My first Magazine Nutanix Flash Forward | Page 18

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Enterprise Cloud For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition
business leaders want IT capabilities that allow them to test
new business models and roll out new services quickly.
Because of the need to ensure ongoing availability and performance levels for legacy and next‐gen applications, fooling
around with legacy local infrastructure is often frowned upon
by the business, which often doesn’t appreciate or understand the level of effort that it takes to keep systems going.
That’s where the public cloud comes in.

IT as a business enabler
But you need to understand the why behind all of this first. IT
has generally done a good job supporting the business by running tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP), collaboration, and so on.
But so much more is at stake.
With the right technology environment and the right mindset, IT can move from a behind‐the‐scenes supporting role
intended to reduce expenses into a revenue‐driving role. IT
can become an active enabler of the business.
Moving from a support mindset to an enabler mindset takes
lots of rethinking of IT infrastructure and services.

Understanding fractional
consumption
Consider your legacy datacenter environment. You probably
have a bunch of servers, a monolithic storage environment
based on SAN technology, and various networks connecting it
all together.
On the economics side, you likely prepay for all your
resources — and you pay full price even if you use only one‐
half of the resources during their life cycle.
This purchasing practice is far from efficient. Most organizations overbuy and overprovision resources so they don’t run

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