Shift CAPEX to OPEX. With an Expedient On-Site Private Cloud

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1 Shift CAPEX to OPEX With an Expedient On-Site Private Cloud P

2 Expedient now offers an agile, On-Site Private Cloud to help you shift CAPEX to OPEX, enable a hybrid cloud strategy using software-defined networking and simplify disaster recovery with Push Button DR 2.0 Expedient is an acclaimed provider of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) for cloud customers. With continual, rapid refresh cycles, Expedient s cloud architecture has received national recognition as a cost-effective model that delivers stability and performance for enterprises of all sizes. Expedient has now taken its deep knowledge of networking and cloud technology to an even greater level with a new model: the Expedient On-Site Private Cloud. On-Site Private Cloud The On-Site Private Cloud is the convergence of hardware, hypervisor, software-defined networking (SDN) and management applications. These elements are integrated with your own in-house data center. The new on-site cloud model allows you to take advantage of all Expedient managed services, while still retaining the control you need over your own data center. Enterprises no longer have to buy and manage their own hardware. Instead, businesses can phase out capital equipment in a timely manner as they deploy an automated, orchestrated on-site virtualized infrastructure. They can also use the Expedient On-Site Private Cloud as an entry point to scale up to the full Expedient Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud. Business can now get the outcome they need, on-demand, with greater agility, at a lower cost, and with less risk. STRATEGIC BENEFITS FOR ENTERPRISES The Expedient On-Site Private Cloud delivers key strategic benefits to enterprises: Shift capital expenditures (CAPEX) to operating expenditures (OPEX), so you can focus less on equipment and more on strategic business goals. Make migration easer, with a clear path to a software-defined infrastructure. Minimize risk and speed up recovery, with a powerful new tool for business continuity: Push Button DR 2.0. On-Site Private Cloud provides access to Expedient managed services and a migration ramp between the in-house data center and the Expedient Cloud. EXPEDIENT CLOUD ACCESS TO ALL EXPEDIENT MANAGED SERVICES EXPEDIENT ON-SITE PRIVATE CLOUD CUSTOMER DATA CENTER OPERATIONAL BENEFITS FOR IT The Expedient On-Site Private Cloud provides many benefits that help IT reduce costs and maximize performance: Offload some IT tasks to Expedient, so your own staff can focus more on critical in-house work. Transfer on-call service requests about infrastructure issues to Expedient s 24x7x365 Operations Support Center (OSC), and reduce in-house calls for help. Match workload demands with computing resources more accurately and at a more granular level by the week or month instead of attempting annual predictions. Reduce in-house operating costs by taking advantage of high-end computing, storage and networking resources. Avoid operational limitations in networking and virtualization areas due to skill gaps with existing staff. Figure 1. The Expedient On-Site Private Cloud is integrated with your own data center. Integration includes some hardware, software-defined networking and virtualization. Once implemented, the On-Site Private Cloud provides access to all Expedient managed services, including Expedient s new Push Button DR 2.0.

3 Choose the Level of Control and Administration You Need The On-Site Private Cloud is a combination of the Expedient cloud and your own cloud. Basically, Expedient sets up hardware, virtualization appliances and the other elements of the On-Site Private Cloud inside your network (see Figure 2). These resources are then continually upgraded for performance and capabilities to adjust with customers performance demands. In fact, with Expedient s rapid refresh cycle, the resources of the Expedient On-Site Private Cloud are typically more powerful, more capable and more robust than the resources that make up a business s own data center. YOUR ON-SITE PRIVATE CLOUD IS ISOLATED AND DEDICATED It s important to understand that, in the Expedient model, the On-Site Private Cloud remains fully isolated and dedicated to your business. It is part of your data center. There are no noisy neighbor issues that could compromise your business. At the same time, you get the benefit of access to dedicated Expedient servers in the full Expedient cloud to facilitate maintenance activities or in the event of an unplanned service interruption requiring failover to an alternative location. YOU CAN CHOOSE YOUR LEVEL OF CONTROL Because the On-Site Private Cloud is in-house, you can choose how much control to retain of the data center investment you ve already made. For example, administration can remain with your company s IT department or it can migrate to Expedient. You can choose the level of control you need for your business requirements. You can choose the level of control you require for network operations, hypervisors and mission-critical applications. Storage is also in-house, provided by Expedient or a combination of both; so again, you choose the level of control you need for sensitive workloads and data. LEVERAGE YOUR RESOURCES AND EXPEDIENT RESOURCES AT THE SAME TIME The combination of an On-Site Private Cloud integrated with your own data center provides a gateway to the full Expedient cloud. This lets you leverage the specific benefits you need for virtualization, security and performance. This also makes it easier to ramp up from your data center to Expedient s IaaS cloud, without migrating too fast for your IT administrators to effectively manage change. E X P E D I E N T O N - S I T E P R I V A T E C L O U D Expedient On-Site Private Cloud is integrated with a customer s in-house data center Customer data center Expedient on-site private cloud Customer has immediate access to Expedient managed services expedient managed services Expedient infrastructure Customer server hardware Expedient server hardware HW SDI V Customer Storage Area Network (SAN) Expedient Storage Area Network (SAN) Expedient software-defined networking (SDN) 24/7 Support Hardware Refresh Cycle Inventory Push Button DR 2.0 Servers, network elements, SAN, etc. defined Networking Virtualization layer Customer Virtualization Layer Expedient Manager of Virtualization Layer Customer Licensing Expedient Licensing Figure 2. Expedient builds the On-Site Private Cloud by integrating a private network inside the customer s existing data center. This allows the customer to retain the level of control it needs for administrative access, network operations, hypervisors, mission-critical applications, etc., while gaining the advantage of Expedient managed services.

4 Focus More on Strategic Goals Most business leaders and IT administrators intuitively understand the value of the On-Site Private Cloud. At the same time, businesses are often understandably reluctant to let go of the capital invested in their data centers. Compounding the issue is that IT administrators need to know they are in control of their hardware, network, virtualization and critical applications. However, the process of trying to control and scale a data center as your business grows can create an unmanageable burden on both IT services and budgets. John White is Expedient s Vice President of Product Strategy. Says White, In their own data center, IT engineers have to do a thousand things for their company and its users, workloads and data. Each week, every month, those engineers have to find the time and personnel to do those thousand things. Unfortunately, in today s world, they can only do a hundred things. They re impairing their job by chasing an impossible goal. And every day that goal is scaling further away. Explained White, Our On-Site Private Cloud changes all that. Cloud hardware, software-defined networks, virtualization those are our areas of expertise. With our new on-site model, we give enterprises an efficient, cost-effective way to offload non-strategic burdens and still retain the control they need over critical systems and workloads. Now those IT engineers can focus more on strategic IT and better support their company s core goals. Shift CAPEX to OPEX One of the biggest benefits of the new On-Site Private Cloud is that it helps IT administrators shift more effectively from a capital expense (CAPEX) model to an operational expense (OPEX) model resulting in: Predictable monthly expense profiles Increased IT management efficiency In a traditional business model, business leaders typically estimate the capital needed for projects across a fiscal year (or multiple years). Unfortunately, there is no truly accurate way to predict resource needs in the ever-changing world of IT. Over-buying means a large CAPEX up front. Underestimating can cost even more, because you must come up with additional capital to meet unexpected workload demands at the expense of other critical projects. In the standard Expedient cloud model, you pay only for the service you need. Every month, you can update your resource subscription to meet growth demands. With the new Expedient On-Site Private Cloud, it s even easier to adjust your subscription to meet your needs. For example, you can use your in-house data center to meet basic workload needs. You can then use the Expedient On-Site Private Cloud to provide additional on-demand services or simply scale out to more resources as required for workload mobility and disaster recovery. By shifting your computing demands to an operating expense and subscription model, you can predict future growth costs with increased reliability and at a far more granular level than before. This helps you remove the typical CAPEX burden from your IT administrators and still meet actual use requirements but with a flexible, agile OPEX model. Instead of spending time and money building and maintaining your own data center, your IT administrators can now concentrate more on cost-effective OPEX and your strategic business goals. Anytime you integrate with a system that s already working, you need to dot every i and cross every t. At Expedient, our priority is to maintain the customer s service in spite of every change. Migrations, scaling up transitions must be virtually invisible. Our new On-Site Private Cloud provides that kind of seamless ramp. John White, Vice President, Product Strategy, Expedient

5 Scale Seamlessly into the Expedient Cloud Most companies can t scale long-term inside their own data center walls. They don t have the physical space, cooling systems, power infrastructure or bandwidth to grow an in-house data center along with their business. With the Expedient On- Site Private Cloud, companies can now move off their limited, virtualized platform and scale gently into the Expedient walls and the full Expedient cloud. Over time, as businesses grow increasingly comfortable with Expedient s proven architecture, they can use the On-Site Private Cloud as a smooth gateway to scale up to the full Expedient cloud. SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING (SDN) ENABLES EASIER SCALING AND SMOOTHER MIGRATIONS The On-Site Private Cloud makes scaling and migrations between data centers virtually seamless. This is because Expedient decouples the hardware and software infrastructures. In the On-Site Private Cloud, hardware is used to do critical tasks, while software provides an agile network and cloud infrastructure. Software-defined networking (SDN) enables full policy-based, automated orchestration of on-demand IT services. SDN helps: Automate workflows and resource provisioning Allocate resources according to business needs, application requirements and infrastructure mapping Enable smoother, seamless scaling and migrations Enhance security at a granular level using micro-segmentation In the Expedient Gen 7 Cloud POD, SDN is enabled by a foundation of Intel technologies. This includes the powerful Intel Xeon processor E v4 product family, which includes built-in support for software-defined infrastructure (SDI). Intel-enabled SDI offers excellent performance for agility, virtualization, and SDN. It also supports highly distributed scale-out Hadoop workloads, as well as efficient management of legacy workloads. It is now easier than ever for you to migrate workloads seamlessly from your own data center to the full Expedient cloud. Minimize Risk and Recover Faster with Push Button DR 2.0 The world is full of risk. The question is no longer which risks your company will face, but how fast and how well you can recover after an event, failure or full-on disaster. Surprisingly, even today, many businesses still don t have a DR plan. Service providers often offer disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). However, these solutions typically rely upon domain name system (DNS) failovers. That s how they attempt to provide network continuity in the event of a disaster declaration. Unfortunately, a DNS-based solution delivers an inconsistent recovery time. That can degrade or prevent service to some users for an extended period of time hours or even days. That s a recovery timeline that can cripple your business. With the new On-Site Private Cloud, Expedient now offers a powerful new tool for disaster recovery: Push Button DR 2.0. With Push Button DR 2.0, Expedient delivers a public and private DRaaS solution using VMware NSX*-based network virtualization. This is a hybrid network mesh. When combined with dynamic routing protocols, VMware NSX allows public internet protocol (IP) subnets to be re-used in an alternative geographic location. Customer Clicks DR 2.0 Button; Recovers within Minutes Business continuity and disaster recovery are critical capabilities that cloud providers must deliver. The challenge is to maintain real-time replication of all customer workload configurations and be able to rapidly restore them. Recently, one of Expedient s customers, Stanley Steemer, went through full network fail over testing. Expedient integrated the customer s data center with the Expedient On-Site Private Cloud, including Push Button DR 2.0. To simulate what would occur after a network failure, the customer pushed the DR button. Within minutes, all public IPs and system information that typically switches from the primary site to the secondary site was sent seamlessly back to the primary site, which came back up within minutes. Commenting on the process of moving critical workloads to the Expedient DRaaS solution, Tom Juncewicz, Director of Information Technology at Stanley Steemer remarked, Working with Expedient to implement Push Button DR has been a pleasure. Their handling of our migration was absolutely magical! In my career, I ve never seen such a smooth transition of such a complex environment.

6 Public IP addresses and all virtual network appliances including firewall, load balancers and VPN endpoints can now move automatically with their connected computing workloads. This allows Expedient to replicate computing environments between two data centers. In turn, this provides a reliable failover for your entire environment. If a disaster occurs, an authorized IT administrator simply clicks a single button in the Expedient self-service support portal to begin recovery. Expedient Push Button DR 2.0 provides: Guaranteed resources reserved for unexpected events Seamless failover of computing, networking and storage elements Active and passive configuration options by application Straightforward one-click recovery process in the familiar VMware vsphere interface Recovery time objective (RTO) measured in minutes Recovery point objective (RPO) that is near real-time Availability in Expedient data centers and in other appropriate, qualified locations Expedient s Push Button DR 2.0 is a powerful, next-gen, fully automated and orchestrated solution that can restore your systems quickly and easily in mere minutes. Enterprises can now automate recovery and dramatically minimize risk. IT leaders can also present a better business model to executives, since effective business continuity and DR plans help prevent costly downtime that can significantly impact business. To see a video demonstration of Push Button DR 2.0, visit Expedient Gen 7 Cloud POD Enabled by Intel Xeon Processors Expedient has generations of experience delivering high-performance, costeffective clouds with powerful capabilities for IT. For example, in any cloud environment, the performance of virtualized components not just that of the underlying hardware is critical. To ensure maximum performance and capabilities of the Expedient cloud, Expedient built their first cloud architecture with Intel Xeon processor-based servers. Expedient has continued to build subsequent Cloud POD generations on Intel technologies. This has enabled Expedient to offer customers a substantial increase in CPU and memory performance, as well as powerful new capabilities, with each new generation of Intel processors. CONTINUAL CLOUD POD UPGRADES ENSURE HIGH PERFORMANCE AND NEW CAPABILITIES Servers: Expedient s Gen 7 Cloud POD is built upon the new Intel Xeon processor E v4 product family. This processor family includes built-in support for software-defined infrastructure (SDI). These processors deliver the industry s largest in-memory power for your most demanding data workloads. Expedient is also taking advantage of other key security and reliability capabilities The increased performance of Intel Xeon processors has enabled our new Cloud POD generation and our powerful new On-Site Private Cloud. We can now provide more services to our customers, including support of virtual network appliances that enable Push Button DR 2.0. John White, Vice President, Product Strategy, Expedient

7 built into the new generation of Intel Xeon processors, including Intel Advanced Encryption Standard - New Instructions (Intel AES-NI). Network: To make sure Expedient can continue to scale out for future demands, Expedient is changing over to new spine and leaf switching technology from Juniper Networks separating north/south traffic from east/west traffic in support of improved performance and scalability. Storage: A major improvement to the Cloud POD stack comes with the use of all flash storage arrays across a 10Gb iscsi network. Utilizing an all flash storage array provides the ability to handle almost any workload and reduce any possibility of noisy neighbor. COMPATIBLE WITH MANY CONFIGURATIONS Expedient s new On-Site Private Cloud is compatible with a large menu of processors and RAM configurations to support the unique requirements of various application workloads and licensing dependencies. SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING (SDN) FOR IMPROVED SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE In the On-Site Private Cloud, SDN helps IT centralize and automate management of network and application services. Expedient uses SDN inside VMware NSX.* This virtualized networking introduces a set of security features that many companies do not yet have in their toolbox. In fact, because Expedient must manage client workloads of all sensitivities and security levels, Expedient s On-Site Private Cloud includes compliance measures that are typically stricter than what an enterprise generally has in place. IMPLEMENTING AN ON-SITE PRIVATE CLOUD Once an on-site cloud is implemented, the Expedient team handles all IT operations needed to support that cloud. Customers can immediately take advantage of all Expedient managed services. This includes firewalls, load balancers, backups, virtual private network (VPN), managed operating systems, patching and Push Button DR 2.0. For IT, you gain powerful new services that make your work easier and eliminate some requirements for specialized knowledge. For users, nothing has changed. Workload allocation is invisible and performance is consistent, whether users work on in-house data center resources or on resources of the On-Site Private Cloud. This is part of the reason scaling and migration are so seamless. With Expedient s On-Site Private Cloud, the infrastructure itself is virtually invisible, and you can focus on services and workloads instead. Test Results: New Expedient On-Site Private Cloud vs. Typical Private Clouds Expedient asked a third-party Cloud Spectator* to analyze the performance of an Expedient On-Site Private cloud versus typical private clouds, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS)* and Microsoft Azure.* You can visit the Cloud Spectator website and download the test results yourself, to see how the Expedient On-Site Private Cloud delivers up to three times the performance of other clouds. As shown by the Cloud Spectator results, Expedient On-Site Private Cloud delivers superior, accelerated performance and powerful managed services for on-demand computing, while still allowing you to retain the control you need over your resources. To see test results, visit * Other names and brands may be the property of others. Learn more Contact an Expedient representative to learn how an On-Site Private Cloud can help you shift from CAPEX to OPEX, resolve critical business needs and improve business continuity. Visit P