My first Magazine Nutanix Flash Forward | Page 31

Chapter 3: What Is an Enterprise Cloud?

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✓ Resilient and self‐healing
✓ Extensive automation
In short, you need an infrastructure that allows you to scale
without limits and without single points of failure.
The platform needn’t be limited to the private cloud or your
local datacenter either. You should have the ability to support
hybrid delivery of applications — that is, you should be able
to provide choice between on‐premises infrastructure and
public cloud services for your business‐facing applications.
Your enterprise cloud environment also must offer powerful
data protection and disaster recovery options, analytics to
streamline operations, and other critical services.
With the growing diversity in infrastructure needs for applications, natural silos appear on the infrastructure side. For
example, some demanding Oracle and SQL Server databases
may be run in bare metal environments while others are virtualized. These silos make the process of managing infrastructure incredibly challenging, because you have to manage each
silo separately. The enterprise cloud needs to deliver infrastructure capabilities that can support bare metal, virtualized,
and containerized environments for any application.
Infrastructure is the fundamental building block for the enterprise cloud. Past attempts at building private clouds have
focused on the software layer — such as on cloud management platforms — that sit on top of infrastructure and deliver
self‐service, monitoring, billing, and chargeback capabilities.
But unless infrastructure is built to scale out and without
single points of failure, you will not end up with a cloudlike
environment.
Figure 3‐1 provides a look what the web‐scale world looks like.

Zero‐click operations
Even if you’re the master of the console in your virtualized
datacenter, you likely still perform lots of clicks to get your
work done. You may have deployed tools that help you
achieve the beginnings of automation, but most organizations
have yet to take these capabilities to their desired and natural
conclusion: complete automation.
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