By: Sunil Mahale, India MD and VP, Nutanix
Digital
transformation has been recognized as being vital to the growth of
our nation. This transformation has enjoyed the unanimous approval
and contribution from all stake holders including enterprises, MSMEs,
government bodies and citizens. But this level of adoption in a
country with a population of over a billion people would need a
robust technology base that is capable to collecting and distributing
vital data seamlessly.
Digital
India envisions creating high speed digital highways, that will
impact commerce and create a digital footprint for every individual.
Technologies based on mobility, analytics, Internet of things and
most importantly, cloud
technologies are the building blocks for the digital India
mission. There
is a growing need to manage huge volumes of data, and making them
readily available to public through digital cloud services. Cloud has
a pivotal role in enabling this change.
While
Data centers have become crucial to this transformation, IT leaders
increasingly recognize that current data centers have reached their
limits for supporting how state and local governments need to work
and provide services. Lightening the load to adapt to increasing
demand is the principle many government IT managers have in mind as
they look to make data centers more efficient, flexible and capable
for delivering new services. Government IT departments are also
prioritizing investments in data center consolidation and new
technologies to enable higher IT service levels.
There
are three trends that are impacting government IT today:
- Virtualization and cloud
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
- Flexible infrastructure for application development and delivery
Evolving
the Data Center to Hyperconvergence for Virtualization and Cloud:
The
traditional image of a data center is a cavernous room filled with
rows of equipment racks and whirring, blinking boxes. This reality is
fast disappearing as advances in virtualization technology pack more
capabilities into smaller devices. Government data centers are
evolving to take advantage of virtualization, especially for servers
and storage. The goal is to capture the associated benefits of higher
data center efficiency and optimization, as well as reduced capital
and operational expenses.
The
data center model is also evolving to support private cloud and IT as
a service to accomplish IT projects faster and more effectively.
Virtualization enables a hyper-converged infrastructure that
integrates servers and storage in a single appliance. The systems
leverage industry-standard hardware and software defined storage,
enabling easy scalability and management. A well-designed
hyper-convergence infrastructure in the data center offers several
additional advantages for IT operations and service delivery like
- Cost reductions for infrastructure, software licenses, cabling and other elements, with predictable budgeting for data center growth
- Easier, on-demand and linear scalability of compute and storage resources, which reduces the need to overprovision resources in anticipation of potential performance demands
- Flexibility to support new IT offerings, such as analytics, that help government employees improve services to constituents
- Simpler management with fewer server and storage silos
Delivering
Private Cloud and Infrastructure as a Service
One
key to agility — in both government and IT — is having the right
resources ready to go at a moment’s notice, but to use them only
when they are truly needed. That agility is behind the idea of IaaS
on hyper-converged infrastructure: delivering computing, storage and
network resources on demand to application developers and users.
This
environment operates like a private cloud, where the IT
infrastructure can serve more applications and users without the need
to add more staff. By creating a private internal cloud, IT managers
also can reduce concerns that come with using untrusted or shared
cloud services, including security, compliance and audit trails.
IT
can automate many operational tasks around provisioning and
orchestration, which makes it easier to activate or repurpose servers
as needed. Additionally, automated configuration and management of IT
resources means IT staff can focus on strategic, high-value
activities.
Any
Application at Any Scale
From
a smartphone app used by one employee to a complex information system
used by hundreds, the ability to deliver any application at any scale
is essential for government IT. This scalability requires an
infrastructure that can quickly deliver the right resources for
compute requirements, storage capacity and application performance.
Yet different applications commonly used for government functions
require different types of resources and performance levels. For
example, a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) application needs
more storage capacity than compute capability, while
transaction-oriented applications are often compute-intensive and
don’t require as much data storage.
An
agile government is one that has the information, applications and
computing capabilities that keep pace with the fast-paced changes in
citizen and employee expectations for services. By considering the
data center trends discussed, IT can make the infrastructure simpler
while also delivering services that make government better. Cloud
has demonstrated the capability to digitize the governance system
while proving to be cost efficient. The global world is eager to see
India embrace the Cloud Computing frontier led by technology
capabilities to improve people’s lives.
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