Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Lions and tigers and bears, OH MY!
In that quote from the movie “The Wizard of Oz” Dorothy, her dog Toto and her friends, the Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman are travelling along the Yellow Brick Road when they come to a forest. She asks them if there are animals in the forest and the reply is “Probably a lot of lions and tigers and bears” they start repeating that over and over and suddenly out of the forest comes a fierce lion!
I’ll stop the story there. I don’t offer spoilers just in case you haven’t seen the movie. But why the reference to a 77 year old movie in a technology blog? It’s because a similar tornado of change is ripping through IT environments today and IT professionals find themselves entering a dark forest with an abundance of danger. Don’t even get me started on the flying monkeys!
You know as well as anyone in the industry – IT infrastructure is no longer just supporting the business. It is the business enabler. Infrastructure must support constant business demands for new applications and services with limited budgets and resources (and they aren’t increasing). Administrators don’t have time to constantly evaluate and integrate hardware, software, and networking solutions to meet continuously evolving requirements. What we need is an automated, dynamic infrastructure that adapts to your business demands.
Maybe I should change the opening chant to “Blocks and Racks and Rails, OH MY”!
Of course, I’m referring to VCE’s converged infrastructure Vblocks, VxRacks and the new VxRail. But these aren’t dangerous wild animals, but rather the solution to the dangerously overgrown IT forests we’ve built.
Converged infrastructure (CI) is touted as having the ability to transform businesses, and rightfully so. No more IT sprawl and siloed architectures to contend with. Converged systems integrate compute, network and storage technologies. They should also include data protection solutions to ensure business applications and data are safe and recoverable. Why shop multiple vendors when you can get the best of best all in one box from one vendor?
But, a primary challenge for midsized organizations or those with many remote locations is identifying the most appropriate CI solution for their business requirements. Sure, they can opt to leverage a Managed Service Provider, but even they need a right-sized, efficient and flexible IT solution for their customers. Some available CI solutions may be too large, complicated or expensive for a particular business, or not flexible enough for their unique requirements, or require additional software components. That equates to more cost and more management.
But, of course, there’s a solution. Just click the heels of your ruby red slippers.
Enter the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance (HCIA). HCIA solutions go beyond CI’s inclusion of compute, storage, virtualization and network, to also include software to further simplify deployment, and all within a scalable form factor.
VCE VxRail is a new exclusive offering from VCE and VMware. It’s the only turnkey hyper-converged infrastructure appliance fully integrated and tested with VMware vSphere and Virtual SAN software. Based on this, the VxRail Appliance delivers a known and proven building block for the Software Defined Data Center, creating certainty in your IT operations and end user experiences.
So what else could organizations possibly need out of an easy-to-deploy, scalable hyper-converged infrastructure solution? Easy management? 24 x 7 support? Cloud storage? What about built-in data protection? Yes, yes, yes and ABSOLUTELY YES!
As a comprehensive solution, VxRail Appliances include data protection as a critical element to support key applications and data in today’s virtualized data center. That’s the trust factor on top of flexibility, performance and scalability, efficiency and usability associated with hyper-converged infrastructure. And with VCE VxRail comes with built-in best-in-class data protection from EMC. That should take care of those lions and tigers and bears.
In the Wizard of Oz movie, Dorothy never really left her farmhouse home in Kansas. It was all a dream. For us, let’s stop dreaming of radically simplified IT environments.
After all, there’s no place like home. There’s no place like home…
