Nirvana with Policy Based Deployment and Automation for Enterprise Applications

Enterprise application landscapes are not simple
Complex, multitier applications such as SAP® Business Warehouse have application profiles that require thousands of interaction rules to be enforced based on dozens of policies for availability, security, performance, service levels and scalability. That’s in addition to other attributes and requirements related to distributed users, virtual and physical resources, and an ever-changing set of security, governance, and compliance standards.

Traditional environments require representatives from multiple disciplines, including application, network, security, storage and other infrastructure teams, to seamlessly work together to successfully handle provisioning, deployment, and configuration. As a result, implementations are usually slow, expensive, and error prone, and are difficult to maintain over time.

VCE offers what we think is a better way to deploy and manage applications. One that is based on:

  • An intelligent converged infrastructure platform
  • Abstracting the complexity of infrastructure components and services
  • Policy-based, instead of configuration-based deployment and operation

Why intelligent infrastructure matters
VCE’s Vblock System is the industry leading converged infrastructure, built and tested to a well-defined set of specifications. It is no accident that VCE has garnered the #1 market position in Integrated Systems, according to Gartner[1. Source: .

VCE Vblock Systems are pre-engineered, pre-validated, and delivered by VCE out of the factory, and are available for operation within 30-45 days of ordering. In contrast, most contemporary IT deployments involve a huge service modeling and remediation effort on the customers’ data center floor post-deployment.

Vblock Converged Infrastructure Overview
VCE VBLOCK® SYSTEMS: TRUE CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

Abstracting complexity
VCE’s policy defined converged infrastructure leverages this structured converged infrastructure foundation. It simplifies and accelerates the deployment of advanced applications, while maintaining strict compliance to corporate, governmental and industry policies on an ongoing basis. Innovations in application infrastructure modeling that enable this solution include Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) from Cisco, and an automated, application centric, policy driven, software-defined-everything platform from Vnomic.

VCE Vblock Systems provide a well-defined, repeatable and dependable foundation that can be accurately represented in a software model, providing a solid foundation for the operation of the advanced technology from Cisco and Vnomic.

Policy rather than configuration-based deployment and operations
As a result, enterprise customers and global service providers can now simplify and accelerate the modeling and deployment of enterprise applications. SAP Business Warehouse on HANA is the first implementation of this new approach leveraging the VCE Vblock Systems. It’s as easy as:

  • Defining policies
  • Using the Vnomic Desired State Controller to automatically create deployment templates for the network, compute, and storage requirements from those policies
  • Deploying those templates on VCE Vblock Systems
  • Updating policies and templates as necessary to maintain the lifecycle management for the application

VCE's converged infrastructure

Customers and service providers that adopt this approach can benefit from:

  • A predefined converged infrastructure system that enables faster deployment and low-risk changes for sophisticated applications, such as SAP Business Warehouse on HANA
  • Ongoing agility and operational control of SAP Business Warehouse
  • Elimination of complex, risky, and error-prone manual processes
  • Alignment of network behavior with application requirements
  • Continuous security and compliance assurance and remediation

Find out more
If you are attending SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2015—which takes place in Orlando, Florida from May 4-7—come see us and learn more about our policy defined converged infrastructure solution and other SAP solutions from VCE. You can visit us at the following booths: EMC #623, Cisco #330, VMware #272, SUSE #172, and Virtustream #413.

We encourage you to meet with our SAP Specialists one-on-one to learn about this and other solutions such as replatforming SAP applications to HANA, virtual HANA deployments, Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI), cloud automation for SAP deployments and more.

About the Author: Lakshmi Pedda