My first Magazine Nutanix Flash Forward | Page 39

Chapter 3: What Is an Enterprise Cloud? 35 Every environment presents different performance characteristics. Those must be coupled with business and financial drivers. On the business front, IT must adhere to service level agreements (SLAs) that dictate the levels of performance availability that must be supported by the datacenter environment. Only with an environment that has predictable levels of performance can strict SLAs be adhered to. Further, different applications may require different SLAs. Some may require high levels of performance and availability while others may be able to get by with less. On the economic and financial front, the datacenter environment must be affordable, both at inception and on an ongoing basis. If you buy an environment that provides high levels of performance and availability, but most of your applications require less, you’re leaving money on the table. The same goes for available capacity in different areas of the environment. You must ensure that your environment can support different kinds of applications and has sufficient capacity in each area to support the workloads that will run there. In other words, you run applications in the right environment at the right time — one of the core tenets of enterprise cloud. Applications must be able to move freely between hypervisors, to any public cloud service, and to container‐based environments. Any cloud, any time. For this any‐to‐any freedom to be effective, it should ✓ Require no application changes ✓ Preserve application state, configuration, and environmental requirements to minimize risk ✓ Translate SLAs across different environments Traditional infrastructure presents several barriers to application mobility: ✓ Data gravity (a phenomenon in which data must remain local to its application in order for that application to operate properly) ✓ Tight coupling between applications and runtime environments These materials are © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.