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How to Choose the Right Virtual Datacenter for Your Needs

Executive Summary
Enterprises are increasingly moving to the cloud for greater agility and cost efficiency. However, they are finding that running complex enterprise applications requires much more than a one size fits all approach when they move to a cloud infrastructure. Based on experiences, these large organizations have multiple workloads with differing performance and security requirements. Some applications demand a positive and consistent end-user experience for production and higher-tier workloads, while other applications need quick access to scalable resources, yet price sensitivity is higher because these workloads carry lower risk.

Virtual Datacenters: One Size Does Not Fit All

Common Uses for Virtual Datacenters Which VDC is Right for Which Workload? Benefits of Multiple Virtual Datacenters Our Approach to Virtual Datacenters Conclusion About Fulcolo.net

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Virtual DataCenters Hosted:

One Size Does Not Fit All
Service-based IT continues to grow in popularity, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offered via a public cloud. These service providers offer the processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources while ensuring nearly constant uptime and state-of-the-art security measures. More and more enterprises are drawn to IaaS models, given their clear cost and operational advantages. According to a June 2012 report from IT research and advisory company Gartner Inc., the Cloud System Infrastructure Services market is poised for strong growth with a worldwide forecast to grow from an estimated $4.3 billion in 2011 to $24.4 billion in 2016.1 Companies creating and managing their own datacenters are prone to over-provisioning and building too much capacity based on projected demands that are one, two and three years into the future. On the other hand, we have found that organizations that leverage IaaS services benefit from on-demand, adjustable resources. IT organizations using IaaS public cloud virtual datacenters experience an unparalleled level of speed and agility because their IaaS resources can quickly conform to their changing market conditions and business requirements. As a service provider, we know IaaS cost benefits also motivate SMBs and Enterprises to move workloads to the cloud. Public cloud service providers typically have large platforms segmented for customers, providing economies of scale and cost savings through efficiency. In addition, because the infrastructure resides off premise, companies can adopt new technologies without having to worry about obsolete equipment, upgrades and retrofits. Instead, they remain focused on their core mission.
1 Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide 2010-2016, 2Q12 Update, report by Gartner, Inc., 2012.

VIRTUAL DATACENTER
A virtual datacenter is a pool of cloud infrastructure resources hosted in the public cloud that includes compute, memory, storage and bandwidth components. Service providers meet the ever-changing needs of their customers by making these resources available to customer applications, business units and projects, eliminating concerns with physical capacity. Service providers that offer virtual datacenters may offer a single type of virtual datacenter or multiple types. When the multiple types offered are compatible with each other, customers have the flexibility to match different workload requirements with different virtual datacenters and move between those types. Higher-tier virtual datacenters offer ondemand resources, greater performance and scalability and burstable capacity, and are the usual choice for production workloads. Lower-tier virtual datacenters also offer on-demand resources, yet are typically designed for less critical workloads with higher price sensitivity, such as development and testing environments.

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Evaluating Service Providers

When evaluating IaaS service providers at the highest level, companies should establish what kind of service relationship they want, how service-oriented a potential company is, and whether the provider is knowledgeable and committed enough to understand the business type and use case.
Investigating datacenter platforms is also important. For example, companies virtualizing with Vmware may discover that a service provider does not offer compatibility with the current VMware platform and tools they use or wish to use for virtualization. They also may not offer to support future VMware product releases, which could impact your future environment. Every IaaS service is structured differently. Service providers vary in how they interact with other datacenters and how they interact with a customers private datacenter in a hybrid cloud model. Some service providers offer the flexibility of different datacenter tiers, but the tiers do not work together, prohibiting workload movement between datacenters. When migration is impossible, vendor lock-in can result, making it difficult for companies to align their IT services and applications to the optimal virtual datacenter environment, especially as requirements change.

LB
Public Zone

FW
Private Zone

L3 LB L2

VMWARE JOURNEY ADOPTION INSIGHTS 2011 REPORT ON APPLICATION TIME TO MARKET

Customers in 2012 placed greater focus on applications as they strived for increased agility when compared with customers surveyed in 2011. They realized 25 percent faster application time to market, compared with the 2011 results. They also reported that agility is aided by cloud computing. In fact, the research shows that there is an opportunity cost for organizations that wait too long to adopt cloud computing.

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Common Uses for Virtual Datacenters

Different types of virtual datacenters, designed for specific concerns and uses, help enterprises meet their variable needs in IT service delivery. Emerging Applications
Companies focused on emerging applications face many unknowns, yet must ensure that the underlying infrastructure will support application delivery in the short and long terms. Therefore, datacenter flexibility and scalability and cloud server burstability are imperative, particularly as they relate to providing a consistently positive end-user experience. A production level virtual datacenter offers the flexibility needed to accommodate a broad range of both IT and end-user needs for even the most robust, demanding new applications.

Development and Testing

IT departments involved in the development and testing of client-facing applications also face unknowns, especially where building the infrastructure and operational protocols to meet their exact needs is concerned. During development and testing activities, IT executives face particular financial risk. They need to successfully predict the servers, computing power, networking and storage that will be needed at the development, testing and production stages. However, these applications residing in a development platform may not be ready for production for many months, and ultimately may never go live. Noteworthy is that a VMware Customer Benchmark study found that organizations that virtualized Test and Development yielded a compelling 175% return on their investment. 2 For these organizations, the virtual datacenter is a great option. By working with a cloud service provider with flexible virtual datacenter options, forward-thinking IT executives can leverage a different type of virtual datacenter based on how development and testing cycles unfold, and their eventual outcomes.

Moving a Workload to Production

When moving closer to production, virtual datacenter flexibility is again important. For instance, a development project may initially require application replication for one small test team. Then closer to production, three instances of the application may be needed for three different teams, temporarily requiring additional capacity. These activities are well suited to a preproduction virtual datacenter offered at a lower cost than a production virtual datacenter. Closer to production, additional bandwidth may be required for performance testing. With a desire to know exactly how the application will run in production, the team may want to test it in the production virtual datacenter since that is the eventual target, but may only need that environment for three weeks to conduct the performance testing. Upon successful testing, the application can easily be staged and moved into a production virtual datacenter.
2 Boldy Navigating Towards IT-as-a-Service, white paper by CIO Custom Solutions Group, 2011.

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Application Upgrades More datacenter flexibility is needed after running the application in production. Instead of using up production virtual datacenter resources, IT teams can conduct functional testing of the new version by replicating the production platform to the pre-production virtual datacenter, and then move it to the production virtual datacenter when it is ready to release to customers. Other Virtual Datacenter Uses The flexibility of the virtual datacenter model makes it a viable, cost-effective model for many application environments in addition to development and testing, production and upgrades. Total cost of ownership is a key consideration when declining and aging applications can create usageand therefore resource requirementfluctuations. IT can strategically move workloads between production and pre-production virtual datacenters to reduce costs and still meet end-user requirements. In a traditional datacenter environment, companies build their datacenters for peak demand, which can result in costly resources sitting idle for long periods of time. A company participating in a trade show can temporarily leverage a production virtual datacenter to quickly deliver more capacity to accommodate a 50-prospect demonstration environment. Another example, the conference room pilot, involves demonstrating an application to prospective customers from a conference room. This is the perfect opportunity to leverage a pre-production VDC to temporarily have an instance of the application running, without needing high-performance production levels.

Virtualization is an ongoing journey towards attaining virtual nirvana of cloud computing. Cloud computing will however be out of reach entirely unless you get your virtual data centre and the network infrastructure in a position to support virtualization.

Declining

Emerging

CORE (strategies)

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Which Virtual Datacenter is Right for Which Workload?

Few cloud service providers offer companies a choice of multiple types of virtual datacenters to serve the needs of different workloads and different business requirements. However, the ability to match workloads to virtual datacenters based on specific characteristics can drastically increase efficiencies. To choose the right virtual datacenter for the right workload, companies must carefully assess resource and cost demands for each workload they are considering moving to the cloud.

MATCHING WORKLOADS TO VDC: IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS

Different risk profiles for different applications, so you must consider requirements around: Security Performance Flexibility Contractual commitment IT governance

STEP 1: Assess Your Risk Profile

Ensure that you get the appropriate level of value from the Virtual Datacenter per your risk profile.

STEP 2: Assess Resource Predictability

Identify your flexibility needs based on how predictable your workload is. You need different degrees of flexibility for production vs. reproduction workloads.

Identify how much capacity you will need to be able to quickly access. For top-tier workloads, you want the right amount of capacity available when you need it. Self-service or managed service? For some business units and projects, you need self-service cloud management capabilities white for others you may need managed services to achieve optimal ROI.

To optimize your IT budget, it is important to have the flexibility to change your mind and move workloads around, out to the cloud to the appropriate platform and back if needed. Understand what types of changes and movements you can make with your resources once they are in a virtual datacenter.

STEP 3: Assess Resource & Management Needs

Analyze how you will need to be able to distribute capacity. You may need the ability to distribute capacity across teams, departments, applications or projects.

STEP 3: Assess Cost

What services are you willing to pay for vs. do yourself? you need to be able to quickly make some changes yourself, while others might be better handled by the cloud provider. Identify a balance to prevent too much service for the business need and budget.

You should establish how much you are willing to pay for security, performance, flexibility and contractual commitment levels.

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Benefits of a Virtual Datacenter

Increase IT responsiveness. By managing efficient pools of IT resources and layering elements of automation, a virtual infrastructure solution enables service requests to be fulfilled much easier and more rapidly in response to establishing new and retiring old applications. Improve utilization and lower capital spending. Individually, initial investments in technologies such as server virtualization and efficient, shared storage can dramatically reduce the number of servers and the storage capacity needed in a datacenter environment. This reduction in capital spending is further amplified in a virtual infrastructure solution through the power of an efficient, shared storage solution that is pretested and integrated with virtualized servers and tuned to work efficiently with specific applications under a common management umbrella. Ease management and move to more predictable operational spending. The common management umbrella, enhanced with automation and multi-tenancy enabled by orchestration management software, can greatly reduce the processes and strains on resources to manage a complex, dynamic IT environment. Minimize power and cooling. Improvements in utilization combined with the benefits of automation capabilities spanning the virtual infrastructure environment that enable a more holistic level of control over resources will help minimize energy requirements. Reduce risk. The risk of IT not being able to support the business goals of an organization is greatly reduced as the task of maintaining and managing discrete IT components is inherently more complicated. Simplified and automated management of a virtualized infrastructure solution affords efficient and rapid recovery from server or application failure. In addition, the risk associated with maintaining a virtual infrastructure solution is reduced given the pretested and integrated solutions approach. Enables GREEN computing - Virtualization is a cornerstone technology for making datacenters more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. With virtualization, you can consolidate applications and services now running on multiple servers onto one or a few modern, energy-sparing servers, and you can configure them to run at much higher utilization rates. info@fulcolo.net In addition to reducing capital and operating expenses, customers report that their:

Number of new projects increased by 21 percent Application time to market improved by 22 percent Rework and test improved by 26 percent Server incidents were reduced by 27 percent System downtime was reduced by 26 percent

Moreover, customers that choose to implement virtualization with cloud computing capabilities sooner in their IT transformation report achieving high value lower costs and greater agilitysix times faster than enterprises that wait.

- VMWARE JOURNEY TO YOUR CLOUD EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW, 2011

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Benefits of Datacenters

Leveraging

Multiple

Virtual

Companies desiring a more agile approach to business operations and IT service delivery can turn to virtual datacenters hosted in the public cloud for flexible infrastructure resources and cloud services. Leveraging multiple virtual datacenters increases the flexibility, cost-efficiency and agility that organizations can realize from adopting a public cloud strategy:

Our Approach to Virtual Datacenters

In addition to the more common features of virtual datacenters, we offer capabilities and services that offer our customers additional advantage. Fulcolo.nets Virtual Datacenters are pools of resources. You can allocate and reallocate the resource components, memory, storage, bandwidth and compute) as needed rather than building a new virtual datacenter with the desired resource configuration. For instance, you can add memory to an individual server, in contrast to other service providers where you would have to invest in another, larger server to get the memory allocation needed. You can also mix and match your workloads to the optimal virtual datacenter type. Fulcolo.nets Virtual Datacenters offer different virtual datacenter types, VMware compatibility, robust cost management tools and flexible burst options.

Resource efficiency

Leverage one public cloud providers platform with multiple virtual datacenter options rather than more than one platform, and mix and match applications to the most appropriate virtual datacenter Deploy applications for multiple business units in the same virtual datacenter environment, empower groups with selfservice capabilities, and equip IT managers with role-based access Assign individualized infrastructure resources and security to different application teams and business units, enable each group to have its own virtual datacenter environment without increasing IT management complexity, and offload simple operations such as virtual machine creation and control to individual departments Leverage flexible capacity and bursting month after month to accommodate changing user demands Back up to a pre-production site to reduce costs while effectively protecting your production environment with a sound backup and recovery plan Provide a more consistent end-user experience by running the right workloads in the right virtual datacenter, which enables both cost efficiency and the performance needed for mission-critical applications

Centralized control

Distributed capacity

Flexible capacity and bursting

Cost-effective backup and recovery

Positive end-user experience

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Conclusion
While virtual datacenters are providing an opportunity for enterprises to operate with a new level of IT and business agility, one type of virtual datacenter does not meet the requirements of all business applications. IT departments dedicating staff and financial resources to move a variety of applications through their lifecycles need different virtual datacenter environments for different workloads at different times. Fulcolo.nets unique approach to virtual datacenters offers organizations the underlying technologies, flexibility and management capabilities to deliver IT services and applications in a more cost-effective, strategic way than what is possible with other IaaS options in the marketplace. After thoroughly assessing workload requirements and establishing which Fulcolo.net Virtual Datacenter is right for which workload, IT organizations can leverage the multiple virtual datacenter model to operate more responsively to internal clients and customers alike, and to have a positive impact on the bottom line.

Who we are
Fulcolo.net provides small, mid-size and enterprises flexible IT infrastructure solutions with its Modular and Virtual Datacenters. Fulcolo.nets customer approach leads to innovative solutions that offer unprecedented visibility and control, helping customers make better decisions about risk, agility and operational efficiency. Fulcolo.net, a service provided by Fulcrum IT Service Pvt Ltd, facilitates a hybrid cloud approach for IT departments and business units seeking choice, platform compatibility and a cloud partner that focuses customers unique infrastructure needs.

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