VMware products have long been one of the virtualization platforms supporting enterprise IT. However, due to changes in product portfolios and licensing systems, more and more companies are facing challenges such as rising costs. When upgrading to the next-generation system, there is also a trend of reviewing IT infrastructure from scratch.

When re-evaluating IT infrastructure, the key issue is not only about achieving "proactive IT," but also about how to reduce operational costs, which account for a large portion of the IT budget. When thinking about the entire enterprise IT landscape from a zero-based perspective, it is necessary to consider not only the IT infrastructure environment in office operations, but also environments in diverse scenarios such as manufacturing, distribution, and customer touchpoints. By streamlining these distributed environments, improvements in operational efficiency can be expected.

The Power of Vendor-Lock-In-Free, Highly Reliable Cloud Infrastructure

"One of the advantages of the Wind River Cloud Platform is that it is based on open source software, eliminating the risk of vendor lock-in. At the same time, it can quickly keep up with trends in modern IT systems," says Paul Miller, CTO of Wind River.

Wind Riveris a leading company that has long provided commercial real-time operating systems and embedded Linux operating systems in mission-critical fields such as aerospace and defense, industrial equipment, medical devices, and communications, where downtime can affect human lives and social infrastructure. In recent years, however, the company has been transforming into a cloud technology company and actively investing in cloud-related open source software development communities.

"Over the past decade or so, Wind River itself has also become deeply aware of the need to transition to new technologies, and has transformed from a leading software company for OT devices into a company that leverages cloud technology to promote collaboration between IT and OT," Miller explains the company's cloud transformation.

The company offers its own on-premises commercial private cloud platform—Wind River Cloud Platform(hereinafter referred to as the "Cloud Platform"). Although there are multiple options for commercial cloud platforms, Wind River's unique strengths lie in its commercialization of open source technologies without vendor lock-in, as well as its expertise in building and operating large-scale mission-critical systems accumulated in the OT field.

The Cloud Platform is built on open source software such as StarlingX, Kubernetes, and OpenStack, and its reliability has been verified through deployments by global telecommunications carriers such as Verizon and Vodafone.

The operating system uses a real-time extended Linux kernel and is characterized by high availability of 99.9999%. It has an operational track record of handling more than 50,000 nodes without downtime.

The Cloud Platform also features automation functions for various workloads, as well as automatic recovery functions that allow operations to continue even during network outages, thereby improving system availability while achieving efficient and stable operations.

Support Tools for Simplified Licensing and Centralized Operations

One of the attractions of the Cloud Platform is its simplified licensing system. Commercial IaaS platforms (such as VMware products) typically use complex licensing systems based on virtual machines (VMs) and core counts. In such cases, hardware configurations must be adjusted according to each vendor's billing rules, adjusting the number of cores and VMs. However, if billing rules change, unexpected costs may increase.

Taking these risks into account, the Cloud Platform adopts a simple node-based licensing system, making it easier to choose hardware configurations that maximize system performance without being torn between licensing costs and missing out on performance.

Another feature is its design that considers operational consolidation. StarlingX is a cloud infrastructure development project for high-performance, low-latency edge environments. It is based on a low-latency version of Debian GNU/Linux and is configured for distributed cloud computing. The entire distributed infrastructure can be managed from a single system controller, and the latest version of the Cloud Platform is said to allow a single system controller to manage up to 5,000 sub-clouds. This system can also be used for enterprise IT infrastructure, allowing centralized management of the entire IT infrastructure of various entities such as subsidiaries, offices, factories, warehouses, and stores.

Wind River is a leading member of the StarlingX project and continues to actively contribute feedback on its development. The Cloud Platform will integrate the project's results into commercial products, combining various tools to support operations, commercial support, and system migration services.

The company's operational support tools include "Conductor" and "Analytics." Conductor automates application deployment tasks in distributed cloud environments, provides orchestration functions for zero-touch automated management, and centrally manages the end-to-end distributed cloud environment, significantly reducing the burden of system construction and operations. Analytics collects and analyzes Cloud Platform data to achieve efficient operations of distributed cloud systems.

Comprehensive Support for Migration from VMware with Customized Optimization and Track Record

The Cloud Platform also provides a path to consolidate existing IaaS services based on container technology Kubernetes.

The Cloud Platform supports OpenStack, and its control plane has been containerized, so it can run seamlessly as a container application on the platform. In addition to migrating virtual machines from VMware products, recently popular containers can also be operated within the same cluster.

In fact, there are already cases where companies have used the company's migration services to migrate VMware products to container platforms.

However, migrating VMware products to a container platform is by no means easy. Wind River's migration services fully consider requirements in advance and provide the broad support expected by user companies, such as estimating the cost-effectiveness of migration. Another attractive feature is their ability to solve OT-specific issues—issues that only companies with deep understanding of industry needs and challenges can support—and they have established a system for tailoring migration services and professional services to each enterprise.

Reconsolidating Individually Optimized IT Infrastructures

As IT is introduced into every business operation at each company location, the systems that IT departments must manage are becoming more diverse, complex, and distributed. If these systems continue to be managed separately, no matter how much effort is made daily to cut costs, it will be unavoidable that operational costs will squeeze the IT budget.

To ensure room for future proactive IT investment, a stable system that can comprehensively operate distributed environments is needed.The Cloud Platformhas a proven track record in managing carrier network operations and offers advantages in scalability, availability, and cost-effectiveness, making it one of the options to consider when building a robust next-generation IT infrastructure.