There’s been a whirlwind of disruption in IT triggered by changes announced by Broadcom following its acquisition of VMware late in 2023. Countless articles and blog posts detail the waves of uncertainty for customers, partners, and Cloud Service Providers (CSP). Many impacted businesses report the same thing: receiving cancellation letters without further information on what happens next. 

In the wake of industry shifts, we at CenterGrid took proactive steps as soon as whispers of Broadcom’s acquisition began. The writing was on the wall for us: a wave of change was coming for cloud service providers and their clientele.

Without hesitation, we embarked on a strategic shift to a state-of-the-art, 1hyper-converged infrastructure. Our approach was methodical, rigorously evaluating various storage and hyper-converged platforms against our bespoke benchmark suite and existing VMware set up to ensure enhanced performance for our clients. Our transition was a carefully orchestrated affair designed to guarantee a seamless experience for our customers.

When the acquisition was first announced in May 2022, we started working on our plans, analyzing and strategizing the implications for our Cloud customers. The bottom line is that not much is changing for our cloud customers. Why? Because embedded in the DNA of our services is a commitment to forward-looking, proactive strategies.

Today, CenterGrid’s multi-tenant Cloud services stand ready, eager to support those looking to transition their VMware-based workloads to a superior platform.

Leveraging Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for Enhanced Cloud Performance

As a CSP, our relentless focus on continual service improvement and lifecycle management forms the bedrock of our value proposition. We’ve realized that we haven’t shouted this from the rooftops enough.

Let’s be clear: a significant portion of every dollar our customers invest in us is reinvested into elevating the services we deliver to them.

Our transition to a new hyper-converged infrastructure is just our latest example.
Another example is in our hardware lifecycle management efforts. When aging HDD storage arrays approached the end of their initial support, we didn’t simply reinvest in additional years to support older gear. We upgraded to state-of-the-art SSD Flash Storage arrays, and then, three years later, we upgraded again to NVMe, delivering not just the necessary support coverage but enhanced performance, reduced datacenter footprint, and optimized financials.

Maximizing Cloud Value: How CenterGrid Prioritizes Customer Success and Service Lifecycle

Our cloud customers benefit from these upgrades in the form of enhanced performance.

  • They are spared the complexities of vendor meetings, configuration options, feature comparisons, financial analysis, the entire purchase process, implementation, and migration strategy meetings.
  • They reaped the benefits of faster speeds and enhanced features seamlessly integrated into their services.

Unlike the service providers caught off-guard by the recent announcement, we knew we needed to be proactive. However, migrating to a completely new hypervisor or hyper-converged infrastructure is challenging. The dividend of having a service provider deeply invested in proactive strategies resulted in our CenterGrid customers remaining unaffected.

If you’re a Cloud customer today, you can demand more from your provider. They should channel a percentage of your monthly spending into continual improvement and lifecycle management. Unsure? Ask for examples. You can also ask how you’re potentially affected by the Broadcom announcement regarding Cloud Service Providers.

For those not yet in the Cloud, we recommend prioritizing providers committed to continual improvement and lifecycle management. Remember, cloud services are more than an alternative to buying new infrastructure.

Too often, Cloud is compared to the cost of new servers, new storage, and upgraded networking, but you should look beyond just the acquisition costs of those assets. Significant effort goes into that final purchase order you’re going to submit, and recognizing the added value in the forward-thinking focus, it’s worth considering as a line item on your monthly bill.

Navigating Change: CenterGrid’s Consultative Approach for CSPs

We suspect hundreds or thousands of Cloud Service Providers of varying sizes are in a tough spot today, scrambling to migrate to a new solution. Recognizing the problematic situations, we’ve expanded our role to include consulting services, aiding them in overcoming these challenging circumstances.

Our journey underscores the importance of preparedness and proactive service improvement strategies as the cornerstone of enduring success. Curious to uncover the full potential of CenterGrid’s innovative services? Let’s connect and explore a paradigm shift in your Cloud experience together.

  1. Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined IT framework that combines storage, computing, and networking into a single system to reduce data center complexity and increase scalability. HCI leverages virtualization to manage resources from a centralized user interface, making deploying and managing resources easier than traditional hardware-defined infrastructures. This technology is particularly appealing for cloud services, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and other scenarios where scalability and simplified management are priorities. ↩︎