As a handy homeowner, it’s often tempting to pick up a hammer on the weekend and join in on the time-honored tradition of “Do-It-Yourself.” Whether it’s adding a deck, building out the basement for entertaining, or landscaping the yard, there is an appeal of applying your skills to a project to gain a sense of accomplishment and save money at the same time.
With every undertaking comes the often-overlooked addition of risk. Like many projects started with the best intentions (in IT and at home), we risk finding ourselves behind schedule, over budget and with an unhappy internal customer. In more extreme cases, we may have unintentionally violated local regulations or building code, impacting us financially or worse. Through these experiences, we learn to regulate our inner “handyman,” and consider investing in outside expertise. Expert help offers us the piece of mind that the outcome (and the cost) will be predictable, while our risk of failure is greatly reduced.
Recently in a call with analysts, EMC shared an example of a global pharmaceutical company with a goal to build a highly flexible, low-cost way to deliver Infrastructure as a Service on demand to its business units and developers. Even though the company had the internal skills to achieve their goal, EMC provided a Hybrid Cloud solution to meet the company’s goals while staying cost-effective and within the required timeframe: a predictable outcome.
The company’s Hybrid Cloud solution leverages its investment in their EMC VMware Vblock-based private cloud managed by EMC, while enabling seamless consumption of capacity from VMware’s vCloud Air public cloud services. For the business units and their developers, an application Self-Service Portal provides the company a single entry point to estimate, request, manage, and track the fulfillment of requests. This portal is then integrated back into the company’s existing and internally managed tools, further streamlining request through fulfillment.
Upon completion of delivering the solution, some 2,000 virtual machines will be migrated from the company’s on-premises private cloud to VMware’s vCloud Air public cloud service, to be followed by additional non-regulated production workloads going forward. The end result: an engineered and proven cost-effective Hybrid Cloud solution that reduces risk and is managed and fully automated and supported by EMC.
As your organization makes the journey into Hybrid Cloud, challenge yourself to answer this question: “Do I really want to be in the integration engineering business maintaining versions and upgrade re-engineering, or could I be more successful by having EMC do it for me in about a week?”
Once you dig in, you might surprise yourself.
