Virtualization offers the opportunity to cut costs, improve agility, reduce energy consumption, and provide a new foundation for IT. However, like all technology innovations, virtualization also introduces challenges. Because of the ease of creating and deploying virtual machines, IT must ensure control and management of this technology — otherwise, virtual sprawl can wipe out your savings and demand can outpace your capacity.
A comprehensive and well-designed Service Catalog offers a solution to this challenge by providing a self-service portal for requesting standard virtual machine options with lifecycle management to track the end-to-end cycle from provisioning to de-commissioning. It can also help standardize virtual machine deployments across the enterprise and drive a virtual-first policy to encourage adoption, by providing comparisons between standard physical and virtual (or cloud computing) options and then guiding the users to the most cost-effective choice to meet their needs.
With a newScale Service Catalog, IT can offer a Web-based self-service menu of standard service packages and options. Easy-to-use service request forms can be configured to record everything you need for the virtual machine build sheet. Once a build has been selected, an automated approval process ensures all the right policies and procedures are in place.
The approved virtual machine is then automatically deployed based on the selected build, together with other components for the service package. You can then track the entire service lifecycle, identify who's using what, de-commission unused resources, and ensure capacity to meet demand. Moreover, by tracking consumption and costs, IT management has complete visibility into usage and a detailed bill of services. There are many virtualization solutions that focus on the back-office tasks of systems management and the machine aspects of provisioning. Some of them even cover virtual as well as physical environments. newScale integrates with the most common virtualization management systems and other data center automation systems to complement this existing infrastructure investment.
However, these tools do little to improve the front-office processes of defining standard server build configurations, providing a self-service shopping experience, linking server requests to the underlying business justification, speeding the requirements gathering and approval cycle time, and managing the lifecycle of the end-to-end service. They don't address other silos such as network and middleware — nor do they provide governance.
Only newScale offers a Service Catalog solution to provide self-service and control in managing physical, virtual and cloud resources for today's multi-vendor, cross-platform infrastructure spanning from the data center to the desktop. The result is reduced cost and increased agility — enforcing standards to streamline the request to delivery cycle time, and providing governance to prevent virtual sprawl.
To learn more, you can go to our Literature Request section to download the Data Sheet for the newScale FrontOffice Suite for the Virtual Data Center.
