Getting the Unified Cloud Experience – SDxCentral

Getting the Unified Cloud Experience: While hybrid cloud solutions have made remarkable strides in addressing real life applications, they still leave a lot to desire. While working with Communication Service Providers (CoSPs) on their implementations, we find that they have different environments that are often patched together with scripts to automate repetitive processes. For example, a managed cloud service provider addresses a varied environment with Red Hat OpenStack, OpenShift, Kubernetes, VMware Cloud Foundation across different enterprise customers. While some level of automation exists within each one of these technologies, CoSPs are often left to their own to automate across technologies. This impedes productivity.

Lenovo Open Cloud (LOC) addresses these issues and accelerates the time to onboard customers from weeks to minutes. In addition to providing cloud deployment and cloud management services, the software also manages platform such as device inventory, lifecycle management, and more importantly to benchmark and validate performance between old and newer versions of the software. It works by identifying silos of automation and developing a plan. Next automating operations across multiple open and proprietary ecosystems, CoSPs can set up a fully automated and operational cloud ready infrastructure in just hours instead of weeks. After this, maintenance is easy as the tenant workloads can be active in minutes and it is easy to scale across multiple platforms and users. CoSPs benefit from a customized cloud solution with low-touch deployment and manage the lifecycle from a single pane of glass across entire operations.

On-boarding a new enterprise customer and offering cloud migration services can be complicated. Each customer comes with their own environment and want a path to migrate to the cloud in the future. Learning the customer environment and developing custom software can be time intensive and limit the ability to scale and grow CoSPs customer base. LOC can alleviate this pain and offer a flexible infrastructure that reduces the time to onboard a new tenant.

In fact, one of our customer, T-Systems shared their experience about LOC at the SDN NFV event in The Hague in October 2019. Their goal is to offer a flexible path to cloud for their enterprise customers. However, it took weeks to set up a new customer environment. After trialing 4 different vendors for 6 months, T-Systems selected Lenovo Open Cloud for implementation because LOC offered cloud scale building blocks, end to end automation and support for DevOps. Lenovo provided an integrated solution that was ready on arrival from the manufacturing facility. Now with this solution, T-Systems makes just one API call. LOC takes this and performs hundreds of automated tasks in the background and allows T-Systems to onboard new enterprise customers in a matter of hours instead of weeks.

Open source software provides several advantages. However, it also comes with implementation challenges. For the unified cloud experience, Lenovo Open Cloud addresses these so that CoSPs can focus on their customers better. Lenovos global footprint and our obsessive focus on reliability along with putting customers at the top is a strong factor positions us well to help CoSPs succeed.

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Getting the Unified Cloud Experience - SDxCentral