ESG Validation

Introduction

This report documents hands-on testing of Cisco Workload Optimization Manager (CWOM). This software analyzes application demand, resource consumption, costs, and compliance requirements and provides proactive management to continuously ensure application performance and optimize infrastructure resource utilization, while minimizing costs and ensuring compliance.

Co-Author(s): Christophe Bertrand

Abstract

This ESG Technical Review documents hands-on validation of the Veritas Resiliency Platform (VRP). The goal of the report is to validate that VRP, once integrated within a business’s IT environment, significantly enhances the ability of IT to support the business’s digital transformation initiatives by reducing the risk of interruptions caused by application downtime.

Hybrid Cloud Challenges: [1]

While hybrid cloud computing sounds promising, it’s not so easy to accomplish. Many organizations want the option to run workloads in the cloud to handle spikes in demand, but to do that means renting compute and storage resources—where you pay for the storage even when it’s not in use—and it may take weeks or months to move applications and data. It means extra cost, security concerns, and application changes, plus it’s difficult to bring those workloads back on-premises.

According to ESG Research: [1]

VMware Validated Designs for the Software-defined Data Center

The acceleration of cloud computing initiatives, combined with the change in IT infrastructure consumption, is rapidly transitioning the IT conversation away from a technology focus to more of a business-oriented approach.

The Challenges

ESG asked 633 IT professionals and managers to name their most important IT priorities, and information security was cited by 37% of respondents, making it the most-often cited response by a wide margin.[1] Business intelligence and data analytics initiatives ranked second, cited by 24% of respondents. In addition, when asked to identify their most important justifications for IT investments, while 39% of organizations named improved security, 32% called out business process improvement and 27% indicated a reduction in operational expenditures, which suggests that while information security is certainly at the top of mind, operational improvement is not far behind.

Due to their simplicity and flexibility, NAS storage solutions have proven invaluable to enterprise organizations as in-house solutions for file sharing, backup, and archive needs. The emergence of server virtualization, private and public clouds, and the need to support an ever-increasing mobile workforce has led to increased demands in the performance, capacity, security, and connectivity of NAS storage solutions. With an ever-increasing need to manage and protect a growing amount of unstructured data, it is no small surprise that respondents to ESG research have identified hardware costs, rapid data growth rate, data protection and migration, and staff costs as top storage challenges faced by enterprise organizations.[1] Storing, protecting, and managing access to such a large mount of unstructured data is costly both in terms of capital expenses (hardware and software) and operational expenses (management and expertise).

The Challenges

IT challenges are not always technical in nature, which is indeed the case when it comes to networking. In fact, organizations surveyed by ESG most often cited meeting budget constraints as a top challenge facing their networking teams (38%) (see Figure 1).[1] And it’s not just in networking; according to ESG’s 2016 IT Spending Intentions Survey, budget factors such as return on investment and reducing operational and capital expenses are important considerations for justifying investment across all of IT.[2] However, as borne out by the fact that providing network performance (27%) was also in the top five networking challenges, network quality and user satisfaction are still important, even while dealing with budget limitations.