At VMworld this week
I was able to sit in a session that talked about a project to take a global
bank from 17% virtualization to the Software Defined Data Center. The driver
was pretty simple, take their 5 billion in IT spend and cut it in half. Easy
right?
While virtualization
is an obvious part of the equation, virtualization alone was not going to cut
the budget in half. In order to speed the deployment of applications and
increase agility for the business, a more commoditized approach to IT was
necessary. The business needed to be able to consume IT on demand, with
automated processes for every part of the service.
The approach was
revolutionary in every way. Instead of deploying traditional storage systems,
servers, and even data centers, they built a commodity based infrastructure
that could scale at very low cost with little to know warning. They approach is
designed to change everything about the way they do IT including staff roles,
and budgeting. This approach would allow them to reduce their IT costs by
almost 70%.
There were a lot of
different technologies involved in achieving this, some of it still beta, but
the results were real and validated by several independent financial and
technical institutions (think Gartner etc, although I can't recall the exact
companies, so don't quote me on that). More details about this solution will
become available as they continue to move more into production but the results
are a great example of what private cloud enables, especially with a software
defined approach to everything.
