Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances

Transcription

1 Enterprise Strategy Group Getting to the bigger truth. ESG Economic Value Validation Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances By Aviv Kaufmann, Senior ESG Lab Analyst January 2018 This ESG Economic Value Validation Report was commissioned by Lenovo and Nutanix and is distributed under license from ESG.

2 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 2 Contents Executive Summary... 3 Challenges... 3 The Solution: Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series... 4 Economic Value Validation (EVV) Process... 5 Economic Value Overview... 6 Economic Modeling... 9 ESG s Economic Value Model for Lenovo HX Series... 9 Example: Using the EVM to Predict Savings for a Modeled Organization The Bigger Truth... 14

3 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 3 Executive Summary ESG was engaged by Lenovo to conduct a detailed Economic Value Validation (EVV) and develop a quantitative model examining how an investment in Lenovo s HX Series converged infrastructure can benefit an organization over a three-year or five-year period. The analysis is designed to help IT organizations determine the fully burdened costs and benefits of deploying Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series compared with a present mode of operation (PMO) that reflects how organizations typically deploy component-based IT infrastructure data today. This analysis built upon ESG s evaluation of Lenovo HX Series, in-depth interviews with Lenovo and Nutanix customers and technical stakeholders at Lenovo, end-user case studies, ESG qualitative and quantitative market research with IT decision makers, and ESG s general familiarity with IT and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This analysis is designed to provide prospective customers with a comprehensive picture of the potential direct and indirect cost and benefit drivers they should bear in mind when considering an investment in HX Series. As discussed in the following pages, Lenovo HX Series offers the opportunity for organizations to significantly lower both capital and operational expenses with a faster time to value and improved business agility. ESG s analysis of a modeled use case leveraging an HX Series deployment resulted in an impressive 443% ROI. Many of these benefits are easier to quantify (such as the CapEx and OpEx savings), while others may require more discussion around your particular environment (such as expected productivity savings and revenue increases). In any case, ESG s thorough analysis shows that for those organizations looking to deploy an infrastructure that is quicker to deploy and less expensive to purchase and operate, and that offers simplified scalability and enhanced business agility, Lenovo HX Series should prove to be a wise investment. Challenges Highlights of ESG Economic Value Validation Modeled Scenario of Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series: 372% return on investment (ROI) $3.25M in expected savings and benefits over three years 85% faster application deployment 56% less application downtime and delays 57% lower data center facilities cost 2.8X lower storage TCO IT organizations are always looking to make investments in technologies that provide their business with not just the lowest cost of acquisition, but also the greatest value. At the same time, these organizations are faced with the costly task of modernizing their data centers and providing high-performance private cloud functionality to the organization. When comparing technologies, value does not come singularly from comparing the price tag of the investment, but from understanding all of the potential costs and benefits that are provided by deploying one particular technology over another. Thus understanding the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) of an investment are of utmost importance. ESG s forward-looking research indicates that some of the key factors that drive a lower TCO and higher ROI are the top priorities with organizations as they make decisions on deploying the infrastructure that will best power their virtualized and cloud environment for years to come. As Figure 1 shows, respondent organizations most often cited reducing costs and increasing productivity among their highest priority business outcomes. 1 1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2017 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2017.

4 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 4 Figure 1. Highest Priority Business Outcomes Which of the following business outcomes would you consider to be your organization s highest priorities over the next 12 months? (Percent of respondents, N=641, five responses accepted) Reducing costs Increasing productivity Improving information security 40% 39% 43% Increasing revenue Acquiring new customers Ensuring regulatory compliance 29% 31% 33% Retaining existing customers 24% Attracting, developing, and retaining employees Developing new products Entering new markets 20% 20% 19% Don't know 2% Many organizations have chosen to first focus on controlling operational expenses by making systems easier to purchase, scale, manage, and maintain by standardizing their IT infrastructure on reference architectures or even better, by investing in converged or hyperconverged infrastructure. However, operational costs are only one aspect of the investment. To truly understand potential investments, organizations must take into consideration not only the expected capital and operational costs of the solution, but also the savings and benefits that the solution can deliver in other areas of the business. The Solution: Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Lenovo HX Series is a hyperconverged solution that combines storage, compute, and virtualization into a highly reliable and scalable Lenovo server running Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software. When deployed in clusters, the hardware resources from each server (node) are combined into a shared-everything pool of compute and storage resources that can be managed through a single interface helping to greatly reduce complexity while increasing business agility. The Lenovo HX Series appliances are available in a variety of models optimized to meet SMB and enterprise requirements. The family includes the HX 1000 Series (ROBO), HX 2000 Series (SMB), HX 3000 Series (compute-heavy), HX 5000 Series (storageheavy), and the HX 7000 Series (high-performance). Each node offers a combination of SSDs for workloads requiring high performance and low latency, and HDDs for lowercost, higher-capacity storage, as well as all-flash models. A Nutanix virtual storage controller runs on each node in the cluster to improve scalability and resiliency, while the highly distributed, shared-everything architecture prevents performance bottlenecks. The Nutanix file system aggregates all storage and compute capacity across the cluster to create a single, shared storage and compute pool that can then be partitioned and presented to the hypervisor and, therefore, the VMs and applications. Communication between the hypervisor and Nutanix controller VM acts the same way the communication between the hypervisor and a physical storage controller would, ensuring no change to the application

5 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 5 environment. The difference is that VMs can be provisioned without the need to configure RAID groups, LUNs, and volumes. Figure 2. Lenovo HX Series Economic Value Validation (EVV) Process ESG s Economic Value Validation process is a proven method for understanding, validating, quantifying, and modeling the economic value propositions of a product or solution. The process leverages ESG s core competencies in market and industry analysis, forward-looking research, and technical/economic validation. The EVV process consists of four main phases: value scoping, validation, quantification, and model development. In the value scoping phase, ESG works with a vendor s internal stakeholders to discuss the ways in which the product or solution can impact potential customers. These economic benefits may be in the form of cost savings (lower CapEx or OpEx), cost avoidance (e.g., reducing compliance risk, and eliminating the need for professional services), increased revenue (e.g., faster task completion, and ability to handle more desktops), and other soft benefits (e.g., increased user productivity, and higher customer satisfaction). In the value validation phase, ESG conducts in-depth interviews with endusers to better understand and quantify how these potential value propositions have impacted their organizations, particularly in comparison with previously deployed or experienced solutions. In the final stages, ESG blends the quantified values revealed through the stakeholder and customer interviews with known industry values and additional research, resulting in a validated set of assumptions on which to build a scalable and dynamic TCO/ROI model. This Economic Value Model (EVM) accepts as inputs the answers to typical qualifying questions regarding a potential customer s IT environment and business needs. The model then returns a detailed report of expected savings, TCO, and ROI over a given time period when compared with a relevant, defined present mode of operation. An overview of the ESG Economic Value Validation process is shown in Figure 3.

6 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 6 Figure 3. ESG EVV Methodology Value Scoping Investigate economic value propositions of product or service Collect anecdotal evidence and relevant industry research Leverage ESG end-user research and publicly available information Value Validation Collect anecdotal evidence through internal stakeholder interviews Validate economic benefits received from customer interviews Validate assumptions based on market trends and industry analysis Economic Value Model Creation and analysis Leverage assumptions and quantifications to create TCO/ROI Model QA Economic Value Model against known use cases and situations Model scenario for analysis; Write Economic Value Validation Report Economic Value Overview ESG s Economic Value Validation process revealed that an effective deployment of Lenovo HX Series can provide significant cost savings and economic benefit opportunities when compared with deploying a do-it-yourself (DIY) architecture consisting of servers and SAN-based storage arrays. ESG found that Lenovo HX Series can help organizations in three primary areas: 1) by lowering the expected total cost of ownership of IT infrastructure; 2) by reducing expected operational costs throughout the organization; and 3) by helping to make employees and end-users more productive. ESG validated Lenovo s economic value propositions through a series of customer interviews and case studies with a variety of organizations and individuals that had deployed Lenovo HX Series appliances running Nutanix software. These organizations covered a range of industries including e-commerce, retail, healthcare, and government organizations, with deployments ranging from smaller SMBs to very large organizations spanning multiple sites. Workloads included SaaS, analytics, web services, SQL databases, private cloud, VDI, and general server virtualization for applications and services. These customers revealed how Lenovo HX Series and Nutanix had helped them reduce infrastructure-related TCO in numerous ways, including: Infrastructure-related Total Cost of Ownership Savings þ Less hardware to deploy (no SAN switches, less storage capacity required, and fewer nodes required). þ Lower software costs (all software costs included no separate server, SAN, or storage software). þ Smaller data center footprint resulting in lower power/cooling/floor space costs. þ Ability to spread costs out over time and increase resources as needed, on demand. þ No need to overprovision or upgrade hardware to avoid performance bottlenecks. þ Possibility of greatly reducing virtualization licensing and software costs through the use of AHV. Lenovo HX Series helps reduce the overall infrastructure footprint and complexity of the deployment by deploying simple scalable blocks rather than separate servers, SAN networking, and storage arrays. HX Series eliminates the need to deploy dedicated storage controllers and SAN network switches, as well as deduplication and compression technologies. And the effective use of flash media helps to further reduce the total amount of capacity that must be deployed. Organizations can

7 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 7 deploy nodes as demanded by the business over time, rather than having to overprovision for future capacity and performance requirements. Customers ESG spoke with were in general very happy with the reduction in costs, smaller data center footprint, and overall savings achieved by moving their 3-tier architecture to a Nutanix-based hyperconverged platform: We replaced half a rack of [Previous Vendor] equipment with just 2u of Nutanix with room to spare. Our datacenter costs were cut in half with a 50% overall reduction in TCO While many of the organizations ESG investigated continued to deploy some of the leading commercial hypervisors, a surprising number of organizations had found that the no-cost, built-in AHV hypervisor solution (a Nutanix ruggedized version of open source KVM technology) satisfied their business needs, and were able to enjoy substantial savings by completely eliminating virtualization licensing and software costs. More than one organization that we spoke with shared similar justifications to that of one customer s account: It was a challenge to actually accept that AHV delivered what it claimed with us it was the fear of the unknown we did lots of due diligence tests to be sure and found that we really did not need all the virtualization functionality that we pay for today. I can pay for the entire system just based on getting rid of virtualization licensing and maintenance over 7 years. With a lower cost of acquisition comes proportionately lower costs of maintenance and support. While Lenovo HX Series offered substantial savings in the areas of cost of acquisition, data center footprint, and support, ESG s EVV process validated that the hyperconverged architecture also provided substantial operational expense-related savings. Expected Savings Due to Reduction in Operational Expenses þ Less time required to plan for and complete purchases (due to easier ordering and simple scale-out design). þ Faster deployments resulting in faster time to value for applications (fewer issues, faster POCs, etc.). þ Administrative savings due to the reduction in the number of IT silos (virtualization, servers, and storage). þ Administrative savings due to a single management interface versus three or more. þ Less time dealing with resource growth (i.e., adding compute and storage resources). þ Fewer administrative hours required for maintenance and dealing with integration issues. þ Less time spent migrating data between storage arrays and storage tiers. Operational costs can add up quickly, and recur year over year, and are often not accurately measured. Lenovo HX Series is sourced from a single vendor and the scale-out design greatly reduces the time and effort required by organizations around planning and purchasing for future growth. Deployment time is greatly reduced due both to the simplicity of the design and the elimination of possible interoperability issues, leading to faster time to value and increased revenue. Organizations on record reported: The single SKU ordering simplifies ordering for us; we don t need to spend so much time planning We went from weeks to deploy, configure, and test components in our three-tiered architecture to only a few minutes to deploy HX nodes. HX Series takes away a lot of the risk and complexity around guessing what we need to buy. Perhaps one of the largest advantages of deploying HX Series is the operational savings that can be achieved by greatly simplifying the daily administration of the infrastructure. HX Series is far simpler to manage, monitor, and maintain using a single, simple interface versus three separate tiers consisting of servers, SAN, and storage (with three separate, vendor-

8 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 8 specific interfaces). Because it can be easily managed by an individual, HX Series helps to eliminate the traditional management or departmental silos that exist between virtualization, server, SAN, and storage administrators greatly reducing the total man hours required to administer, maintain, and monitor the infrastructure. My key requirements were to have something that was simple, easy to manage, and ideally a single pane of glass. I wanted a solution that was very powerful and also very versatile. For me, Nutanix ticked all of those boxes. The management is simple very eye pleasing with actionable searches. The simplicity of Prism was outstanding... I have much fewer things to manage.. The beauty of Nutanix is that it s an open platform We can get data from the hypervisor, guests, hardware, etc.. ESG found that HX also offered substantial operational savings when scaling the system. Nodes can be ordered, racked, and brought online quickly and easily compared with a traditional three-tier architecture, which must be architected and scaled in different dimensions. HX eliminates the need for guesswork, interoperability issues, and the need to migrate data. HX is so simple to scale, it took about 60 minutes to add a node. All I had to do was plug in two wires. While reduction in capital and operational expenses may be the most easily comprehensible factors in deciding to deploy Lenovo HX Series, ESG found that organizations often also benefited from increases in productivity and enhanced business agility, which are often more difficult to measure and thus, overlooked. Increased Productivity and Business Agility þ A single vendor relationship to manage rather than three or more (for planning, purchasing, and support). þ Faster deployment and time to value for new applications. þ Improved application integration, orchestration, and automation. þ Improved business agility. þ Improved application performance. þ Less application downtime and delays. Lenovo HX Series appliances running Nutanix software are supported by a single vendor rather than three or more vendors. First call support goes to Lenovo. This single throat to choke is a great benefit to the organization as a whole: benefiting decision makers by simplifying planning, benefiting finance and vendor management by simplifying purchasing, and benefiting the rest of the organization by greatly simplifying support. These benefits accumulate across the organization, making every level more productive. Since it s a hyperconverged solution, Nutanix reduces the number of vendors we have to work with, streamlining contract negotiations and support We used to spend so much time calling vendors, going through different channels, organizing different vendors to come in We can now order a node and have it deployed here in two weeks versus possibly months. Lenovo HX Series customers reported that applications could be developed, tested, and delivered faster. Customers were able to leverage built-in application integration and speed application-driven changes to the infrastructure through orchestration and automation. This helped both application and infrastructure administrators to be more responsive to the needs of the business and more productive in other areas. Nutanix is enabling us to launch new services for our constituents very quickly now.

9 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 9 It was a huge win for the organization The agility that I get with Nutanix is remarkable We now have capabilities that we never had before as a company Customers reported up to a 50% improvement in application performance when compared with deployment on their previous SAN-based DIY infrastructure. ESG also found that end-users could be more productive due to less application downtime and delays, thanks to fewer interoperability issues and quicker non-disruptive upgrades. End-users were also able to spend less time dealing with customer support, ing admins, and dealing with support ticketing systems. I was very skeptical about performance after 20 years in the industry was nervous about putting all my eggs in one basket My latency is actually lower than a flash-based 3 tier system. Lenovo HX eliminated crashes of our ERP system month end close was a nightmare - it was just poor architecture. The overall availability of our ERP has increased significantly since we re-architected the core with Lenovo HX With Nutanix, our reputation internally in the college as a support department has become very positive. We have received comments like the response time from the IT team has been fantastic. Economic Modeling ESG s Economic Value Model for Lenovo HX Series ESG leveraged the information collected through vendor-provided material, public and industry knowledge of economics and technologies, and the results of customer interviews to create a three to five year TCO/ROI model that compares the costs and benefits of deploying and managing Lenovo HX Series hyperconverged infrastructure against deploying a DIY solution consisting of servers, SAN, and storage based on known reference architectures. Because no two customer environments are the same, the model was designed to allow for flexibility in characterizing the end-user s business and workload requirements. The model considered five possible Lenovo HX Nodes for deployment ranging from SMB (HX2320 Express) to high-performance enterprise (HX7520). The model considered the necessary requirements for running consolidated general server virtualization, database, and/or VDI workloads that are defined by parameters such as the number of users/desktops, capacity, performance, and expected growth. The model uses the results of these inputs (along with growth requirements over three or five years) to size the number of HX Series nodes required, and then determines the storage array and SAN requirements, as well as the number of servers required to handle the workloads based on well-known reference architecture configurations and VM sizing guidelines. The model calculated and reported the difference between the Lenovo HX Series and PMO configurations for infrastructure TCO CapEx and OpEx (cost of acquisition, power/cooling/floor space, support/maintenance, and administration) as well as additional economic benefits derived from advantages resulting in improved end-user and IT productivity and faster time to value. It should be noted that the data and conclusions presented in this report reflect the output of ESG s economic value analysis based on the specific use cases and assumptions modeled for this report. ESG acknowledges that changes to these assumptions will lead to a different set of results, and therefore advises IT professionals to use this report as one validation point in a comprehensive financial analysis prior to making a purchase decision. The detailed model behind this analysis also forms the basis for a web-enabled version of the tool with simplified inputs available on Lenovo s website.

10 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 10 Pricing assumptions for HX Series products were provided by Lenovo and may vary depending on specific configuration and business requirements. Other IT equipment and labor cost assumptions were obtained from publicly available sources such as IT vendor websites and published price lists. ESG acknowledges that list prices, configuration details, or other data used as inputs may vary depending on information sources. Example: Using the EVM to Predict Savings for a Modeled Organization To illustrate some of the possible economic advantages of a HX infrastructure deployment versus a DIY infrastructure deployment, ESG ran a set of assumptions through the ESG Economic Value Model. The modeled scenario was based loosely on some of the requirements from the customers interviewed, and considered the costs and benefits over a threeyear period. The scenario modeled a large distributed organization serving a community of about 5,000 total people (employees and application end-users) deploying new infrastructure in an effort to consolidate their existing and future IT operations. The modeled organization was designed with generalized requirements that might be representative of a university, hospital, municipality, or software development organization. The modeled requirements for the VMs, performance, and capacity are discussed in detail in the following paragraphs and summarized in Figure 4. Figure 4. VM/Server, IOPS, and Capacity Requirements for the Modeled Organization ESG assumed that this organization s environment consisted of mission-critical and non-mission-critical databases, a virtualized desktop environment for 1,300 users, and a large number of other applications, databases, and services running on a total of 250 virtualized servers. ESG assumed that two databases were accessed by about 2,500 users from ten virtualized servers providing access to different locations. The database and related functions consumed a total of 10 TB of storage and required sustained performance to handle 7,000 IOPS. The user community, capacity, and IOPS requirements for database services were expected to grow by 10% annually. The VDI requirements consisted of a single VDI desktop each for up to 1,300 end-users. Each desktop required an average of 60 GB of storage and performed a moderate workload averaging 25 IOPS. The total number of desktops was expected to grow by 25 annually, with a 10% capacity growth requirement and a near-flat 3% IOPS growth requirement. Finally, the organization maintained a total of 250 other virtualized server applications and services that required a total of up to 50,000 IOPS and 30 TB of total storage, with the IOPS requirement growing at 5% annually, and capacity growing at 10% annually. These applications and services provided access to the 5,000 users (employees, partners, customers, and web users) and was expected to grow at 10% annually. With this information entered, the ESG EVM calculated that the requirements could be satisfied by a total of seven Lenovo HX3720 nodes. Since each of the densely packed, all-flash, 2U HX3720 systems contains four nodes, the entire 336-core HX

11 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 11 infrastructure would only require a total of 4U. The model predicted that the DIY solution would require a total of 11 highperformance servers connected via SAN to a midrange SAN storage solution providing about 216 TB of raw storage capacity (provided by a mix of SSD and HDD). The estimated deployment comparison is shown in Figure 5. Figure 5. Estimated Configuration Required to Satisfy the Workload Requirements of Modeled Scenario With this information entered, the ESG EVM calculated that by consolidating workloads onto Lenovo HX Series instead of deploying a DIY infrastructure consisting of servers, SAN, and storage from different vendors, the modeled organization could expect savings and benefits of around $3.25M over a three-year period. These savings result in an impressive expected ROI of 372%. A summary of the modeled results is shown in Figure 6. Figure 6. Summary of Potential Savings and Benefits Realized with Lenovo HX Infrastructure Of the roughly $3.25M in expected savings and benefits, roughly $1M is expected as a result of traditional-infrastructurerelated CapEx and OpEx savings. The HX Series solution required that far less hardware be deployed to handle the application requirements. The dense design of the HX3720, combined with the benefits of compression and deduplication, and all-flash media means that the solution only requires 4U of rack space. The DIY solution would require roughly ten times the amount of rack-space. The results from the EVM modeled scenario are shown in Figure 7.

12 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 12 Figure 7. Estimated Infrastructure Total Cost of Ownership Before and After Lenovo HX Infrastructure Deployment For the modeled scenario, the HX solution provided total upfront capital expenditures (hardware and software) that were 52% lower with a 60% lower three-year cost of projected maintenance and support, and a 50% lower cost of professional services. Much of this cost reduction is a result of deploying less hardware, but it is also a result of buying software, support, and services from Lenovo instead of from three or more vendors. In addition, the Lenovo HX solution would require much lower three-year operational costs when compared with that of the DIY infrastructure, resulting in predicted 57% lower data center facilities costs (power/cooling/floor space) when compared with the DIY solution that requires far more hardware. The HX Series would also be far easier to manage based on the ability to manage within a single organization (silo) with a single interface, advanced application integration, and the benefits of server/storage orchestration. ESG s model predicted a 77% lower cost of daily storage administration. ESG s model also predicted economic benefits that may not at first be apparent and are often times difficult to measure and project for organizations. While these soft benefits can vary drastically between organizations, the ESG EVV process is valuable in validating those benefits that organizations have experienced, and can provide you with a starting point for understanding how to quantify these potential benefits for your organization. ESG s model analyzed how an organization could expect to save an additional $2.18M over three years through operational savings at other levels of the business and productivity improvements. When compared with managing a traditional DIY infrastructure deployment through three or more separate management silos and/or interfaces, ESG s model predicts that the organization could expect to save about $906K through operational improvements. These benefits included quicker resolution of support issues (32% less time spent dealing with issues, resulting in $5K of operational savings), simpler upgrades and capacity scaling (100% quicker upgrades and scaling resulting in $247K of operational savings), simplified administration (46% lower administrative OpEx resulting in $556K of operational savings), and a lower cost of deployment with faster time to value (24% faster time to value, resulting in $98K in combined revenue and OpEx savings). A detailed description of these benefits and results from the EVM are shown in Figure 8.

13 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 13 Figure 8. Summary of Operational Savings and Benefits Realized with HX Series ESG s model predicts an additional $1.27M of productivity-related savings and benefits for the organization most of which are due to increased business agility that would be expected should the organization choose to deploy HX Series. While at first these benefits may seem profound, it is important to remember that benefits are inclusive of end-users, support personnel, administrators, and line of business decision makers over a three-year period. These benefits center around being able to provide more reliable and agile applications, where a single functional benefit can result in productivity-related savings multiple times, as the positive effect is realized by each business unit. Savings included: 85% faster deployment of applications and up to 50% improved application performance (resulting in predicted revenues and savings totaling $941K over three years), 56% less application downtime and delays ($106K of revenue and productivity savings), 18% less time dealing with support of applications ($2.6K of end-user productivity savings), and 73% simpler application administration ($218K of end-user productivity benefits). A detailed description of the productivity-related savings and benefits from the EVM are shown in Figure 9.

14 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 14 Figure 9. Summary of Productivity-related Savings and Benefits Realized with HX Series The results shown in Figure 9 highlight some of the areas that an organization looking to deploy new infrastructure can expect to save with HX Series; however, every deployment is different, and every organization should understand the potential savings and benefits that apply to their particular environment. We encourage those considering making investments in infrastructure to leverage the simplified Web-enabled tool on the Lenovo website or contact their Lenovo HX Series sales representative or partner to enter the custom requirements of your organization into the excel-based tool (containing more detailed inputs) to see how much you could save. The model is not designed to be used as a configurator or sizing tool, but rather as a tool for interactive discussion. Assumptions and parameters can be tuned, and savings and benefits can be dynamically removed from the analysis to better match your specific workload and requirements. The Bigger Truth Choosing an infrastructure on which to consolidate and deploy your business-critical applications is an important decision for any organization one that can either constrain your functionality in the future or act as a catalyst to increased business agility. Purchasing best of breed technologies from separate server, SAN, and storage vendors is a popular strategy, but can complicate planning, purchasing, and interoperability down the road. Lenovo HX Series combines the industry-leading hyperconvergence software from Nutanix with proven advanced server technology and global support from Lenovo to create a highly reliable, highly scalable, and high-performance infrastructure building block for virtualized environments. It is easy to compare price tags and specs such as number of cores, RAM, and raw storage capacity between hyperconverged and three-tier architectures (DIY). However, fully understanding an investment in HX Series requires looking beyond the simple infrastructure-related costs (hardware, software, support, etc.) and beginning to understand and quantify how that technology can impact every area of the business (administrative expense, enhanced employee productivity, increases in business agility and revenue streams, etc.). ESG s Economic Value Validation process was used to investigate and validate the ways HX Series can greatly simplify operations while lowering both capital and operational expenses and realizing savings and benefits that result in a positive

15 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 15 return on investment when compared with deploying a DIY infrastructure consisting of servers, storage, and SAN switches from multiple vendors. The detailed results are articulated throughout this paper, but ESG s economic value model predicted savings and benefits totaling over $3.25M over a three-year period with an ROI of 372% for a modeled organization looking to consolidate database, VDI, and general server virtualization workloads. The analysis was performed assuming that a leading virtualization hypervisor was deployed in both cases. However, virtualization-related costs were lower for the HX Series deployment due to the fact that the solution required fewer total CPU sockets (the key factor in virtualization licensing costs) to meet workload requirements. It warrants mentioning that many of the customers that we spoke with had chosen to deploy the built-in AHV hypervisor with their Nutanix/HX Series hardware, eliminating the cost of virtualization licenses without limiting virtualization functionality for their applications. One customer stated: We have saved tens of thousands of dollars on virtualization licensing with a free hypervisor that has all the necessary features that ESX had for our applications. ESG s economic value model-based tools allow customers to select the AHV hypervisor to eliminate virtualization licensing costs. Figure 10 compares the result of virtualization related costs for the modeled scenario with and without AHV. Figure 10. Benefits of Deploying AHV Hypervisor on Modeled Scenario Many of the customers with whom ESG spoke had investigated deploying Nutanix software on other hardware choices, but decided that Lenovo hardware made the most sense for their organization based on reliability, density, performance, and vendor relationship. One customer said The hardware density that we got by combining Nutanix and Lenovo is excellent, and another remarked We knew we wanted to deploy Nutanix on more robust hardware from [vendor omitted] or Lenovo. We ran many tests and the data pointed to the fact that the best deployment option was deploying Nutanix on Lenovo servers. Your infrastructure is the foundation of all of the value that your IT department delivers, and selecting the right infrastructure deserves proper due diligence. A HX Series customer proclaimed You re making a large investment in the future, and if you are wrong, it s your job. ESG s Economic Value Validation process and resulting Economic Value Model can guide organizations to ask the right questions and hopefully make better informed decisions about their infrastructure deployment. ESG validated that deploying Nutanix software on Lenovo hardware makes great functional and economic sense for many organizations, and encourages you to ask your Lenovo rep or sales partner to see if it is the right fit for yours.

16 EVV Report: Quantifying the Value of Simplified IT Infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Appliances 16 All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at Enterprise Strategy Group is an IT analyst, research, validation, and strategy firm that provides market intelligence and actionable insight to the global IT community by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. P