Hybrid cloud leader VMware Hybrid Cloud services enhance IT service flexibility

Since 2001, Consona has greatly expanded its business scale through acquisitions. The company acquired the open source and cloud ERP supplier Compiere in 2010, bringing the first cloud-ready ERP solution to Consona and enabling it to enter the distribution market. Consona is a leading global CRM and ERP software provider headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, Consona offers software solutions that automate key business tasks from marketing to material management. If you've ever had an instant chat on a company web site, you might have used Consona software. Companies sell software and provide some solutions in the form of software as a service (SaaS) in a cloud environment. Its 4,500 customers are all over the world from retail to auto manufacturing, including small businesses and 2000 strong global companies. Consona has more than 700 employees in 40 locations around the world.

Global organizations need flexible IT resources

At present, the company maintains 3 own data centers, of which 2 are in the United States and 1 in India Bangalore. The main in-house IT customers are Consona software developers, shared services, and technical advisory staff. Consona each product line has pre-sales development and after-sale release research and development team. Consona's global infrastructure director, Kristenhayes, controls the company's IT department, which receives 10-37 virtual machine requests a week. In addition, the company provides SaaS to external customers.

As Consona companies grow in size, data center space is about to dry up. Within the company, product developers need the IT department to quickly supply the resources on which they rely to do their jobs. At the same time, Consona's external customers want the company to meet stringent performance SLAs (service-levelagreement, service quality agreements) requirements.

Consona's earlier AmazonEC2 service is still supporting a number of product lines for its customer service. However, Consona found that the solution was limited in the face of complex applications and 32-bit clients. Consona developers often deal with a three-tier application consisting of large Microsoft SQL databases, Web front-end and intermediate application tiers. Fixed-size non-VMware cloud solutions cannot quickly add more resources such as RAM, CPU, or hard disk space to the development, testing, or production environments of these applications. Consona has to create new instances and transfer data each time. The process is both troublesome and costly.

VMware Hybrid Cloud computing implements resources on demand

Consona needs to find a more flexible solution. It hopes to adjust the cloud-based workload on demand through resource pooling, which consumes different tiers of services based on business requirements. It also requires a cloud platform that is compatible with its internal VMware environment to enable application portability and reduce the risk of vendor lock-in.

Consona the company's 3 data centers for large-scale data center virtualization based on VMware platforms. In addition, Consona has signed a Virtual data Center service contract with Vmwarevcloud Data Center service provider Bluelock. The result is a rapid supply of cloud computing resources and strong performance and flexibility, as well as the ability to transfer workloads in a mixed cloud and increase or decrease capacity on demand.

"We have the application portability of the cloud, and we can add and subtract resources on demand," Hayes said. This brings cost efficiencies, performance improvements, and business scalability to meet the growing needs of internal and external customers. ”

"VMware, together with Vcloud-driven service providers, constitutes the industry's largest cloud computing partner system," said Zhang Zhenlen, technical director of VMware's Greater China region. The Vmwarevcloud infrastructure delivers enterprise-class cloud computing delivered both within the enterprise and through a vcloud-driven service provider. With Vcloud-driven services, customers can safely leverage secure, mixed cloud resources while gaining choice and flexibility to ensure workload interoperability and portability across cloud computing environments. ”

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Consona began selecting Bluelock's Vmwarevcloud Data center Authentication Service in 2010 and currently operates 6 virtual data centers in the environment. By Bluelock virtual data centers, Consona can leverage its existing VMware investments, both technically and professionally.

Flexible and efficient vmwarevcloud cloud services

Bluelock headquarters is also located in Indianapolis, one of the three certified Vmwarevcloud data center providers in North America. The company provides enterprise-class virtual data centers using Vmwarevsphere and vmwarevcenter management tools that vmwarevclouddirector as cloud delivery platforms. Bluelock has implemented Vcloudconnector for Vclouddirector, enabling Consona to view and manage its existing VMware environments and vsphere virtual data centers in its existing Bluelock client control Panel.

Bluelock's team of experts provides round-the-clock monitoring and other support, and manages the cloud environment, easing the burden on the Consona it team.

"Apart from the lack of capital spending and management complexity, it's like my own datacenter," says Hayes. I can do everything through a management console, start a virtual machine, create a virtual image directory, grant access to end users; I can also rely on Bluelock's customer service team to do the work for us. ”

Vmwarevclouddirector brings together virtual infrastructure resources and provides them to users in the form of directory services. Consona uses related resources (operating system, memory, processing power) to create a virtual datacenter and then grant access to it. Next, the Consona end users choose the instances they need from these directories for the development and test environment through self-service services. Internal applications include proprietary knowledge management and support tools available to some external customers.

Because Vmwarevsphere has functions like vmotion, it doesn't matter where a virtual machine exists in a mixed cloud, Consona says. This solution enables Consona to move workloads between managed and securely compliant data centers. Storage capacity can be extended on demand, which is a unique advantage for Consona, which must permanently save thousands of of megabytes of source code.

Capacity increases cost reduction

The benefits of a mixed cloud environment can be translated into measurable benefits. Under the Pay-as-you-go bluelock Environment, Consona only needs to pay for the computing and storage space it uses. Because of the need to invest heavily in new entity servers, power supplies, cooling devices, and floor space, the cost of Consona data centers has only increased slightly. Server warranty costs are down by 16%, and other cost and environment savings derive from lower power and thermal requirements.

End-User IT service levels have also increased dramatically. Before migrating to the VMware Hybrid cloud, the Consona help desk typically handles about 300 pending cases each time a resource request is received and takes 3-4 weeks to complete multiple requests. Today, the average caseload is reduced to 70 and can be completed within 3 days once the request is confirmed. Consona will also better meet customer SLA requirements for rapid deployment and 99.999% system uptime.

"By consolidating, we have reduced the number of internal data center entity servers, reduced our hardware maintenance burden, and gained the flexibility to add and subtract capacity on demand," Hayes said. ”

VMware cloud Computing improves Consona competitiveness

Freed from the tedious work of managing the entity infrastructure, Hayes turned its attention to work that would further benefit Consona end-users. She will update the internal data center to a newer version of vsphere and plan to deploy VMWAREVCENTERCAPACITYIQ soon to optimize capacity. She is interested in vmwarevcenterchargeback. Vmwarevcenterchargeback is useful for Consona budget planning when it begins to understand the cost of each department. In Consona, where key business applications such as Microsoft Exchange have been virtualized, and more applications and services are being virtualized, Hayes estimates that the proportion of the final internal data Center Application virtualization will reach 75%.

An important recent initiative in Consona is the use of Vmwareview for desktop virtualization. Consona will build a test group consisting of both internal end users and sales people who have access to the system through a terminal server.

"We are looking for a way to provide updates, patches and mirrors for workers around the world," says Hayes. ”

Ultimately, the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing for Consona are to improve enterprise competitiveness. Companies can operate efficiently, integrate acquisitions more quickly, and support their employees with IT resources to develop, deploy, and upgrade their products. At the same time, to Consona customers to ensure rapid deployment, service reliability and continuous upgrading of software products and services.

"The scale of the Consona is growing, adding new products or upgrading existing ones," Hayes said. Our flexibility and agility demand is huge. Cloud based services enable us to quickly build environments and deploy applications. VMware technology enables my IT department to provide better service to internal and external customers faster. ”

(Executive Editor: admin)