, every mission-critical application, every database, every big-data application, and every physical server is replaced by virtual infrastructure.
Our strategy calls for delivering the core network services of switching, routing, firewalling and load balancing in software. By decoupling the network services from hardware, these services can be programmatically created, provisioned and managed over any underlying physical network, reducing costs and drastically improving network agility.
Built upon a groundbreaking distributed architecture, we enable network services to scale seamlessly with the needs of the application. Because Layer 2 to Layer 7 services are run via software, customers simply need to add server nodes to grow their infrastructures. This integrated platform works with any environment and provides the flexibility and openness that customers ask for so they can build the most scalable and efficient data centers.
But applications need data and data must be stored. This is where software-defined storage architecture comes in. It includes a policy-driven control plane, where IT can set policies for capacity, performance, and availability requirements on a per-virtual-machine basis, and have those policies operated upon by the rest of the virtualized infrastructure.
It also includes virtualization of the data plane, which enables IT to abstract and pool the heterogeneous capabilities of the underlying storage infrastructure and advertise those capabilities to that software-driven control plane. Finally, it includes virtualization of application-centric data services, which have been tightly bound to the hardware arrays to enable a rich set of virtualized data services.
Once storage is aligned with application demands, you can begin to empower your customers and workforce by virtualizing the network for speed and efficiency. You can free workloads from physical network infrastructure and free IT staff from slow, error-prone provisioning processes by abstracting network functionality from underlying hardware. Through a software-defined model you can transform networking so that it is programmatic and automated, and helps increase IT agility.
Critical to this data center of the future is automated IT operations management. Traditional IT management created information and infrastructure silos; automated cloud management provides actionable dashboard views.
Taking the initiative
Agent-based reactive management has given way to analytics-based predictive management and automated remediation. Provisioning and lifecycle operations of applications must work across multiple clouds while enforcing policy and ensuring compliance. Customers need new tools to help them become brokers of IT services, renting or building services as appropriate in order to deliver IT as a service.
Customers gain the intelligence to automate on-demand provisioning, placement, configuration and control of applications based on policies, simplifying IT operations. IT is better able to manage security, compliance, and risk while driving business value.
With the software-defined data center, your business can leap into the future without leaving all your applications behind. You can take control away from disparate operating systems and into the hands of IT.
Cloud service provider NTT Communications (NTT Com) is deploying technology from our SDDC architecture for its new cloud service, Enterprise Cloud (EC). Today’s enterprises see the value in moving workloads to the cloud, but applications still require access to resources such as CRM/SRM systems, which must remain within the enterprise data center. Connecting cloud-based applications to the necessary resources in the enterprise data center previously required a costly and time-consuming deployment of specialized hardware in a customer’s data center.
By incorporating our virtualization technology into its EC service, NTT Com will provide seamless and flexible connectivity between customer data centers and the NTT Com cloud without changing the IP addresses of a customer’s existing, on-premise environment. NTT Com eliminated the need for complicated manual provisioning of the network, thus vastly simplifying their customer onboarding process while lowering both operational and capital expenses.
Extending ‘as-a-service’ to endpoints
In the mobile-cloud era, the software-defined enterprise supports new and future requirements, addressing both the cost and complexity of managing PCs and emerging mobile devices.
A robust mobile enterprise platform needs to be in place to not just empower the IT team but the end users too. It needs to support bring own device (BYOD) mobility and virtual workspace initiatives, enabling IT to deliver what users need, when they need it.
Thanks to desktop virtualization technology, the virtual workspace connects end users to their data and applications on any device without sacrificing IT security and control.
With desktop virtualization, the relationship managers at ABN AMRO in Singapore is able to securely access their files and applications hosted on the bank’s network when they meet their private banking customers.
At Singapore’s Temasek Polytechnic, another one of our customers, some 1,500 students are now able to access files, folders, and resource-intensive applications from anywhere in the campus using any mobile device, regardless of its age. The implementation is one of the latest desktop virtualization projects in the region.
Harnessing your business to move at the speed of life
According to the Annual Customer Benchmark that we’ve conducted, customers that moved to a software-defined data center architecture have experienced greater value than those that did not. We found two-thirds of respondents reported being able to generate new revenue for their businesses when they expanded their use of virtualization . Of those businesses able to take full advantage of a complete software-defined data center architecture, 85 percent were able to generate new revenue as high as 22 percent for their businesses .
Virtualization and cloud computing have produced a tectonic shift in the way how IT is being run. CIOs and IT leaders must understand the landscape clearly to take full advantage of emerging opportunities across the IT infrastructure.
Those who make the right choices can maximize the value of their budgets, generate revenue streams based on new and innovative IT services and applications, leverage their staff efficiently and effectively, and create a place for IT at the executive table. Otherwise, it’s business as usual—and that’s no recipe f
