The world is undergoing a massive digital transformation. This digital revolution is driving innovation across industries and across all lines of business—with more ways of engaging with customers, and gathering valuable data and insight than ever before.

It is no surprise that much of this transformation is enabled through the adoption of different cloud platforms.There is a huge wave of businesses that are embracing public and hybrid cloud today. Overwhelming evidence provided by leading research institution such as IDG indicates this technology shift:

• Cloud technology is becoming a staple to organization’s infrastructure as 70% have at least one application in the cloud.
• Within the next three years, organizations have the largest plans to move data storage/data management (43%) and business/data analytics (43%) to the cloud.

Those are compelling data points! Is your organization ready to make that change and embrace the Cloud? Many customers are looking to transform their businesses by managing their data centers in a more productive way – integrating with public clouds. They often view Public Clouds as a way to:

• Gain the agility to respond to changing business requirements.
• Align costs to business requirements by managing expenses and reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
• Accelerate innovation by transforming the role of IT.

VMware vCloud Air offers a fully compatible public cloud where you can “lift and shift” your existing on premises data center infrastructure to a secure and compatible public cloud environment.

If you are going through a merger, acquisition, spin off or a hardware end-of-life and if you are seeking alternative options to consolidate and host your data center, you are looking at options to Replace a data center. This can quickly become an expensive and time-consuming project involving lot of infrastructure and migration planning. You will want a public cloud that is 100% compatible with your existing application. If your public cloud provider is not 100% compatible, it forces the applications to be re-architected or re-designed around a particular cloud provider’s strengths or gaps. The result is a sub-optimal solution that makes the whole project a daunting ask and adds to the overall timeline and cost. As the head of IT, it makes it harder for you to plan and justify the viability of the solution in your tight budget.

Data Center Replacement Achieved with vCloud Air

vCloud Air today offers the perfect hybrid cloud infrastructure making it an ideal solution for these projects.

• vCloud Air runs on the vSphere platform, a platform that supports the broadest set of operating systems and a wide variety of applications. The service delivers high performance compute and storage and ensures built in high availability to ensure that you get an enterprise grade solution that you can trust.
• Replicate your existing on premise data center infrastructure to vCloud Air by utilizing Advanced Networking Services powered by NSX and maintain the same network security and access control policies across your on-premise and vCloud Air environment.
• With Hybrid Cloud Manager, a unique and differentiated vCloud Air service, you can move data and applications from one location to another with little to no downtime. It can also help you move workloads from one location to another without changing IP or MAC addresses over a WAN optimized connection.

Now you can meet tight deadlines, cost mandates and resource utilization goals by migrating workloads and architectural best practices to the public cloud efficiently and quickly.

Customer Success Story

Recently, one of our customers; a leading construction, services and property group in Europe; completed a Data Center Replacement project. They were in a situation where they:

• Needed to regain control over data center sprawl with 9 data centers gained through acquisitions.
• Had an aggressive timeline to close 3^rd party data centers.
• Needed to support future growth while addressing many legacy issues to ensure business continuity, minimize risk and downtime.

vCloud Air helped the customer to:

• Accelerate data center closures through migrations facilitated by the Hybrid Cloud Manager.
• Mitigate risks by conducting migrations through Layer 2 network extension, with minimal downtime or the need to re-architecture.
• Achieve standardization and efficiency in the infrastructure which will improve agility to support growth projects.

vCloud Air gives you the automation and control over your data center that you have always wanted and future proofs your investments. Therefore, if you have a hardware refresh, a data center consolidation or a merger coming up and if you are on a tight budget and timeline, vCloud Air is the right choice for you.

VMware Blog Written By: Aparajita Jas, Sr. Product Marketing Manager

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