Business and IT leaders agree that data center and cloud transformation will yield big benefits, ranging from greater business agility and responsiveness to change, greater cost efficiencies and faster time to innovation for new applications.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean scrapping everything that already exists within the business and starting from scratch. Instead, businesses can bring their IT environment up-to-date by modernizing the infrastructure, automating IT and running modern apps.

Data center modernization is at the heart of this movement to change.

For some businesses it could mean a move to DevOps, for others it could be a shift to transforming into a digital business. Many are striving for both. Either way, data center modernization can lead to a significant boost in speed and agility – two key attributes at the heart of DevOps and digital transformation.

Take Amdocs, a market leader in customer experience software and services. The company had a challenge to provision an environment for developers and testers to work quickly without depending on IT.

“Previously, it took us between three hours to three days to provision an environment, which is market standard. It wasn’t enough for us,” said Golan Remi, Head of Global Business Technologies at Amdocs IT.

“We needed to transform our code from development through testing for the customer in record time, so we conducted a POC with multiple private cloud vendors. The VMware solutions proved to be the closest to our requirements and the easiest to install and operate,” he explained.

The organization deployed a large-scale private cloud based on VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) architecture. It allowed Amdocs to provision thousands of vApps on a daily basis as part of Amdocs’ automated DevOps processes.

Previously it took the organization between three days to a few weeks to create a full environment for its developers – but this has all changed. “Now, a developer can come to work, press a button, go and make a coffee and when they come back the environment is ready for them,” Remi said.

The company is able to globally provision an environment to all of its developers and testers with zero dependency on IT, while also significantly shortening its ramp up time and being more flexible to its customers’ needs.

Another example of a company that has been implementing a DevOps philosophy is Telefonica, the huge digital telco with more than 300 million users in 21 countries across the world.

Its Senior DevOps Manager, Gustavo Martin Bouso, said that the company took the decision to refresh its hardware and storage using the hyper-converged system. “The benefits including a reduction in cost, a reduction in complexity and having a scalable system. VMware is helping us with digital transformation,” he said.

It’s clear with these examples that with SDDC technologies, customers can modernise data centers for infrastructure flexibility, security, and scalability.

To go a step further, organisations can leverage VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture, easily extending this to public clouds, giving their developers an integrated hybrid cloud environment for deploying modern apps.

This is all part of their journey towards a DevOps culture and a digital future.

To learn more about how we have helped our customers adopt a Cross-Cloud approach read our ‘Integrate Public Cloud’ blog

Category: SDDC

Tags: Cross-Cloud, Cross-cloud architecture, datacenter, Datacentre, DevOps, SDDC, vmware