Page 47 - FCW, November, December 2018

Q&A: THE CLOUD
can go to the cloud, but you need to ask if they should. With an assessment, our team of experts will analyze the environment
and identify good candidates
for public cloud, which ones are suitable for on-prem, and which applications probably should be left alone. A lot depends on your data. If you have sensitive data that must be siloed, for example, such as medical information subject to HIPPA policies, you’re probably looking at a multi-cloud solution. For most users in federal government, hybrid cloud is the most attractive option for the data and applications that agencies are using.
The VMware Cloud Foundation is our platform of choice. It allows our clients to have an on-prem cloud and rapid deployment. Basically, it’s a big red “EASY” button that gets you on a hyper- converged platform. You get a modern data center. You get virtual storage through VSANS (virtual storage area network)
so you can present to all of your applications a large storage pool. You get virtual software and virtual networking through VMware NSX, which is the network virtualization platform. It all gets deployed very easily through SDDC Manager.
We can deliver IT as a service with less risk and time to deploy. Our team has the experience with pre- designed solutions from VMware on Dell EMC infrastructure, powered by Intel’s Xeon processor and Optane SSD drivers, which allows us to easily architect your solution with high scalability and
performance.
We can take that a step further and, through SDDC Manager, deploy to a public cloud. The vRealize Suite’s Cloud Manager within Cloud Foundations can
link the two on-prem and public clouds together to do workload transformation. It gives you a stepping stone to full public cloud or a hybrid solution.
Q: How easy is it to change cloud vendors?
A: At Iron Bow, we make it very easy. Our design is a hybrid, so you can pull everything from a pubic cloud back to on-prem
or go to a different public cloud provider. With some providers, that’s not always the case. If you go solely into one public cloud provider, later moving directly from that cloud to another cloud provider is not easy, cheap or seamless. You’re kind of at their mercy.
Q: Tell me how Iron Bow helps agencies get to cloud most efficiently to better pursue their missions.
A: Again, we’re firm believers in assessment first. We like to go
in and analyze an environment to make sure everything’s a good fit for what we want to propose. We have a VMware Validated Design that is a hyper-converged platform that runs cloud foundations and a lot of other tool sets to include off- prem or cloud backup. It includes software that helps with the virtual desktops. So we have a lot of
tools to help get customers from a traditional data center to an on- prem cloud. Our solution gets you one click away from hybrid cloud.
Q: Can you share a cloud migration case study?
A: We’ve had customers go to
a hybrid cloud and do virtual desktops. The desktop refresh rate went from every three years to
a 10-year tech refresh rate. You have the security of your virtual desktop being a software instance that runs on the data center. You patch that and all of your users are patched. So you’re secure much more rapidly.
Clients are realizing benefits
from virtualizing homegrown applications of the type that
are ubiquitous in the DoD
and throughout the federal government. A lot of times they’re unique to a hardware platform. Over time, the hardware gets outdated, and these homegrown apps can’t go onto the new platform or the new hardware; they can’t go on the new operating systems. So they basically get
left behind, which becomes an unsecure and unsupportable situation. Virtualizing those applications can take a lot of that stress away.
For more information on Iron Bow Technologies, visit www.ironbow.com