BrainBlog for VergeIO by Jason Bloomberg
What’s another name for modern enterprise IT infrastructure?
The answer: money pit.
Dealing with VMware vSAN Ready Nodes or Dell VxRail lock-in? Throw money in the pit.
Building out AI infrastructure but running into constrained RAM or Flash supplies? Throw more money in the pit.
Struggling with the costs of supporting an increasingly hybrid infrastructure estate? You got it – chuck more money in.
Then what about all the bad things that can happen? Cybersecurity breaches. Unexpected compliance penalties. Data protection failures.
It seems that pit is bottomless.
Your organization can’t afford any kind of money pit – bottomless or otherwise. How are you going to get ahead of the costs so that you can meet ever-changing, stubbornly complex IT infrastructure requirements?
You need a better architectural approach that provides control, ownership, and scalability – an approach that rethinks how to implement dynamic infrastructure requirements.
The end result is manageable costs. The secret to achieving this result: an architectural approach that enables you to maintain control and ownership over your infrastructure.
The architectural underpinnings of VergeOS
In the previous article in this series, my colleague Eric Newcomer explained how the VergeOS Private Cloud Operating System from VergeIO would have addressed the complex infrastructure requirements he faced at Citigroup, even better than hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) would have.
As he explains, this Private Cloud Operating System is essentially an abstraction layer across diverse enterprise infrastructure assets – servers, storage, networking, the works.
Abstraction layers, of course, are wonderful things: complexity below, simplicity above. The devil, of course, is in the details.
In the case of VergeOS, the details are what matter. VergeIO built VergeOS with a single, unified code base: essentially, they designed an entirely new hypervisor to abstract all the elements of the private cloud infrastructure, including compute, storage, and network.
Traditionally, a hypervisor is low-level infrastructure software that squeezes between the underlying bare metal server hardware and the server operating system. Hypervisors are the technology at the heart of virtual machines (VMs) – the VMs that transformed enterprise infrastructure and gave birth to cloud computing over two decades ago.
The brilliant architects at VergeIO looked at this well-established notion of a hypervisor and asked the question: if a hypervisor can abstract server hardware to support whatever VMs we want to run, what if we architected a hypervisor that did the same thing across the entire private cloud infrastructure landscape?
Unlike HCI which combines virtualized compute with software-defined storage across a cluster of servers, VergeOS builds a similar abstraction across the entire data center, creating what VergeIO refers to as a virtual data center.
The benefits of virtual data centers running on VergeOS
Imagine you had one dashboard – the proverbial ‘single pane of glass’ – for your entire private cloud infrastructure. What could you do with it?
Operators would be able to manage the underlying complexity of the infrastructure as your application requirements called for greater scalability and elasticity.
The Private Cloud Operating System would reduce the complexity facing operators so they could focus on supporting business needs rather than fighting fires.
You would also have better control over all of the external forces that can lead to bill shock.
For example, are you running into issues with constrained supplies of RAM and Flash storage? Turn a dial to optimize your usage of existing resources – or better yet, leverage APIs that provide programmatic control over all aspects of your infrastructure.
Another way for organizations struggling with legacy virtualization technologies like VMware vSAN and Dell VxRail to substantially reduce costs: leverage VergeOS to streamline and accelerate migration off these legacy platforms.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of moving to a comprehensive Private Cloud Operating System, however, is the increased ownership and resulting control over the entire infrastructure landscape.
VergeOS puts your infrastructure team in charge. Scaling up cloud native infrastructure? Rolling out data-intensive AI applications? Dealing with complex new compliance requirements for infrastructure resilience or data protection? VergeOS gives you the control your team needs regardless of whatever new challenges present themselves.
The Intellyx take
VergeIO has achieved a goal that all previous infrastructure abstractions have aspired to but have fallen short: One architecture. One codebase. One abstraction.
First-generation hypervisors did it for VMs. HCI extended the notion across virtualized compute and software-defined storage.
And now VergeOS extends the one codebase – one architecture – one abstraction principle across the entire private cloud infrastructure landscape.
Infrastructure architects no longer have to design complex private cloud architectures by assembling various diverse components. With VergeOS, the architecture across the entire virtual data center is already in place, ready for infrastructure operators to automate via a single API.
Furthermore, virtual data centers are never static. Hardware refreshes take place all the time – especially when components have constrained availability. Even more importantly, business requirements are always in flux, as enterprises struggle to define and deploy their AI initiatives.
No one wants to worry about all the various infrastructure components that must work together seamlessly to deal with all these forces of change. With VergeOS, you don’t have to.
Stop throwing money into the bottomless infrastructure money pit. Instead, take control and ownership of your infrastructure with VergeOS.
Copyright © Intellyx BV. VergeIO and Broadcom (parent of VMware) are Intellyx customers. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. A human wrote every word of this article. Image credit: Craiyon.
