VMware’s Online Technology forum takes place this Wednesday and this virtual event is a must-attend for IT professional looking to gain valuable insight into how their organisation can spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time innovating and delivering greater business value.
The forum focuses on five technologies that IT professionals and business decision makers need to keep up to speed with and are driving business and IT efficiency: hybrid cloud, business mobility, software-defined datacentre infrastructure and new services, and software-defined networking.
Here's a bit more detail about just why these areas are so important to the modern enterprise:
Hybrid cloud
While more and more companies head towards the public cloud, there is a growing realisation that this is a journey. Indeed, it is recognised now that there will still be a place for on-premise infrastructure and private cloud for many organisations for the foreseeable future.
Many businesses, then, require a strategy to ensure their applications, databases and services can straddle both these worlds and are always available to the user regardless of where they are served from and how they are accessed. Applications and services also need to be developed in a consistent way to ensure the user experience is seamless and downtime is minimised.
The Ontine Technology Forum sessions in this strand will deal with building existing and new applications that are ready for hybrid cloud, what’s new in vCloud Air Disaster Recovery, a deep dive into vCloud Air Advanced Networking Services, and VMware Continuent Replication for Oracle.
Business mobility
Nowadays, your end users want to access business applications no matter where they are or what device they are using. As an IT professional, it is your job to make sure that access is available and secure at all times. While that sounds simple enough, achieving this goal is far from easy.
The VMware event will detail how to make sure a user session persists in a non-persistent virtualised environment. It will cover best practice, real-world use cases and how the technology in VMware's User Environment Manager can help you drive down operational costs.
Another session at the event takes a look at how to make Citrix more effective. The Citrix environment for many businesses is complex and scaling this across thousands of users can be time-consuming. IT organisations can learn how to put a strategy in place that leads to faster application delivery, simplified end user application management, better monitoring and more personalised access.
Event attendees will also learn how to solve their enterprise mobility management problems with a session that runs through the top 10 issues that surround mobile deployment.
Software-defined datacentre: Infrastructure
The Software-Defined Datacentre (SDDC) is one of the hottest topics in technology right now and attendees can learn the ins and outs of the infrastructure demands here.
The SDDC promises compute-capacity that is location-agnostic and is managed flexibly and securely across an ecosystem that includes not just on-premise datacentres but colocations and multiple clouds.
To enable this, real-time visibility into operating parameters is essential. This means enhanced connectivity across various systems within each facility and the ability to collect and analyse data that impacts operations.
For many organisations, data silos limit visibility and control. This results in inefficient practices and prevents firms from establishing a coherent ecosystem of IT, infrastructure and applications.
The sessions at the Online Technology Forum will look at how tools from VMware can help in delivering capacity optimisation, increased availability and reduction in the time required to effectively troubleshoot issues.
Delegates can also learn how integrated systems can simplify the process of creating and operating a complete SDDC private cloud with VMware EVO SDDC. This strand will also cover use cases, best practices and key SDDC strategies for IT professionals.
Software-defined datacentre: New services
New technologies that affect how the SDDC will evolve are covered off in this session.
Cloud native applications, OpenStack, containers and DevOps are areas that will shake-up the strategies of IT organisations over the next few years.
Experts will detail how IT organisations can get started on moving to the DevOps model, what the pre-requisites are and how best ensure a successful migration.
Containers are also a big trend for IT organisations and dovetails with the evolution of DevOps. They assist with the packaging and transportation of applications thanks to their lightweight nature when compared with hypervisors and the fact they make for an easier-to-control environment.
Containers also give rise to cloud-native applications. Getting apps to work in the cloud requires a set of components that work together and an architecture that is not your traditional enterprise application design. All of this and more will be covered off in a number of sessions at the VMware event.
Software-defined networking (SDN)
Networking and security are often the least automated parts of the infrastructure and traditionally require a lot of manual intervention. But with technologies such as Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Network functions virtualisation (NFV), automation is becoming a reality.
The increasing adoption of cloud-based services heralds the decline of traditional WANs as these are not the most optimal solution to today’s enterprise challenges.
Both SDN and NFV will accelerate the process towards converged networks and will span from IoT devices at the edges through to the datacentre at the core.
SDN promises speedy deployment, easy change control and configuration management, while NFV has the capacity to move critical services to the cloud and reduce costs.
Organisations will need to ensure that networks built on these technologies are monitored and continuously tested in order to ensure the speedy diagnosis and resolution of problems.
The sessions here will cover current trends in the industry as well as enhancing network security through micro-segmentation.
Don't forget to register for the event to ensure you don't miss out!
IT decision makers need to understand how each of these technology areas can impact their strategies for moving the business forward and remaining competitive.
The sessions, panels and hands-on labs should help professionals get to grips with the issues these technologies present and ensure their cloud architecture can deliver any application on any device, quickly and securely.
