Jonathan Clarke

With IT at breaking point, organisations are demanding new models for information management. The answer is IT as a Service (ITaaS), a model which enables an organisation’s IT operation to transform into an internal service provider.

Jonathan Clarke, alliances manager of EMC Southern Africa, describes ITaaS as a delivery model which leverages cloud technologies to enable business agility and value-based choice through readily-consumable IT services. These services have transparent prices and established service levels, and ITaaS also optimises IT production for business consumption.

“If IT is to adapt and compete with external services, it needs to deliver improved business agility, provide value to the business at executive level, maintain trust and control, and simplify service consumption,” he says.

“ITaaS offers a transformed line of business which is highly integrated and automated, and is based on consistent, self-correcting processes. Management is driven by Service Level Agreements (SLAs), there is cost transparency and chargeback, and IT competes for its business.”

The ITaaS Framework consists of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), User Interface as a Service (UIaaS) and Service Management as a Service (SMaaS). Clarke emphasises that one core enabler for the ITaaS model is a cloud-based infrastructure, which needs to be standardised, predictable, consistent and highly efficient. To assist customers in achieving this transformation, EMC, together with Cisco, VMware and Intel, introduced the Vblock converged infrastructure.

“Vblock is designed for ultra-standardisation from the outset,” Clarke says.

”It provides predictable SLAs to the business as well as predictable levels of power, cooling, capacity and scalability. Infrastructure costs are lower because high utilisation rates can be maintained across many applications – provisioned, returned to the pool and reallocated as required.

“In addition, Vblock reduces operating costs and automates tedious tasks. The real payoff, though, is the speed and ease in responding to new and changing business needs.”

Another cloud infrastructure offering from EMC and its technology alliance partners is VSPEX. VSPEX is the next generation of virtualised infrastructure solutions for the private and hybrid cloud. VSPEX proven infrastructure brings best-of-breed components together in flexible, pre-validated and easy to install configurations that deliver predictable performance.

“It’s important to remember that ITaaS is an operating model for IT and not a technology in itself,” Clarke says. “However, technology enablers such as Vblock and VSPEX make transforming to an ITaaS model simpler.”

The local EMC Forum 2012 is taking place on 9 October 2012 at Gallagher Estate in Midrand. Attendance is free, so please register at www.southafrica.emc/forum and join EMC on Facebook at www.facebook.com/EMC.Southern.Africa.