Cloud cuckoo land or heaven on earth?

The run on the public Cloud is in full swing - also in the DACH market.

No question: The public Cloud has set a new standard in IT. ScalabilityThe new imperatives are automation, standardization and demand-oriented use.

In all these respects, the cloud is superior to traditional data center infrastructures.

Worse: Your own colleagues expect the same from IT as they do from their own Cloud-providers in the private sector. As a result, shadow IT is growing and the company's own reputation among management and users is suffering.

The recipe for success of yesteryear, especially from SAP-existing customers, namely perfectly coordinated systems and infrastructure components, customized core solutions for ERP, and numerous integrations to other enterprise solutions such as CRM, seem to be becoming a stumbling block.

Because the digital transformation means in the Data center, new services and Applications flexible and, above all, fast to users, but also to involve end customers in the digital value chain.

Even the technical advances of the 2000s, such as all-flash arrays in the storage sector or the Virtualization the server little to nothing. Because here, too, the limits are set in terms of Scalability, flexibility, complexity and above all Costs still too rigid.

For this reason, the known Cloud-sizes like AmazonFacebook and Google have taken a different approach from the outset and control their own data centers solely through software.

This reduces the dependence on and, above all, the Costs for Hardware massive, allows a linear Scalability and radically shortens implementation times for new services.

So what could be more logical than to use the range of established Cloud-providers and to take on their Infrastructure for your own environment?

What sounds so simple turns out to be far more complicated on closer inspection. Crisp Research has identified three hurdles in particular: complexity, costs and compliance.

Carlo Velten on this:

"The complexity of enterprise environments doesn't just disappear into the Cloudbut must be purchased and managed there.

Often, due to a lack of knowledge and resources, automation potentials remain unused and too much capacity is kept in reserve because the real demand is difficult to predict.

All this leads to higher Costs And less agility than hoped for."

This leaves the legal imponderables of differing local regulations with regard to data protection or their existence before high courts. For example, the painstakingly negotiated Privacy Shield could suffer the same fate as its predecessor Safe Harbor.

Nevertheless, the Company what Velten calls a "digital infrastructure platform".

This must meet the four characteristics already mentioned of the Scalabilityautomation, standardization, and demand-oriented use, even in the company's own Data center show

Because the modern Applications are increasingly being used from the outset for the Cloud programmed and use current technologies such as Virtualization or containers. Moreover, in many cases they are designed to be made available to the end customer via the web.

However, Nutanix estimates that, on average, only a quarter of all workloads in the Company so much elasticity that for their operation public Cloud–Infrastructures are absolutely necessary.

The vast majority of enterprise applications can therefore still be used in-house. Data center provide - provided that the local Infrastructure follows the Cloud-Paradigm.

Classic three-tier architectures are becoming less and less suitable for this. Because although it is now possible to deploy a virtual machine within minutes, the corresponding provisioning at the storage or network level takes days or weeks.

Problems with interoperability between different storage platforms and the need to keep more rather than fewer resources for performance reasons encourage the formation of IT silos in the Data center.

These make resource sharing difficult and sometimes even impossible.

Enterprise Clouds as a solution

Nutanix and Lenovo provide a solution that enables the Cloud-paradigm in own Data center realized and the limits of classical Infrastructures overcomes.

Nutanix stands for software control of the infrastructure components and removes the barriers between private and public Cloud, while Lenovo provides the matching appliances with its HX series.

With its centralized management console, Nutanix makes the Infrastructure for the administrator from the Hardware invisible all the way up to the hypervisor, so that IT has the freedom to take care of services and Applications to take care of.

From the user's perspective, it will be as fast and "cool" as public Cloud-offers, but retains full control and data sovereignty.

Where necessary and warranted, the public Cloud flexible integration, a real Enterprise Cloud arises.

According to SAP the future of IT will be hybrid or bimodal. With the Enterprise Cloud from Nutanix to Lenovo appliances, this future is for SAP-customers has already become a reality.

This is not yet heaven on earth, but it is a real solution to real problems.