More than 20 years ago, Sun Microsystems’ co-founder Bill Joy offered up an insightful thought: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” This thought eventually became known as Joy’s Law, and today its applicability is only compounded by the sheer vastness of the tech industry.
The world’s most intelligent, innovative people are spread across the globe, all working on the industry’s next-generation technologies. The difficult truth is that likely only a handful, or quite possibly, none of these people work for you. But that doesn’t have to be the case, and with the right IT strategy, you can start to put the smartest people from all over the planet to work for you – all in your own data center. To get there, you’ll need to get serious about turning your environment into a software-defined data center (SDDC).
First, let’s start with the benefits software-defined infrastructure delivers for the group of innovative people who are currently working for you. Your innovators – your developers – all work in the world of software. But your IT Ops organization typically deals in hardware. By software-defining your infrastructure, you bridge the gap between the two groups so that everyone is working in the same sphere.
In an SDDC, all of your infrastructure is managed by software, helping you to automate tasks, reduce risk, and move faster with less hands-on work to maintain infrastructure. But it’s not just about managing with software. It’s also about running software tools that help your developers build the apps and services your business is trying to deliver. Getting these two layers to work together seamlessly is key to building the best software-defined data center, and it’s also where you have the opportunity to start recruiting the world’s brightest.
In some cases, you might already have many of these people “working” for you. For example, if you’ve already virtualized much of your data center using VMware or RedHat products, you’ve got some of them. If you’re using Docker to containerize your applications so you can move apps between your on-premises infrastructure and the cloud, you’ve got some more of them. But what you might be missing is having them all in the same place.
To make it easier for you to take advantage of the top-notch tools coming out of companies such as Docker, VMware, Red Hat, Puppet, Chef, Microsoft, and more, you need an infrastructure management solution that is built on a rich, unified API. Why? Because it will allow you to “recruit” those wonderful people Bill Joy was talking about in minutes versus hours. A unified API allows you to quickly integrate the tools other companies have created with just a single line of code, and you can manage these tools from a single interface across your infrastructure. With a unified API, you can present infrastructure to your developers in one common language.
Public cloud is a popular solution today because of the speed with which developers can directly access the resources they need without going through their company’s IT organization. With the right tools, you can bring the same kind of speed and agility to your data center and be a better service provider for your business.
HPE OneView is a management tool that lets you easily transform your infrastructure into a software-defined environment. At the core of HPE OneView is a rich, unified API that supports an extensive partner ecosystem. The world’s smartest people can get you started with integrations for the best tools in the industry across DevOps, IT Ops, cloud engines, facilities engines, and developer toolkits.
With the best tools and the smartest people working for your company, you can create a fast, flexible environment that moves like the cloud. You’ll quickly see how easy it is to flex and customize your environment, accelerate innovation, and support new business growth.
To learn more about the benefits of HPE OneView and the extensive partner ecosystem HPE has built to help you on your software-defined journey, download the e-book: HPE OneView for Dummies. You can also listen to this Software Engineering Daily Podcast in which ecosystem expert Bob Fraser talks about how you can leverage the HPE Composable Partner Ecosystem for your private cloud.