By Matt Watts, Chief Technology Evangelist, NetApp

Since the Broadcom acquisition late last year, more than 300,000 VMware customers are left with many questions about what they'll do when their contracts expire. Most companies are now assessing what their options are, many, for now at least will likely remain on VMware-but concerns remain. For example, new VMware subscriptions will be far more expensive than they were before the acquisition. Companies need to make informed decisions that meet their immediate needs and position them for long-term success. From managing costs of ownership to mitigating the risks of business disruption, it can be daunting.

But, if you're thoughtful, you can address today's virtualization challenges while also preparing for the future. There are four key challenges companies face and strategies for seeking equilibrium during uncertainty in the wake of the VMware acquisition.

Challenge 1: The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) dilemma

The subscription model adopted by VMware includes features you'll have to pay for but may not even need. You'll want to maximize usage of these features while minimizing overages through a thorough analysis of your existing usage. Many companies have a lot of VM's that are orphaned, idle or over-sized, there are also some use cases where the VM's could run more efficiently inside one of the cloud providers, managing this will help to reduce costs so you don't find yourself faced with big increases you don't have in your budget.

Choosing an open, optimized, and intelligent data infrastructure that supports virtual machines, containers, and cloud strategies on every major public cloud will allow you to adapt to evolving requirements without undergoing costly and time-consuming transformations.

Challenge #2: Scalability and performance bottlenecks

As enterprises expand, the demand for scalable infrastructure logically increases in parallel. Without keen attention to ensuring scalability and avoiding bottlenecks, business growth will be limited, and operational efficiency hampered. To avoid this, you must seek out, and adopt, solutions that deliver seamless scalability. Those who have inconsistent or poorly implemented strategies in place may find they're encountering ever greater business and operational risks that increase management complexity across their organizations.

Fluctuations in performance caused by a lack of scalability and the bottlenecks that invariably creates often leads to significant and costly business disruptions, resulting in lost productivity and customer dissatisfaction. You must also not let the VMware challenge distract you from the need to support other highly demanding workloads outside of VM's such as Ai and Analytics. To avoid this, an intelligent data infrastructure engineered for optimal performance is required and relying solely on VMware to manage your data will not be sufficient.

Companies should look for vendors that can deliver tools and technologies that help them right-size their virtualized environments with cost-effective, high-performance all-flash storage options and performance guarantees to further mitigate risk. This approach helps avoid the outsized costs of vSAN storage, which can require up to 4X more capacity and cause spikes in VMware license fees.

Challenge #3: Data protection complexity

At this point, most of us are aware that data siloes, and complexity can lead to security vulnerabilities, data breaches, and ransomware attacks. But many companies are still not doing enough to ensure they've integrated data protection, disaster recovery, and application security into their infrastructures and hybrid multicloud environments. 

It's imperative that you have solutions in place that can offload and automate critical data management tasks to help minimize the skills gaps created by so much complexity from data replication to backup and recovery, and optimizing IT resources. Particularly if you are considering implementing a new hypervisor or considering migrating existing VM's to the cloud.

This also means choosing vendors who can support a range of hypervisors, including vSphere, with data management capabilities that provide a consistent experience -- on premises, in the cloud, and at the edge. This flexibility will ensure you can maintain an open and adaptable infrastructure, regardless of your current or future needs.

Challenge 4: Budget Reallocation

A nuanced understanding of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) will help you make informed decisions regarding resource and budget allocation and a strategic approach to license minimization and budget optimization will ensure you allocate investments most effectively.

You'll want to partner with companies that can facilitate the smooth migration of your workloads to the cloud or alternative hypervisors that also deliver new technologies and features while avoiding lock-in, minimizing skills gaps, and providing significant cost savings.

By simplifying data movement and supporting innovative technologies, vendors can provide the same enterprise data management features used for vSphere across any cloud and any hypervisor that has an open storage approach. This unified approach optimizes virtual machines and container workloads with the same tools and user experience, streamlining operations and ensuring a future-proof enterprise architecture.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As Chief Technology Evangelist, Matt Watts provides guidance on NetApp's overall strategy and technology solutions to a wide base of customers and the global partner community. Matt is also part of the portfolio leadership team, providing advice and guidance on technology and transformation. Matt is increasingly in demand as a keynote speaker, combining his knowledge of the IT industry with anecdotes and stories that bring technology to life with witty, easily understandable examples. Prior to this role, Matt project managed a number of significant IT projects; managed System Engineers responsible for providing installation and onsite support; as well as overseeing IT outsourcing contracts. This experience has given him contact with all levels of leadership, enabling him to understand, communicate with and support clients with their IT and transformation strategies.