We know that the continuous acceleration of digital transformation lies in the acceleration of applications. In the entire digital system, software applications are the landing path for everything to play its value. Before the application can play a role, the enterprise needs to do a lot of software and hardware preparation and application development work; before the application starts to play a role, the enterprise also needs to carry out a lot of operation and maintenance, management, and security work to ensure the stability and continuity of the application. From this perspective, a large number of infrastructure construction, development preparation, and operation and maintenance management tasks that occupy the mainstream in the current digital transformation of enterprises are essentially serving "application modernization".
In the process, the traditional infrastructure obviously can no longer meet the requirements of business timeliness, let alone the needs of enterprise application modernization and transformation. Therefore, developing and deploying applications based on hyper-converged architecture and cloud-native technology has become the future of enterprise application. The trend of modern transformation lies.
In this regard, VxRail, which perfectly couples Dell and VMware infrastructure solutions, has a "unique" advantage. A hyper-converged system based on VxRail requires a management interface to realize hardware, software, computing, and storage virtualization. It is the platform with the highest level of management integration among all data center solutions.
Not only that, but VxRail further integrates the architecture platform, hybrid multi-cloud resource platform and DevOps delivery platform. At the same time, it can also intelligently and transparently manage the hybrid multi-cloud resource platform based on the "consistency" infrastructure, realizing the cross-"edge-core-multi-cloud" dynamic Two-way migration of workloads supports cross-cloud technology integration and core system upgrades, and can maximize the continuous delivery of modern applications for enterprises. It can be said that it has become the "optimal" infrastructure "base" choice for enterprises in the process of application modernization.
Application Modernization Transformation Challenges
It can be seen that as the digital transformation of enterprises enters the "deep water zone", the application status of enterprises is also undergoing tremendous changes, mainly manifested in the exponential growth in the number of applications; the types of software applications are becoming more and more diverse; at the same time , The rise of multi-cloud and cross-cloud environments has also brought new challenges to enterprise infrastructure and applications.
It is precisely because of this that application modernization transformation has become a "hot word" in digital transformation in the past few years. According to IDC's survey, most domestic enterprises are currently in the stage of partial promotion and expansion of digitalization, which shows that most Chinese enterprises have broken away from the early stage of "fragmented" digital development and are steadily carrying out digital transformation. Based on this, IDC believes that: "Enterprises need elastic, responsive, distributed, and continuously evolving modern application forms to effectively assist enterprises in achieving large-scale digital innovation."
Against this background, more and more Chinese enterprises have begun to adopt cloud-native development methods to realize the modern transformation of applications. IDC's survey also pointed out that nearly 50% of enterprises have applied cloud-native technology to the core and sub-core systems of the production environment, and 83% of enterprises will continue to increase investment in cloud-native. In the process, How to obtain a more agile infrastructure, how to better simplify operation and maintenance, improve resource utilization, improve application delivery efficiency, and accelerate enterprise business innovation have become the "top priority" for enterprises.
The key reason behind this is that many business-critical applications of many enterprises are based on the traditional single architecture and are deployed on physical machines. However, with the increasing number of digital applications in enterprises, the infrastructure is becoming more and more complex. Data maintenance and application management have become more complex and difficult. In addition, the development model of single application also leads to a large amount of customization work in application development, which increases the difficulty of business.
The greater pressure and challenge lies in that as the deployment and operation methods of different clouds such as edge cloud, dedicated cloud, industry cloud, and hybrid multi-cloud become increasingly "diversified" in the future, more and more different applications of enterprises will be distributed in different In the deployment environment, how to run new applications such as virtualized applications, containers, Kubernetes and AI on the proven infrastructure in the data center, edge cloud or any cloud, while ensuring the compliance and security of its business, and also An important problem that plagues enterprises to accelerate application modernization transformation.
As Zhang Nian, architect of enterprise-level cloud computing and hyper-converged technology of Dell Technologies Group, said: "Currently, the biggest challenge for enterprise customers in accelerating application innovation is usually not the performance of the infrastructure, but how to get rid of a large number of operation and maintenance tasks." , put more energy into business and application innovation.”
Break through the last mile of innovation
As a hyper-converged all-in-one product VxRail jointly designed and developed by Dell Technologies Group and VMware, and the Dell Technologies cloud platform VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on VxRail, it was born for the transformation of application modernization. infrastructure” and “consistent operating model” to truly meet the needs of increasing applications and data interaction, agile innovative applications, data sharing, new business development, and hybrid multi-cloud, and open up the “last mile” of enterprise business innovation.
It is worth mentioning that Dell VxRail has previously obtained the super-convergence certification of Trusted Cloud by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and VCF on VxRail has also passed the private cloud evaluation of Trusted Cloud Hybrid Cloud Solution.
First of all, in terms of performance improvement, enterprises are most concerned about how modern applications developed based on cloud native can maintain sufficiently good performance in the case of large-scale data volume and business volume. In this regard, the new-generation hyper-converged product VxRail 8 launched by Dell Technologies this year is the industry's first and only jointly-designed hyper-converged system that runs VMware's distributed service engine on the DPU, fully supporting the latest VMware vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 software supports running vSphere distributed service engine (Distrubuted Services Engine) and vSAN's latest high-speed storage architecture ESA (Express Storage Architecture), supports data processing unit (DPU), and can help enterprise customers make better use of NVMe-based high-speed Performance flash devices to further unleash the performance and functionality of storage hardware.
According to reports, the new VxRail 8 perfectly "integrates" vSAN ESA and DPU offload technology, which can provide enterprise customers with a better performance experience in the VMware environment. VxRail integrated with DPU has the following advantages, including providing pre-designed and pre-tested And pre-validated hardware and software, enterprises can integrate DPU into existing infrastructure without additional work. This architecture allows the DPU to share the workload of the CPU, so that the CPU can focus on several application processes, thereby optimizing performance to meet business needs with minimal delay.
More critically, VxRail is a "turnkey" production-ready solution. Enterprise customers can use VxRail hyper-converged system software to automate DPU lifecycle management to simplify day-to-day operations, providing the necessary visibility into integrated DPU-powered services to minimize the time to identify and resolve service-affecting issues, while Dell Provide unified support, coordinate global support and services to help corporate customers solve problems that arise.
Secondly, in terms of automated operation and maintenance, VxRail can also provide full-stack "automated" integrated operation and maintenance capabilities, with automatic lifecycle management functions, including automatic expansion and configuration, and can quickly expand through software-defined data centers, with "cluster awareness" Ability; automatic deployment of workloads, such as automatic management of Horizon or Kubernetes clusters; automatic evolution and synchronous upgrades to new nodes without interrupting workloads or data migration; at the same time, with the new versions of Kubernetes and VCF releases, enable "hitless" upgrades, and more.
In fact, for enterprise customers, the bigger challenge may be "Day 2", which is the follow-up operation and maintenance stage, or the need for continuous maintenance and expansion of modern applications that are suitable for modern applications. service level.
For example, VMware vSphere will regularly release new versions, including some new features or security patches, but this may only be a component of the entire VMware stack, while the full-stack automated lifecycle management based on VxRail can provide security , reliability, and compatibility—that is, all relevant components can be upgraded in a predetermined order to optimize the process and eliminate potential failures due to version incompatibilities or changes in best practices; and through With the automation capabilities provided by VxRail, enterprise customers can maximize operation and maintenance efficiency and accelerate application innovation.
Third, in terms of system scalability, VxRail can also play the role of "all-rounder" in the modern application transformation of enterprises, whether it is data center modernization, driving edge computing growth, realizing hybrid cloud acceleration, and promoting the adoption of cloud native and containers , VxRail can provide better support.
In this regard, Zhang Nian also said that from Dell’s point of view, the modern hyper-converged platform is to help customers empower all employees, realize full-stack automated deployment and monitoring management, and improve IT management efficiency; cross-cloud management and enterprise-level consistency The permanent hybrid cloud improves the efficiency of multi-cloud resource management, accelerates business digital transformation and cross-industry and cross-border collaborative innovation capabilities. Facing the future, Dell believes that the application of edge business scenarios and artificial intelligence will be the focus of attention in the next few years. More data can be obtained through the edge, and artificial intelligence can be used to better achieve better application lifecycle management of AIOps technology, ensuring The stability and security of the business in the process of continuous transformation and intelligent IoT upgrade, and the improvement of the efficiency of modern application development, delivery, operation and management are all the directions that VxRail will continue to develop in the future.
Finally, in terms of application scenarios, Dell Technologies, in addition to providing an innovative architecture based on VxRail hyper-convergence, is also accelerating the implementation of enterprise business innovation application scenarios through the empowerment of more new technologies. For example, Dell Technologies, together with NVIDIA and VMware, launched the AI GPU virtualization platform NVAIE solution, which can deploy NVIDIA AI and data analysis software suites on VMware virtualization and cloud-native platforms; in addition, Dell Technologies' modern object storage ObjectScale, not only native Supporting Kubernetes, simple operation and maintenance management, intelligent workload configuration and flexible deployment options, it can provide enterprise customers with a "global connection, unlimited expansion" data lake built on VxRail and VMware.
It can be seen that the current rapidly changing market environment is driving the strategic transformation of enterprise business, technology update iteration, timely response to user needs and other processes to continuously accelerate, all of which require the key applications of enterprises to be more agile and efficient. In the process, the hyper-converged architecture based on VxRail, with its strong consistency, automated operation and maintenance, rich scalability, and ability to implement application scenarios, will undoubtedly better promote the modernization and transformation of enterprise applications, and Drive enterprises to accelerate digital transformation.
New value of innovation and practice
It is worth mentioning that, for Dell Technologies, accelerating the modernization of enterprise applications with a hyper-converged innovation architecture is not just talk, but a large number of practical and verified cases in the market, so this is very important for Chinese enterprises Moving toward application modernization also provides more new values for reference and reference.
In the automotive industry, the "base" support behind a smart electric vehicle manufacturer is a hyper-converged data center based on VxRail hyper-convergence. In terms of systems, solid support is provided.
Specifically, the data center built by the enterprise customer based on VxRail hyper-convergence is not only very convenient to install and deploy, but also can greatly save the space occupied by the computer room. It can also help IT personnel improve data security, platform manageability, and operational efficiency. Efficiency. In terms of performance, based on the VxRail hyper-converged solution, the customer's performance has been improved by 2-3 times compared with the past, and the delay has been reduced by 30%. The overall plan can give more efficient support to the smart electric vehicle business, make the automation rate of the main line area of the factory reach 100%, effectively support the application of V2G technology, and support customers to successfully pass the vehicle, pile and road tests of all V2G technologies, and take the lead in entering The first echelon of technology landing application, allowing customers to become a new car-making force for landing application of V2G technology.
At the same time, in the specific cooperation process, Dell Technologies is also actively helping the IT department of the enterprise customer to customize support plans and technical decisions, and use automated proactive and predictive suggestions to improve IT performance and stability, helping customers achieve Automated support to help IT departments maximize workload availability. In addition, after a failure occurs, Dell, as a unified support interface for customers, can also help customers diagnose and solve problems faster, and provide proactive and timely responses to systems that support business-critical applications and workloads Predictive support, thus maximizing the support for business innovation of enterprises.
In the manufacturing industry, a company cooperated with Dell Technologies to build a manufacturing ecological cloud platform based on VxRail hyper-convergence, which also achieved good results. It is understood that the cloud platform based on VxRail hyper-convergence can enable IT departments of iron and steel enterprises to quickly increase or delete IT resources according to business needs within 20-30 minutes. By defining relevant policies, IT personnel can Ensure the seamless upgrade of the virtual cloud host used during the peak demand period, and the automatic fallback during the slow business period.
In addition, the advantage of the core hyper-converged product VxRail in the cloud platform built by the enterprise lies in the integration of storage, computing, and network resources, and all technical services are provided by Dell Technologies, which makes the operation and maintenance The complexity is greatly reduced. At the same time, VxRail has pre-installed virtualization components and management components such as vSphere, vSAN, vCenter Server, VxRail Manager, etc., which also allows IT personnel to complete the work from booting to creating a virtual system within 15 minutes, and in the later maintenance. Uninterrupted repairs and upgrades can be performed without interruption, which can increase the maintenance efficiency of the entire IT by 20% and save 30% of infrastructure costs.
From these successful landing cases, it is not difficult to see that the data center or cloud platform based on VxRail hyper-convergence can provide support for the transformation and upgrading of enterprise modernization applications, and accelerate the pace of enterprise application modernization to the greatest extent.
In general, in the future, enterprises must develop applications more easily and at low cost, operate and manage applications more conveniently and intelligently, and realize transformation and upgrading of application modernization. The perspective of customers' needs in the process of application modernization transformation, and the "unique" technological innovation capabilities provided by VxRail, as well as the accumulation of a large amount of practice and experience, believe that they can accelerate the realization of enterprise application modernization transformation and drive continuous business innovation. In the process, it will build a solid foundation for more Chinese companies to support and innovate.
Shenyao's Science and Technology Observation was founded by a senior technology media person, Shenski, who has 20 years of experience in dissemination of enterprise-level technology content. He has long focused on the observation and thinking of industrial Internet, enterprise digitalization, ICT infrastructure, and automotive technology.
