Delivering value with intelligent data

Dataquest hosted the webinar titled: Delivering value with intelligent data. It featured VMware and Hitachi Vantara, as well. In the webinar the experts shared the best-in-class use cases on how the unstructured data is a treasure trove of value.

Sunil Rajguru, Editor, PC Quest and CIOL, spoke about the era of rapid digitization. It has become rapid, post-Covid-19. There is rapid digitization of data. Data is now being collected digitally, and not converted. WFH and mobile workforce cultures have taken off. The collaboration industry is booming.

Everything is becoming digital. There is online/remote education, training done via XR, there are no-touch technologies such as drones and connected cars, and 5G will enable smart cities. Data has taken a life of its own now. It is still the new oil. There will be more data centers, devices, cloud operations, etc. The upper limit for IoT devices will be 500 billion by 2030. Data analytics will get better, and AI will be the key. We are now in the decade of complete digital transformation.

Nilesh Goradia, Presales Leader Systems Engineering Partner & SI, India, VMware, talked about the building a foundation for digital business. Applications needs drive infrastructure strategies. Apps are getting more complex, diverse, and heterogenous. As per IDC, the enterprises will build 500 million apps using cloud-native tools and methods, over the next five years.

VMware has a vision of an essential, ubiquitous digital foundation. There will be millions of devices over any app, over any data center and/or cloud. There will be software-defined everything. There will be single management platform for all of these. We are promising software-defined everything in the future.

Cloud Foundation with Tanzu

There are three requirements for delivering a great app experience. These are robust infrastructure, always-on network, and ubiquitous access. There will be an intrinsic security and lifecycle automation. VMware has the Cloud Foundation services with Tanzu.

There is the app-focused management, and Dev and IT Ops collaboration. There are runtime services, such as Tanzu Kubernetes grid service, automation services, including, pipeline, cloud IaaS, template, and custom, and infrastructure services, such as vSphere pod, storage, registry, and network. We are bringing the infrastructure and development on a single platform.

VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu is delivering enterprise-grade Kubernetes at cloud scale. There is full stack HCI platform for VMs and containers. This modern infrastructure provides agility, flexibility, and security for modern apps. There is also the modern infrastructure for modern apps. You can rapidly deploy new apps and microservices. There is consistent infrastructure and operations with cloud agility, scale, and simplicity.

Horizon for ubiquitous access to apps

VMware Horizon provides ubiquitous access to any app. VMware Workspace ONE empowers the digital workspace for your business needs. This is industry's first digital workspace platform. Desktop and apps can be accessed from a single platform. There is the ability to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver, manage, and monitor virtual desktops and published apps to end users, without the need to access the full desktop.

Horizon makes desktop and apps management easy. It centralizes the end users' desktops and apps in the data center, so that the IT can efficiently provision new clients, centralize desktop management, and improve the security and compliance. This is based on seven key pillars. These are: desktop and apps from a single platform, JMP technologies, great user experience, smart policies, complete environment management, SDDC integration, and flexible delivery.

Workspace ONE brings it all together. It is a unified solution that delivers great app experience. There is the ubiquitous access, always-on network, and robust infrastructure, all secured by design.

Hitachi data infrastructure evolution

Sudharsan A, APAC Solution Lead, Business Critical Apps and Converged Solution, Hitachi Vantara, added that there has been the Hitachi data infrastructure evolution. It is from storage, to converged, to hyperconverged, and on to Cloud Foundation.

Hitachi and VMware are bringing various solutions to the table, with simplified consumption, and infrastructure portfolio. These are across hybrid and private clouds, digital workspace, SDDC, and Big Data analytics.

We have made hyperconvergence easy. There is the integrated HCI appliance, and the HCI operations is on the auto pilot. There is common management for edge-core-cloud. We provide full lifecycle management, and flexible consumption. HCI will accelerate cloud transformation.

Key use cases for hybrid cloud include DC modernization and cloud extensibility, and SQL And Oracle for faster query responses. Key use cases for VDI include secure remote workspace in hours, and enterprise app on enterprise HCI. The unique value proposition includes automated provisioning, unified management, turnkey, and hybrid cloud. There is accelerated time to production. This is the best of both worlds. All infrastructure is managed through the UCP-A, integrated into the vCenter.

We are abstracting away complexity, and that is over time and everywhere. There has also been the evolution of the consistent infrastructure from x86 to IaaS, and beyond.

There are multiple approaches to implementing the software-defined data centers (SDDCs). The SDDC Manager is used for centralized lifecycle management. Hitachi Vantara offerings include a fully integrated system, UCP-Advisor, and VSP as a principal storage VMFS, vVOL, cloud native, and supplemental storage. There are flexible storage options with the VMware Cloud Foundation storage.

Hitachi is the first Intel Select Certified HCI for VMware Horizon VDI. There is the secure digital Workspace solution co-engineered with Intel and VMware. You can get on-demand desktop in hours, with secure self-service data access. There are multi-site high-availability desktops, and they are tailored for end-user experiences.

There are intelligent data management VDI solutions powered by Hitachi. These are on-demand and cloud ready, allow smart data sharing, provide policy-based analytics, with backup-less protection, etc. You can move the data services from the edge to the cloud. The need of the hour is to profile the VDI users. Profiling the user VMs is the key to the right sizing of the VDI infrastructure.