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Welcome

IT Challenges are Business Challenges

In today’s technology-driven environment, business agility depends on IT agility. But for many organizations, the potential business value of information technology has become literally trapped within traditional IT infrastructures that are too rigid, costly and complex to keep up with the pace of real-time business.

In fact, most IT organizations spend 70 percent to 80 percent of their time and budget just to “keep the lights on,” leaving little time to innovate or support strategic business initiatives. With users demanding faster response times, and management demanding lower costs, organizations need a better strategy.

GO Virtual: A New Model for IT

To break this cycle so that organizations can transform their IT from a cost centre to a strategic asset that energizes the business, BIOS presents a new model for IT services: Go Virtual. Simplify, streamline, optimize, efficient, cost-effective, manageable, responsive, dynamic. If these are terms you would like to use to describe your IT infrastructure, then Go Virtual is for you. Go Virtual is all about virtualizing everything. Servers, storage and even networks. IT infrastructure traditionally suffers from massive under-utilisation, or inefficient configurations. Large network switches are deployed, even though only 1% of the bandwidth is utilized. Huge (expensive)

storage arrays are procured, delivering massive amounts of unused storage at IOPS only required for the most intensive of applications. Servers are procured through tedious procurement processes incurring lengthy delivery delays, and are often over-specced. In the typical data centre, it is estimated that the average CPU utilisation is just 3% - which leaves 97% of the resource unutilised. Go Virtual is an approach to IT that leverages the efficient pooling of resources to create an on-demand, self-managing virtual infrastructure that can be allocated dynamically as a service. This approach abstracts applications and information from the complexity of underlying hardware infrastructure. Security of the environment is assured with granular controls that can follow data even as it leaves your organisation without the need to implement costly and complex solutions. Simplify management, change control, expansion and performance of the infrastructure with ease, so that IT organizations can focus on business needs and strategic innovation and not on maintaining the status quo.

BIOS are uniquely qualified to architect and supply a unified infrastructure utilizing today’s next generation technology to simplify, streamline and improve performance of IT from private infrastructure to public cloud.

Key Benefits

» Dramatically Lower IT Costs - Reduce capital expenditures by up to 70 percent and operational expenditures by up to 30 percent to achieve 20 percent to 30 percent lower IT infrastructure costs for each application. » Agility with control—Respond quickly to changing business needs without sacrificing security or control, and deliver zero-touch infrastructure with built-in availability, scalability and performance guarantees for all business-critical applications » Secure with Ease – Secure your intellectual property from external and internal threats. Control how data is used whilst inside and importantly once it has left your network. » Improve Business Continuity - reduce the cost and

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complexity of business continuity and disaster recovery with always-on IT capabilities and layered protection against service outages and data loss.

» Deliver IT as a Service – Implement management and automation capabilities such as advanced resource pooling, automated resource allocation, role-based administration, zero-touch infrastructure and self-service portals for end users, Go Virtual aligns IT resources with business needs, making it possible to deliver IT as a utility-like service.

At A Glance

The State of the Nation The overwhelming majority of many IT budgets are now spent maintaining and managing the existing infrastructure. IT departments continually invest manpower, time and other resources in sustaining an inflexible, expanding infrastructure. As overall costs continue to be pushed higher by power, cooling, real estate and the ever increasing demand for computing, storage and application resources, and many companies are now exploring the benefits of virtualisation. Research by Forrester and IDC shows that over 50% of all workloads in the USA and Europe are now running virtualized and the trend is continuing to grow. Of reasons cited for deploying virtualization, cost saving, improving business continuity and taking advantage of the growth in cloud service providers were the top reasons for adoption.

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Answering Infrastructure Challenges:

Go Virtual

Data Centre infrastructure is typically defined as consisting of networks, servers and storage. Go Virtual is a comprehensive solution tackling the challenges in each of these areas, and delivering a comprehensive solution fully optimized, taking advantage of the numerous platform advantages.

Store IT

Go Virtual network-efficient and storage-efficient disaster recovery solution makes it possible to cost-effectively protect more data while delivering higher levels of application availability. This will allow an organisation to quickly adapt to unexpected storage demands using real-time scalability and the flexibility to support any future SAN or NAS projects. Technologies such as de-duplication can maximise storage utilisation and help to achieve at least 50% infrastructure savings in virtual server and storage environments. Further application of technologies such as Thin Provisioning can increase average storage utilisation to over 70%. Businesses using Go Virtual can receive real-time views of the entire environment – from virtual machine to volume – and optimise total server, network and storage utilisation. Go Virtual is unique in enabling block level de-duplication across primary, backup and archival storage, thus reducing virtual storage requirements. Data and virtual infrastructures can be protected with near-instantaneous backup and recovery that does not disrupt performance. With the increased speed, virtual machines can be recovered twice as quickly as is possible with competitors’ technology in virtual environments. It is also possible to shorten test and development cycles by instantly repurposing storage capacity between projects, and to reduce deployment time from weeks to minutes by enabling instantaneous storage provisioning and cloning of virtual machines.

Key Benefits

» Store more with less – use less disk space to store data and re-use existing storage space by presenting it through Go Virtual. » Align application availability to business needs – core applications, databases, email and virtual infrastructure can be backed-up in seconds and recovered in minutes. Keep online consistent copies of your applications and data which can be recovered at any Go Virtual site with ease. » Automate disaster recovery – with Go Virtual you can automate a push-button DR plan and test it without affecting production.

Virtualize IT

Virtualisation is arguably the innovation of the decade within IT. It allows organisations to reduce hardware costs by consolidating multiple resources onto a single platform, reducing power, cooling and maintenance costs. The average consolidation ratio that can be achieved through virtualisation is 10:1, and this increases to 30:1 when also using Unified Computing and utilising existing assets more effectively (NB. These ratios are an average and each Data Centre is different). Virtualisation turns Data Centres into an internal cloud of

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computing resources controlled by a single, virtual Data Centre operating system. The unified computing architecture is optimised for virtualised environments with the latest technology delivering better virtualisation performance, superb scalability and enhanced flexibility. By balancing CPU and I/O capabilities while simultaneously increasing memory capacity, more virtual machines can be hosted per-server than ever before. By providing visibility and portability to network policies, and security all the way to the virtual machine, a consistent operational model can be implemented between physical and virtual environments. Combined with embedded management and the service profile construct, this automation increases responsiveness and reduces the chance of human error which improves consistency and reduces server and network deployment times. In a traditional environment it can take days to procure, prepare and provision a new server; in a virtualised environment this can be reduced to just one hour.

Key Benefits

» Efficiency through utilization and automation—Achieve consolidation ratios of 15:1 or more and improve hardware utilization from 5 percent to 15 percent to as much as 80 percent or more—without sacrificing performance.

» Dramatically lower IT costs—Reduce capital expenditures by up to 70 percent and operational expenditures by up to 30 percent to achieve 20 to 30 percent lower IT infrastructure costs for each application running virtual.

» Agility with control—Respond quickly to changing business needs without sacrificing security or control, and deliver zero-touch infrastructure with built-in availability, scalability and performance

guarantees for all business-critical applications running on vSphere.

Protect IT

The approach to securing the network for years has been to implement different point-security products that deal with client machines lock-down, network intrusion, rights management, encryption, secure remote access, email, virus and malware prevention and more. The challenge here is that businesses find it difficult to meet their demands without incurring high-costs and lots of complexity, with the alternative of ‘doing the bare minimum’ often chosen leaving organisations exposed. Go Virtual tackles the problem from a different angle. Data security is focussed around the data itself and not the actions of users or machines on or off the network. Sensitive data is encrypted and the data owners (not IT Administrators) choose who can access the data and what they can do with it. This control follows the data throughout its lifecycle and even when the data does not reside on the organizations network. Application security and availability is addressed for all applications running on Go Virtual, virtualisation allows organizations to blanket cover the vulnerabilities of their network without reducing its performance.

Key Benefits

» Protect all sensitive data even when it leaves your organization. Don’t try to cover every eventuality, just what is necessary.

» Reduce the threats to applications and data whilst also reducing network load and management overhead.

» Implement security policies that are easy to follow and reduce staff training requirements.

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Run IT

Unified computing simplifies the deployment of servers and networks by centralising networking resources therefore eliminating costly and repetitive networking components. Go Virtual uses a unified fabric that provides transport for LAN, storage and high-performance computing traffic over a single, cohesive infrastructure. This approach can either consolidate or entirely eliminate multiple server adapters, chassis switches, cables and other supporting infrastructure. Compared to traditional computing environments, this simplification can reduce the required power, cooling, and management by at least 70%. Meaning there is less to manage, less to procure, less to power and fundamentally, less to cable. Traditional computing infrastructures are server centric, therefore resources are provisioned per sever, per chassis. This results in added time and costs. Unified computing turns this approach around as this is a system centric method; resources are allocated per service per system. This can ultimately lead to a service orientated architecture which can bring yet more costs savings to your organisation.

Key Benefits

» Reduce the cost and complexity of your network and compute infrastructure. Reduce the cost of maintenance, procurement and management during the lifecycle of Go Virtual. » Obtain greater levels of consolidation, run more

with less, use less licenses, rack space, networking, cabling, power and cooling. » Be ready for cloud computing – align your environment with the cloud and take advantage of low-cost, rapid time to provision cloud service providers.

Why Go Virtual with BIOS?

BIOS is the only technology partner that provides integration between infrastructure, storage and virtualisation technologies with the highest-level of security built in. We have a unique blend of specialist skills in Cisco, NetApp, Microsoft and VMware as well as in a variety of security technologies, including Boole Server, Cisco and RSA. We believe that strong, collaborative partners are a critical element in the delivery and support of a unified computing architecture. Between them, Cisco, NetApp and VMware have the next-generation technologies needed to provide a comprehensive solution. BIOS has the specialist knowledge, and the dedicated and technically-gifted staff to build a stateless and fluid infrastructure that will provide innumerable benefits for your business. Our excellence in this field is underlined by our being the only VMware Premier Partner in the GCC. BIOS is also one of a handful of partners who provide Cisco UCS solutions. This allows us to understand the key technologies and how they work together, as well as ensuring that we have invested in the correct, complimentary technologies to future-proof the network and deliver the expected return. BIOS have invested heavily to become the industry-experts in the Data Centre, giving us a comprehensive understanding of the technologies that are required to make Go Virtual the complete package in providing a cutting-edge, 21st Century network Infrastructure.

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ROI In deploying a virtualised, dynamic data centre from industry leaders in server, storage, and network virtualisation, businesses can maintain a competitive

edge with an integrated, end-to-end solution from Cisco, NetApp, and VMware The following is a live customer example (based on 3 year cost/investment) from a customer who had 120 servers in production and DR un-virtualized and enterprise storage which wasn’t from NetApp who implemented Go Virtual with BIOS.

www.biosme.com info@biosme.com Dubai: 04 60 70 800 Abu Dhabi: 02 658 9779 BIOS M.E. 1001 Le Solarium Building, Dubai Silicon Oasis

Go Virtual ROI

Investment Current Infrastructure

Investment

Req. Virtualised Infrastructure

Investment

Req. Saving

Server Hardware

Replacement

120 servers at 24,000

AED Each AED 2,880,000

12 Servers Including

Vmware at 105,000 AED

Each AED 1,260,000 AED 1,620,000

Additional Server

Hardware for growth

Estimated at 4 per

year at 24,000 AED

Each AED 96,000

No Further Hardware

Required AED 0 AED 96,000

Vendor Advanced

Replacement 1,600 AED per server AED 192,000 3,200 AED per server AED 38,400 AED 153,600

Planned 20TB Storage

Expansion

SAS and SATA

expansion of primary

and DR AED 310,000

25TB reclaimed with de-

duplication AED 300,000 AED 10,000

Power Savings

Current Power

Requirement AED 900,456

Virtualised Power

Requirement AED 334,000 AED 566,456

Cooling Savings

Current Cooling

Requirement AED 900,456

Virtualised Cooling

Requirement AED 334,000 AED 566,456

AED 5,278,912 Total Cost of Ownership AED 2,266,400 AED 3,012,512

Current Infrastructure

Total Cost of Ownership