In today’s business environment, the data center – and the services that come with it – has become a commodity. A strategic partnership between IBM and VMware now enables businesses to simply move workloads between the data center and the cloud, while keeping full control.

Businesses have embraced the idea of Infrastructure as a Service for all the right reasons. First of all, they reduce the burden of up-front investment on IT, making the shift from capex to opex. At the same time, they also reduce the operational workload within the IT environment. Adopting IaaS results in a reduction of the number of rather expensive and time-consuming commodity jobs, such as buying additional hardware and installing new virtual machines. 

This is exactly what the strategic partnership between IBM and VMware aims for. With on-demand provisioning of bare metal and virtual cloud resources, businesses are able to deploy enterprise-class VMware environments on IBM Cloud in just a matter of hours, rather than weeks or months. Using validated server, network and storage configurations of IBM SoftLayer, they can rapidly create new application environments, replicate and use existing management tools and processes, and meet security and compliance requirements.

Expanding the data center into the cloud, businesses enjoy more flexibility in setting up VMware environments – built on SoftLayer – for all types of workloads: test and development, disaster recovery, and more. Using the IBM tools, it is possible to dynamically move workloads between the on-premise data center and the cloud. This way, the IT department keeps in control and fully benefits from its existing expertise, while gaining flexibility and reducing costs at the same time. This approach allows an organization to step away from managing commodity data center services and focus on IT with real added value for the business.

Learn more: IBM and VMware.