Wipro bets big on its Open Data Center strategy

The open data center initiative has the potential to completely disrupt the market and change the way data centers are built today. By creating standards that are vendor neutral and open, interoperability is assured, which in turn improves performance.

In India, software services major, Wipro has taken a huge lead in this space, by launching a Open Data Center CoE. Wipro has launched this CoE to build, integrate, test and demonstrate customer aligned SDI solutions and bringing in significant IP assets to address issues as clients undergo this transition and manage heterogeneous environments. The CoE integrates proprietary and open source solutions across all layers including Network, Storage, Compute and Cloud.

Explaining the key drivers for open data centers, Anuj Bhalla, Vice President & Business Head, Global-System Integration & Maintenance Services & Products, GIS Wipro, says, "The promise of greater flexibility, availability, scalability, superior security at far lower total cost of ownership (TCO) are some of the major drivers for the demand for open data centers. An open data center offers the benefits of improved efficiencies and interoperability which will help customers in the long run. The need to improve abstraction of resources within an open framework is also a key driver for the open data center."

The benefits for firms that adopt open data centers are huge, and can be broadly classified into five key areas:

Agility: The Open Data Center enables highly automated and standardized provisioning with reduced provisioning and deployment times. Organizations can thus count on faster time to value for their business.

Simplicity: The integrated service catalogue of the Open Data Center gives a choice of offerings and services. It also facilitates central control and abstraction of complexity. Simplified management of resources will free up IT staff to pursue innovation activities rather than routine tasks.

Elasticity: The solutions are highly resilient, with policy driven virtual pool of resources and options for public cloud integration for Spin-Out and Spin-In.

Cost Effectiveness: The Open Data Center ensures that there is no vendor lock-in, by leveraging commodity hardware, thereby reducing CapEx. Single pane of glass for management and administrators reduces management and support costs. Efficient usage of resources will also drive down energy costs.
Performance: Improvement in performance is driven by dynamic configuration based on feedback mechanism.

"Our open data center framework meets performance objectives such as greater flexibility, availability, scalability, superior security at far lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with savings between 30 to 55%. The metrics for the benefits of the open data center also depend on factors such as the technologies used in implementation and the scope of the project. For example, we implemented an open data center solution for a leading media organization in Europe where initial cost savings in the first year were 30% with further year on year cost reduction of 10%," states Anuj.

Drawing from Wipro's significant investments in emerging areas such as Open Stack framework, the CoE demonstrates multiple disruptive Software Defined technologies in action to simulate a real world data center environment where legacy and Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) co-exist. The CoE demonstrates how the custom developed tools and plug-ins can be leveraged to achieve integration across diverse and different generation of underlying computer, network and storage technologies and give unified end-user experience. Wipro has also forged strategic and niche technology alliances with Silicon Valley start-ups and mid-size OEMs to offer comprehensive and future-proof solutions to customers.

CIO/CTO Perspective

Baskar Raj, Chief Technology Officer at Euronet Worldwide

Traditional IT infrastructure requires specific skilled resources to manage because its complex in nature. This leads

to high cost of operations that keeps increasing over years. One of the challenges that most of the enterprises face today is to achieve a high degree of flexibility and as a faster time to market. These challenges are increasing the pressure on CXOs and hence businesses with traditional setup struggle to launch new products & services ahead of their competition.
Open data center and networks provide a highly flexible, scalable and a reliable infrastructure. Deploying and managing this Infrastructure is easy compared to the deployment of traditional IT infrastructure. Since the overall complexity is reduced in terms of provisioning and support, with around 90% of the work being completed by the first level support resources, overall cost of management is reduced.

The Open Data Center solution stack is based on Software Defined approach and comprises of compute, storage, network, and cloud elements that provide the following benefits,
· Faster go to market
· Highly scalable solutions with rapid provisioning
· Better Operational Efficiency with Cost Optimization

It is always a difficult task to defy conventional approaches and being an early adopter of newer technologies is always a challenge. There will always be difficulties in terms of implementation and stabilization of the new beast such as skill availability issues with the vendors or service providers. But being an early adopter of this solution will ensure that we are ahead of the curve and help us be a successful referral for these technologies.

What we expect from Systems Integrators and OEMs is to provide the confidence by showcasing a simulated environment and also successfully demonstrating proof of concepts. Systems Integrators who can showcase their solutions in their labs will definitely have a competitive edge.

While technologies such as Open Data Center, Software Defined Network, and Openstack etc have been very well adopted in US and European market, we Indians are very conservative and would like to ensure that we put in our money where it is valued. I believe it will take another 2-3 years for these kind of technologies to mature in this country.

Technologies like MPLS, Virtualization, and Cloud had followed a similar adoption path earlier. But, I strongly believe that these technologies are the future of data centers in India and will help Indian IT industry to grow significantly with a paradigm shift in the way Data centers & associated businesses are defined today.

Pradeep R Apte, GM Systems, Blue Dart Express

CIOs are under heavy pressure to redefine operating models of their business and deliver innovative solutions. Organizations are now looking at emerging technologies as differentiators to deliver a competitive edge. Challenges are driven as per requirement, depth and sizing of the project. If the requirement fits into running data center, it is matter of adding capacity. In contrast, for a new requirement, it really is a mammoth task to get into full understanding of project with respect to scoping, infrastructure data sizing, network requirement, hardware requirement, licensing requirement, retention of data, and user connections.

Other challenges include shortlist and evolution of various vendors, hardware and POCs, agreements, overall procurement time, legal documentation. Last but not list the overall cost to start with can straight hit to the bottom line and ROI might be longer.

The number of applications, data center infrastructure, network complexity and operation cost is growing exponentially. Businesses today require agility in their operations that can only be delivered if IT resource provisioning is done at a rapid pace.

End users also have high expectations from their providers and will not hesitate to switch loyalties if high service levels are not maintained. Hence, the earlier approaches to infrastructure provisioning will no longer be sufficient. There is now a greater need for plug and play solution that reduces overall cost and bring the quicker synergy between technology and users effectively.

The Open Data Center is an end-to-end solution that will help enterprises in their journey into this new era of business.
The Open Data Center will use software defined principles encompassing compute, storage and network layers of the data center to deliver an agile solution for enterprises. The solution will be ready-to-use, ensuring that customers will save valuable time that would otherwise have been spent in implementation. It will also allow for customization and optimization as per user demand and delivers agility consistently.

While the Open Data Center holds immense potential, not all systems integrators will possess the necessary skills and capacity to integrate the required technology and build this solution. It will require a systems integrator with expertise in end to end implementation, a vast OEM partnership ecosystem and a robust delivery mechanism.

The era of agile enterprises is already here. Any organization that hopes to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving business landscape will have to embrace the Open Data Center principles.

Wipro Partner view

Wipro's partners are naturally bullish on the opportunity. We present below some perspectives from partners:

Justin Arbuckle, Vice President Worldwide Transformation & Chief Enterprise Architect at Chef Software

Both Wipro and CHEF recognise that the driving force facing most modern-day organisations is the ability to change and adapt, these come in the form of fickle consumers demanding new services (at the speed they get it on the consumer devices) or perhaps reacting to the dangers of the threat landscape to protect customers data. Either way agility is the name of the game and Wipro & CHEF are creating combined services that address scenario’s such as these

If you’ve been in IT for any length of time the adage of “if it’s not broken don’t fix it” is a familiar sound-bite. This out of data thinking is being superseded as the world becomes soft and IT can be created and destroyed in a matter of minutes opposed to days, weeks and months. Mutable infrastructure allows businesses to rapidly develop versions of IT with slight variations to test relevance to the changing need (be it re-active changes to security or new features applied to something already being offered). In fact a growing number of companies are using this new paradigm to constantly create revisions simply to improve performance in some form. Create, test and deliver small iterative changes.

This capability requires a modern and robust environment such as Wipro’s Open Data Centre service plus CHEF’s workflow automation capability. A single converged pipeline management system layered over ODC with all the necessary gates and stages allows a business to set policy filters to ensure what flows out into a production-ready state is an infrastructure that meets all security and compliance checks you can wish for (or be able to translate from your policy documents into code).

Ashok Shenoy, Director, Datacenter Sales, Cisco India & SAARC

Cisco and Wipro can jointly bring in the solution stack around Open Data center framework which provides holistic experience of Software Defined Infrastructure across compute, storage, network and cloud architectures.

Cloud, mobility, and big data applications are causing a shift in the data center model. New applications are placing demands on the infrastructure in new ways. Distributed applications (for example, Big Data and Hadoop), database applications (such as those from Oracle and SAP) that run on bare metal, virtualized applications running in multi-hypervisor environments, and cloud-based applications that are available on demand all impose different demands on infrastructure.

These demands include:
> Infrastructure must become application aware and more agile to support dynamic application instantiation and removal
> The non-virtual nature of new emerging applications means that the infrastructure must support physical, virtual, and cloud integration with full visibility
> Infrastructure-independent applications treat the data center as a dynamic shared resource pool
> Scale-out models promote more east-west traffic, with a need for greater network performance and scalability
> Multi-cloud models require the infrastructure to be secure and multitenant aware

These changes are increasing operation complexity and limiting business agility and responsiveness. Cisco ACI delivers an agile data center with simplified operations and increased application responsiveness to support a new generation of distributed applications while accommodating existing virtualized and non-virtualized environments.

Abhijit Potnis, Head of Presales, India & SAARC, EMC Corporation
With the “hyper-converged” appliance, you can get from “power on” to a live virtual machine in minutes. Simply put, we

provide the fastest path to the SDDC with what we call the “Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Federation SDDC Edition.”We’re providing customers with an engineered solution built on an SDDC foundation and tested, validated, implemented, and supported by the Federation partners like Wipro.

We can deploy that into a customer’s data center for mission-critical applications in as little as 28 days. SDDC is simply the best data center architecture available for IT organizations that are looking to propel themselves forward as a core part of the overall cloud strategy. If you’re looking to accelerate app delivery and, more broadly, serve as a strategic partner to the business, then SDDC is the path to get there. The SDDC is designed from the ground up to serve as an industrial-grade bridge between your past and your future, between your on-prem and off-prem assets—and there’s enormous value and power in that hybrid model of IT. Implementing a True SDDC is ultimately an investment in business agility and business innovation- all about taking a CIO’s business contribution to a new level.

Tarkan Maner, Chairman and CEO of Nexenta
Wipro, Nexenta and the Silicon Valley Education Foundation (SVEF) have made public their intention to extend these

cloud infrastructure services to school districts, throughout California and across the U.S., that are looking to increase their technology services, performance and protection as they strive to meet the demands of Common Core, a national educational initiative currently in effect in the United States.

These are a few examples of how SDx is being applied to real-world situations. A broad range of industries adopting an SDx approach are reaping the benefits. Consider the growing use of surveillance and safety cameras in schools of all sizes, and in government facilities. Software-defined storage delivers the flexibility to manage and analyze the results collected by these cameras. In a related application, as law enforcement agencies adopt body cameras for their peace officers, they’re confronted with how to store and access the recordings.

SDx is changing IT as we know it. Organizations are using a SDx approach to create the agile IT infrastructure to run their business apps smoothly today. Plus, this IT infrastructure is flexible enough to respond to fast-changing technology trends, from social media, mobility, the ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) and ever-growing Big Data, to industry-redefining OpenStack, CloudStack, and do-it-yourself cloud deployments for all types of clouds—private, public, and hybrid. In so doing, these enterprises are deploying technology remedies to today’s problems while laying out the infrastructure that adapts strategically to meet the future’s challenges.

Gaurav Manglik, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, CliQr  

Starbucks’ founder Howard Schultz was spot on when he characterized Starbucks as a software company that happens to serve coffee. There are many other examples of how software has become the foundation of modern businesses. Uber, the largest taxi company in the world, owns no taxis. Airbnb is on track to become the largest hotelier in the world, but owns no hotels.

These may be extreme examples of how digital services are disrupting traditional industries. But these stories inspire. As a member of the Silicon Valley startup community, I can assure you that at this very moment there are young entrepreneurs sitting around a kitchen table working on the next killer application designed to disrupt your industry.
At the nexus of industry trends
In order to thrive in this new application-oriented business environment, IT organizations need to act now. I see three industry trends that are forcing IT to remake standard operating procedure and leverage technology to enable the digital enterprise.

1 – More applications - The customers I work with are rolling out twice as many applications a year as they did just a few years ago. Mobile applications, big data, business process optimization, and technology enabled service offerings all offer opportunity to remake the digital enterprise.

2 – Faster deployment – Developers are using agile approaches to get new software features into users’ hands as quickly as possible. The result is rapid-fire releases that come out on the order of five times faster than traditional development methodologies.

3 – More deployment options - Virtualized datacenters, private clouds, hosted private clouds, and public clouds are all viable options for digital workloads. IT needs the flexibility to deploy applications to optimum venues based on such considerations as cost and performance, as well as security and compliance. And the flexibility to move if business needs change.

The applications and the venues are complex. So deploying applications more quickly and more frequently is by no means a trivial task. In the digital economy, speed to market enables competitive advantage. Developers can’t wait weeks for IT to deploy VMs and other infrastructure resources using traditional manual, ticket-based processes.

Software-defined Datacenter is critical enabler

Software-defined datacenter is proving to be a critical enabler of a digital services strategy. Treating infrastructure as code, and controlling physical infrastructure via software controlled APIs proves to be a far more flexible, scalable, repeatable and cost-effective approach that previous manual and physical methods.

Infrastructure on demand through cloud APIs and in the datacenter through software-defined technology (compute virtualization, software-defined networking, and software-defined storage) have increased IT agility. But there are two powerful steps IT can take to build on a software-defined foundation.

Combine infrastructure and application automation. If you use one set of automation tools to deploy infrastructure, and another set to deploy and manage application components (database, app server, load balancer, web server, and application) then IT has more tools to integrate and support, and more points of potential failure. Driving infrastructure and application automation off a single deployable application template or blueprint improves agility and reduces cost and risk.

Use one automation platform across environments. If you use different automation tools for each environment such as Amazon Web Services, Azure, OpenStack, VMware, and Cisco, then your application is locked in. Using a single platform that abstracts the environment specific services and APIs and acts as a common management fabric across environments, reduces costs and greatly simplifies the complexities of running a digital enterprise.

Make sure the technologies you use to manage the software-defined datacenter and cloud application deployments combine infrastructure and application automation, and work across environments.

In most industries today, digital services have become essential to modern business. Executives I work with are rolling out more applications at a faster pace to gain competitive advantage. They rely on an expanding mix of software defined datacenter and public cloud solutions to host various applications based on business need such as mobile apps, internal process optimization, or new technology enabled services that drive top-line revenue.

With new application-focused automation technologies, it is now possible for the application to direct the infrastructure, and improve both agility and service delivery efficiency in ways that weren’t possible just a few years ago. An application-defined approach added to software-defined datacenter capabilities gives business an advantage over less capable competitors.

Midokura
As part of its Open Data Center Initiative, Wipro has dedicated a state-of-the art “Center of Excellence” showcasing MidoNet, where enterprises and service providers can explore and test network virtualization in conjunction with OpenStack cloud software, to experience a new level of network agility. In concert with open source network virtualization experts from Midokura, Wipro can help customers design real world solutions tailored to their company’s use cases and facilitate their foray into new sectors and market.