From Legacy to Modern Infrastructure: A Hybrid Cloud Journey
According to Gartner, today’s IT leaders struggle to manage competing objectives. On the one hand, they must keep the lights on and ensure business uptime; on the other, they must quickly adopt new technologies and services that enable them to agilely respond to market conditions—even if IT isn’t ready or doesn’t have budget for them.
The fact is that effectively competing in today’s global economy requires businesses to modernize their legacy infrastructures to gain the agility and efficiencies needed to take advantage of newer technologies and applications that can propel the business.
How do you make the digital transition without putting your business at risk?
The business benefits of a modern infrastructure
Today, more and more businesses see the cloud as the key to successful digital initiatives. But transitioning from a legacy infrastructure with a complex mix of compute, storage, and network resources that have evolved over time can create almost as many challenges as it solves. And a manageable path toward a more modern virtualized and software-defined infrastructure isn’t always clear.
A modern data center allows isolated infrastructure silos in your on-premises environment to be consolidated and managed as one. By combining these once disparate elements into a holistic, software-defined, and integrated platform, you’ll not only eliminate legacy infrastructure silos, you can better leverage existing assets, run apps more consistently, achieve operational efficiencies, and ready your business for the cloud.
- Greatly simplified modern infrastructure: Compute, storage, and network components work seamlessly together within the core data center as well as in the public cloud and at the edge.
- Reduced costs: The same management tools and operational model running across your entire infrastructure, eliminating the need to rip-and-replace as needs evolve.
- Greater agility: Faster business service delivery through new containerized apps and cloud capabilities.
- Cloud-ready posture: Cloud service delivery and consumption demands matched to business needs, enabling you to adopt the public cloud and edge environments in the future.
Transition from a legacy environment to a modern data center with VMware solutions
VMware enables an operational environment with a robust platform that becomes more adaptable to new and emerging technologies and lays a foundation for a hybrid and multi-cloud model.
With a software-defined data center, you can quickly and easily layer in new technologies, along with the latest features and functions, enabling you to achieve business outcomes. This more agile and adaptable digital platform streamlines orchestration to better support more revenue-growth activities, whether you’re inking an M&A deal, launching a new product, opening a new plant, or more.
With a thoroughly modern on-premises infrastructure, migrating workloads to the public cloud for a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment becomes less an unattainable pipe dream and more a business reality.
In addition, you can build, run, and manage all your applications—including cloud-native apps and Kubernetes—across any cloud. And in times like these when remote work has taken center stage, you can extend a secure, easily managed desktop experience to employees, no matter where they’re working or what devices they’re using.
Logicalis: Enabling your transition to a modern data center
A VMware Principal Partner, Logicalis’ certified engineers have a deep bench of experience in data center, hybrid cloud, security, collaboration and other technologies and work closely with the VMware team to deliver the right solution for you. We blend your vision with our technical expertise to build an infrastructure modernization strategy that leverages your existing assets. Then we design and implement a solution that precisely fits your needs and budget with services and support that keep your team focused on your core business.
Logicalis is particularly adept at filling skills gaps and becoming an extension of your team through long-term advisory residencies. Our expert engineers can do everything from providing advice on the best way to meet your business needs to developing scripts that help automate your environment.
Finally, Logicalis’ international expertise and global capabilities—including a unified engagement, a common services platform, and streamlined procurement and shipping—can help you expand your global footprint or step into one.
At the end of the day, Logicalis is driven to help you achieve your business outcomes faster.
Case in point: A global holding company
This global company manages multiple diverse businesses—each with their own IT functions, processes, and platforms—making it nearly impossible to take advantage of newer technologies that would help them better respond to market conditions and achieve business outcomes.
Using vRealize, Logicalis built the foundation for a more automated global infrastructure in rapid time. We also created and operationalized processes and procedures, built in governance, and implemented orchestration, so that we could holistically apply security, accelerate business, re-factor applications, etc. across the environment.
The overall work effort, through Logicalis’ role as this customer’s trusted technical advisor, has continued for over 6 months and included the implementation and migration of processes and technology of additional elements of the infrastructure. The work also included other VMware technologies including NSX, Horizon, and vCenter to create a completely software-defined data center.
The result is a more consolidated, consistent, and modern IT infrastructure that enables them to take advantage of new technologies, workloads, and applications much more quickly. This company is now in a much better position to connect to the cloud and shift workloads around to meet performance and capacity demands.
Case in point: A U.S. furniture manufacturer
Three years ago, this fast-growing company brought in new IT leadership. Their goals? Streamline the business and improve operations, while preparing the company for the public cloud.
Logicalis worked closely with this customer to build a modern infrastructure strategy, which included refactoring applications and updating their on-prem environment, and then designed and implemented a solution with VMware that included Cloud Foundation, vRealize, NSX, and vSphere. They now have a modern on-premise data center infrastructure that’s ready to be extended into a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment.
Somewhat serendipitously, this work was completed just prior to the pandemic, allowing the manufacturer to easily manage their business through the disruption.
Schedule a complimentary workshop and receive recommendations on how to best modernize your data center and prepare your organization for a hybrid cloud model. Or learn more about how our data center solutions and services can help accelerate your business outcomes.
Arron Marchese is Director of Data Center Solutions at Logicalis US, responsible for architecting and delivering complex data center solutions that enable our customers to derive business value from their technology investments.
