The promise of virtualization and cloud has been to
- enable IT agility
- help IT to do more with less thereby lowering both infrastructure and operating costs.
That promise has been “almost” realized, but only “almost”.
Yes, enterprises have realized a lot of the benefits that virtualization provides. They have successfully moved a majority of their workloads (68% in 2013 and growing to 80% by 2015 per Gartner) to virtual machines. 37% of enterprises are also taking it a step further by deploying private cloud environments to provide an automated, self-service model for provisioning infrastructure as well as applications to their internal employees. By doing all of this, they have no doubt reduced costs. But have they really achieved true agility?
I say the promise has been “almost” realized for a reason. There is an inflection point we see today.
- Large Static Workloads – Enterprises are pushing larger and larger workloads into their virtual infrastructure – workloads like CRM applications, HR applications, ERP, and Microsoft applications like Outlook and SharePoint. What does this mean? They need to be able to manage large chunks of IP addresses and need the infrastructure to be flexible to affect change if needed.
- Highly Dynamic Workloads – More and more organizations are adopting the idea that IT is a service provider for internal employees, including Dev/QA. IT wants to respond faster to Dev/QA requests. They need to support a more agile product development process to speed up the development life cycle and push products out the door faster. These Dev/QA workloads are very dynamic by nature and need 1000s of VMs spun up and spun down per week. VM velocity goes through the roof!
In both cases, the need for full automation is so great that IT will fail to meet the agility and SLA requirements without DDI automation. The self service model of the cloud will not work if there needs to be an admin guy at the back manually assigning IP addresses and entering DNS records into the system.
Infoblox tackles these challenges head on by providing the “last mile” integration with industry leading cloud orchestrators. These plug-ins truly automate the entire workflow of VM provisioning, including IP address allocation/deallocation and DNS entries. The IT guy can focus on other more value add business initiatives or take a much-needed vacation! Infoblox therefore enables enterprises to “fully” realize the promise of virtualization and cloud.
