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A discussion on what causes haphazard cloud use, and how new tools, processes, and methods are bringing actionable analysis to regain control over hybrid IT sprawl.
Huge waste in public cloud spend sets stage for next wave of total cloud governance solutions, says 451's Fellows
Path to client workspace automation paved with hyperconverged infrastructure for New Jersey college
The next BriefingsDirect hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) use case discussion explores how a New Jersey college has embarked on the time-saving, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) modernization journey.
We will now learn how the combination of HCI and VDI makes the task of deploying and maintaining the latest end-user devices far simpler -- and cheaper than ever before.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to explore how a new digital and data-driven culture can emerge from uniting the desktop edge with the hyper-efficient core are Tom Gillon, Director of Network and User Services at County College of Morris (CCM) in Randolph, New Jersey; Michael Gilchrist, Assistant Director of Network Systems at County College of Morris (CCM), and Felise Katz, CEO of PKA Technologies, Inc. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What are the trends driving your needs at County College of Morris to modernize and simplify your personal computer (PC) architecture?
Gillon: We need to be flexible and agile in terms of getting software to the students, when they need it, where they need it.
With physical infrastructure that really isn't possible. So we realized that VDI was the solution to meet our goals -- to get the software where the students need it, when they need it, and so that's a top trend that got us to this point.
Gardner: And is the simplicity of VDI deployments something you are looking at universally, or is this more specific to just students?
Gillon: We are looking to deploy VDI all throughout the college: Faculty, staff, and students. We started out with a pilot of 300 units that we mostly put out in labs and in common areas for the students. But now we are replacing older PCs that the faculty and staff use as well.
Gardner: VDI has been around for a while, and for the first few years there was a lot of promise, but there was also some lag from complications in that certain apps and media wouldn't run properly; there were network degradation issues. We've worked through a lot of that, but what are some of your top concerns, Michael, when it comes to some of those higher-order infrastructure performance issues that you have to conquer before you get to the proper payoff from VDI?
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Gilchrist: You want to make sure that the user experience is the same as what they would experience on a physical device, otherwise they will not accept it.
Just having the horse power -- nowadays these servers are so powerful, and now you can even get graphics processing units (GPUs) in there -- you can run stuff like AutoCAD or Adobe and still give the user the same experience that they would normally have on a physical device. That's what we are finding. Pretty good so far.
Gardner: Felise, as a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Platinum Partner, you have been through this journey before, so you know how it was rough-and-tumble there for a while with VDI. How has that changed from your perspective at PKA Technologies?
Katz: When HPE made the acquisition of SimpliVity that was the moment that defined a huge game-changer because it enabled us, as a solution provider, to bring the right technology to CCM. That was huge.
Gardner: When you're starting out on an IT transition, you have to keep the wings on the airplane while you're changing the engines, or vice versa. You have to keep things going while you are doing change. Tom, how did you manage that? How did you keep your students getting their apps? How have you been able to swap things out in a way that hasn't been disruptive?
Gillon: The beauty of VDI is that we can switch out a lab completely with thin clients in about an hour. And we didn't realize that going in. We thought it would take us most of the day. And then when we did it, we were like, "Oh my God, we are done." We were able to go in there first thing in the morning and knock it out before the students even came in.
That really helped us to get these devices out to where the students need them and to not be disruptive to them.
That really helped us to get these devices out to where the students need them and not be disruptive to them.
Gardner: Tom, how did it work from your perspective in terms of an orderly process? How was the support from your partners like PKA? Do you get to the point where this becomes routine?
Gillon: PKA has the expertise in this area. We worked with them previously on an Aruba wireless network deployment project, and we knew that's who we wanted to work with, because they were professional and thorough.
Moving to the thin client systems deployments, we contacted PKA and they put together a solution that worked well for us. We had not been aware of SimpliVity combined with HPE. They determined that this would be the best path for us, and it turned out to be true. They came in and we worked with HPE, setting this up and deploying it. Michael did a lot of that work with HPE. It was very simple to do. We were surprised at how simple it was.
Academic pressure
Gardner: Felise, as a solution partner that specializes in higher education, what's different from working at a college campus environment from, say, a small- to medium-sized business (SMB) or another type of enterprise? Is there something specific about a college environment, such as the number of apps, the need for certain people and groups in the college to have different roles within responsibilities? How did it shake out?
Katz: That's an interesting question. As a solution provider, as an owner of a business, we always put our best foot forward. It really doesn't matter whether it's an academic institution or a commercial customer, it always has to be done in the right way.
As a matter of fact, in academics it's even more profound, and a lot more pressured, because you are dealing with students, you are dealing with faculty, and you are dealing with IT staff. Once we are in a "go" mode, we are under a lot of pressure. We have a limited time span between semesters -- or vacations and holidays -- where we have to be around to help them to get it up and running.
We have to make sure that the customer is enabled. And with these guys at CCM, they were so fabulous to work with. They enabled us to help them to do more with less -- and that's what the solution is all about. It's all about simplification. It's all about modernization. It's all about being more efficient. And as Michael said so eloquently, it's all about the experience for the students. That's what we care about.
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That's Right for Your Needs
Gardner: Michael, where are you on your VDI-enablement journey? We heard that you want to go pervasively to VDI. What have you had to put in place -- in terms of servers in the HPE SimpliVity HCI case -- to make that happen?
Gilchrist: So far, we have six servers in total. Three servers in each of our two data centers that we have on campus, for high redundancy. That's going to allow us to cover our initial pilot of 300 thin clients that we are putting out there.
As far as the performance of the system goes, we are not even scratching the surface in terms of the computing or RAM available for those first 300 endpoints.
When it comes to getting more thin clients, I think we're going to be able to initially tack on more thin clients to the initial subset of six servers. And as we grow, the beauty of SimpliVity is that we just buy another server, rack it up, and bolt it in -- and that's it. It's just plug and play.
Gardner: In order to assess how well this solution is working, let's learn more about CCM. It's 50 years old. What's this college all about?
Data-driven college transformation
Gillon: We are located in North Central New Jersey. We have an enrollment of about 8,000 students per semester; that's for credit. We also have a lot of non-credit students coming and going as well.
As you said, we are 50-years-old, and I've been there almost 23 years. I was the second person hired in the IT Department.
I have seen a lot come and go, and we actually just last year inaugurated our third college president, just three presidents in 50 years. It's a very stable environment, and it's really a great place to work.
Gardner: I understand that you have had with this newest leadership more of a technical and digital transformation focus. Tell us how the culture of the college has changed and how that may have impacted your leaping into some of the more modern infrastructure to support VDI.
Gillon: Our new president is very data-driven. He wants data on everything, and frankly we weren't in a position to provide that.
We also changed CIOs. Our new CIO came in about a year after the new president, and he has also a strong data background. He is more about data than technology. So, with that focus we really knew that we had to get systems in place that are capable of quick transitions, and this HCI system really did the job for us. We are looking to expand further beyond that.
Gardner: Felise, I have heard other people refer to hyperconverged infrastructure architectures like SimpliVity as a gift that keeps giving. Clearly the reason to get into this was to support the VDI, which is a difficult workload. But there are also other benefits.
The simplification from HCI has uncomplicated their capability for growth and for scale.
What have been some of the other benefits that you have been able to demonstrate to CCM that come with HCI? Is it the compression, the data storage savings, or a clear disaster recovery path that they hadn't had before? What do you see as some of the ancillary benefits?
Katz: It's all of the above. But to me -- and I think to both Tom and Michael -- it's really the simplification, because [HCI] has uncomplicated their capability for growth and for scale.
Look, they are in a very competitive business, okay, attracting students, as Tom said. That's tough, that's where they have to make the difference, they have to make a difference when that student arrives on campus with his, I don't know, how many devices, right?
One student, five devices
Gillon: It averages five now, I think.
Katz: Five devices that come on board. How do you contend with that, besides having this huge pipe for all the data and everything else that they have to enable? And then you have new ways of learning that everybody has to step up and enable. It's not just about a classroom; it's a whole different world. And when you're in a rural part of New Jersey, where you're looking to attract students, you have to make sure you are at the top of your game.
Gardner: Expectations are higher than ever, and the younger people are even more demanding because they haven't known anything else.
Katz: Yes, just think about their Xbox, their cell phones, and more devices. It's just a huge amount. And it's not only for them, it's also for your college staff.
Gardner: We can't have a conversation about IT infrastructure without getting into the speeds and feeds a little bit. Tell us about your SimpliVity footprint, energy, maintenance, and operating costs. What has this brought to you at CCM? You have been doing this for 23 years, you know what a high-maintenance server can be like. How has this changed your perspective on keeping a full-fledged infrastructure up and running?
Ease into IT
Gillon: There are tremendous benefits, and we are seeing that. The six servers that we have put in, they are replacing a lot of other devices. If we would have gone with a different solution, we would have had a rack full of servers to contend with. With this solution, we are putting three devices in each of our server rooms to handle the load of our initial 300 VDI deployments -- and hopefully more soon.
There are a lot of savings involved, such as power. A lot of our time is being saved because we are not a big shop. Besides Michael and myself, I have a network administrator, and another systems administrator -- that's it, four people. We just don't have the time to do a lot of things we need to do -- and this system solves a lot of those issues.
Gilchrist: From a resources utilization standpoint, the deduplication and compression that the SimpliVity system provides is just insane. I am logically provisioning hundreds of terabytes of information in my VMware system -- and only using 1.5 terabytes physically. And just the backup and restore, it's kind of fire and forget. You put this stuff in place and it really does do what they say. You can restore large virtual machines (VMs) in about one or two seconds and then have it back up and running in case something goes haywire. It just makes my life a lot easier.
I'm no longer having to worry about, "Well, who was my back-up vendor? Or who is my storage area network (SAN) vendor? And then there's trying to combine all of those systems into one. Well,HPE SimpliVity just takes care of all of that. It's a one-stop shop; it's a no-brainer.
Gardner:All in one, Felise, is that a fair characterization?
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Katz: That is a very, very true assessment. My goal, my responsibility is to bring forward the best solution for my customers and having HPE in my corner with this is huge. It gives me the advantage to help my clients, and so we are able to put together a really great solution for CCM.
Gardner: There seems to be a natural progression with IT infrastructure adoption patterns. You move from bare metal to virtualization, then you move from virtualization to HCI, and then that puts you on a path to private cloud -- and then hybrid cloud. And in doing this modernization, you get used to the programmatic approach to infrastructure, so composable infrastructure.
Do you feel that this progression is helping you modernize your organization? And where might that lead to, Tom?
Gillon: I do. With the experience we are gaining with SimpliVity, we see that this can go well beyond VDI, and we are excited about that. We are getting to a point where our current infrastructure is getting a little long in the tooth. We need to make some decisions, and right now the two of us are like, this is only decision we want to make. This is the way we are going to go.
Gardner: I have also read that VDI is like the New York of IT -- if you can do it there, you can do it anywhere. So what next workloads do you have in mind? Is this enterprise resource planning (ERP), is it business apps? What?
Gillon: All of the above. We are definitely looking to put some of our server loads into the VDI world, and just the benefits that SimpliVity gives to us in terms of business continuity and redundancy, it really is a no-brainer for us.
And yes, ERP, we have our ERP system currently virtualized, and the way Michael has things set up now, it's going to be an easy transition for us when we get to that point.
Gardner: We have talked a lot about the hardware, but we also have to factor in the software. You have been using the VMware Horizon approach to VDI and workspaces, and that's great, but what about moving toward cloud?
Do you want to have more choice in your hypervisor? Does that set you on another path to make choices about private cloud? What comes next in terms of what you support on such a great HCI platform?
A cloudy future?
Gillon: We have decisions to make when it comes to cloud. We are doing some things in the cloud now, but there are some things we don't want to do in the cloud. And HPE has a lot of solutions.
We recently attended a discussion with the CEO of HPE [Antonio Neri] about where they are headed, and they say hybrid is the way to go. You are going to have some on-premises workloads, you are going to have some off-premises. And that's where we see CCM going as well.
Gardner: What advice would you give to other organizations that are maybe later in starting out with VDI? What might save them a step or two?
Get yourself a good partner because there are so many things that you don't know about these systems.
Gillon: First thing, get yourself a good partner because there are so many things that you don't know about these systems. And having a good partner like PKA, they brought a lot to the table. They could have easily provided a solution to us that was just a bunch of servers.
Gilchrist: Yes, they brought in the expertise. We didn't know about SimpliVity, and once they showed us everything that it can do, we were skeptical. But it just does it. We are really happy with it, and I have to say, having a good partner is step number one.
Gardner: Felise, what recommendations do you have for organizations that are just now dipping their toe into workloads like VDI? What is it about HCI in particular that they should consider?
Look to the future
Katz: If they are looking for flexible architecture, if they are looking for the agility, to be able to make those moves down the road -- and that's where their minds are – then they really have to do the due diligence. Tom, Michael and their team did. They were able understand what their needs are, what right requirements are for them -- not just for today but also going down the road to the future.
When you adopt a new architecture, you are displacing a lot of your older methodologies, too. It's a different world, a hybrid world. You need to be able to move, and to move the workloads back and forth.
It's a great time right now. It's a great place to be because things are working, and they are clicking. We have the reference architectures available now to help, but it's really first about doing their homework.
Choose an HCI for VDI Solution
That's Right for Your Needs
CCM is really a great team to work with. It's really a pleasure, and it's a lot of fun.
And I would be remiss not to say, I have a great team. From my sales to my technical: Strategic Account Manager Angie Moncada, Systems Engineer Patrick Shelley, and Vice President of Technology Russ Chow, they were just all-in with them. That makes a huge difference when you also connect with HPE on the right solutions. So that's really been great.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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Panel explores new ways to solve the complexity of hybrid cloud monitoring
The next BriefingsDirect panel discussion focuses on improving performance and cost monitoring of various IT workloads in a multi-cloud world.
We will now explore how multi-cloud adoption is forcing cloud monitoring and cost management to work in new ways for enterprises.
Our panel of Micro Focus experts will unpack new Dimensional Research survey findings gleaned from more than 500 enterprise cloud specifiers. You will learn about their concerns, requirements and demands for improving the monitoring, management and cost control over hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
We will also hear about new solutions and explore examples of how automation leverages machine learning (ML) and rapidly improves cloud management at a large Barcelona bank.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
To share more about interesting new cloud trends, we are joined by Harald Burose, Director of Product Management at Micro Focus, and he is based in Stuttgart; Ian Bromehead, Direct of Product Marketing at Micro Focus, and he is based in Grenoble, France, and Gary Brandt, Product Manager at Micro Focus, based in Sacramento. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Let's begin with setting the stage for how cloud computing complexity is rapidly advancing to include multi-cloud computing -- and how traditional monitoring and management approaches are falling short in this new hybrid IT environment.
Enterprise IT leaders tasked with the management of apps, data, and business processes amid this new level of complexity are primarily grounded in the IT management and monitoring models from their on-premises data centers.
They are used to being able to gain agent-based data sets and generate analysis on their own, using their own IT assets that they control, that they own, and that they can impose their will over.
Yet virtually overnight, a majority of companies share infrastructure for their workloads across public clouds and on-premises systems. The ability to manage these disparate environments is often all or nothing.
The cart is in front of the horse. IT managers do not own the performance data generated from their cloud infrastructure.
In many ways, the ability to manage in a hybrid fashion has been overtaken by the actual hybrid deployment models. The cart is in front of the horse. IT managers do not own the performance data generated from their cloud infrastructure. Their management agents can't go there. They have insights from their own systems, but far less from their clouds, and they can't join these. They therefore have hybrid computing -- but without commensurate hybrid management and monitoring.
They can't assure security or compliance and they cannot determine true and comparative costs -- never mind gain optimization for efficiency across the cloud computing spectrum.
Old management into the cloud
But there's more to fixing the equation of multi-cloud complexity than extending yesterday's management means into the cloud. IT executives today recognize that IT operations' divisions and adjustments must be handled in a much different way.
Even with the best data assets and access and analysis, manual methods will not do for making the right performance adjustments and adequately reacting to security and compliance needs.
Automation, in synergy with big data analytics, is absolutely the key to effective and ongoing multi-cloud management and optimization.
Fortunately, just as the need for automation across hybrid IT management has become critical, the means to provide ML-enabled analysis and remediation have matured -- and at compelling prices.
Great strides have been made in big data analysis of such vast data sets as IT infrastructure logs from a variety of sources, including from across the hybrid IT continuum.
Many analysts, in addition to myself, are now envisioning how automated bots leveraging IT systems and cloud performance data can begin to deliver more value to IT operations, management, and optimization. Whether you call it BotOps, or AIOps, the idea is the same: The rapid concurrent use of multiple data sources, data collection methods and real-time top-line analytic technologies to make IT operations work the best at the least cost.
IT leaders are seeking the next generation of monitoring, management and optimizing solutions. We are now on the cusp of being able to take advantage of advanced ML to tackle the complexity of multi-cloud deployments and to keep business services safe, performant, and highly cost efficient.
We are on the cusp of being able to take advantage of ML to tackle the complexity of multi-cloud deployments and keep business services safe.
Similar in concept to self-driving cars, wouldn't you rather have self-driving IT operations? So far, a majority of you surveyed say yes; and we are going to now learn more about that survey information.
Ian, please tell us more about the survey findings.
IT leaders respond to their needs
Ian Bromehead: Thanks, Dana. The first element of the survey that we wanted to share describes the extent to which cloud is so prevalent today.
More than 92 percent of the 500 or so executives are indicating that we are already in a world of significant multi-cloud adoption.
The lion's share, or nearly two-thirds, of this population that we surveyed are using between two to five different cloud vendors. But more than 12 percent of respondents are using more than 10 vendors. So, the world is becoming increasingly complex. Of course, this strains a lot of the different aspects [of management].
What are people doing with those multiple cloud instances? As to be expected, people are using them to extend their IT landscape, interconnecting application logic and their own corporate data sources with the infrastructure and the apps in their cloud-based deployments -- whether they're Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS). Some 88 percent of the respondents are indeed connecting their corporate logic and data sources to those cloud instances.
What's more interesting is that a good two-thirds of the respondents are sharing data and integrating that logic across heterogeneous cloud instances, which may or may not be a surprise to you. It's nevertheless a facet of many people's architectures today. It's a result of the need for agility and cost reduction, but it's obviously creating a pretty high degree of complexity as people share data across multiple cloud instances.
The next aspect that we saw in the survey is that 96 percent of the respondents indicate that these public cloud application issues are resolved too slowly, and they are impacting the business in many cases.
Some of the business impacts range from resources tied up by collaborating with the cloud vendor to trying to solve these issues, and the extra time required to resolve issues impacting service level agreements (SLAs) and contractual agreements, and prolonged down time.
What we regularly see is that the adoption of cloud often translates into a loss in transparency of what's deployed and the health of what's being deployed, and how that's capable of impacting the business. This insight is a strong bias on our investment and some of the solutions we will talk to you about. Their primary concern is on the visibility of what's being deployed -- and what depends on the internal, on-premise as well as private and public cloud instances.
People need to see what is impacting the delivery of services as a provider, and if that's due to issues with local or remote resources, or the connectivity between them. It's just compounded by the fact that people are interconnecting services, as we just saw in the survey, from multiple cloud providers. Sothe weak part could be anywhere, could be anyone of those links. The ability for people to know where those issues are isnot happening fast enough for many people, with some 96 percent indicating that the issues are being resolved too slowly.
How to gain better visibility?
What are the key changes that need to be addressed when monitoring hybrid IT absent environments? People have challenges with discovery, understanding, and visualizing what has actually been deployed, and how it is impacting the end-to-end business.
They have limited access to the cloud infrastructure, and things like inadequate security monitoring or traditional monitoring agent difficulties, as well as monitoring lack of real-time metrics to be able to properly understand what's happening.
It shows some of the real challenges that people are facing. And as the world shifts to being more dependent on the services that they consume, then traditional methods are not going to be properly adapted to the new environment. Newer solutions are needed. New ways of gaining visibility – and the measuring availability and performance are going to be needed.
I think what's interesting in this part of the survey is the indication that the cloud vendors themselves are not providing this visibility. They are not providing enough information for people to be able to properly understand how service delivery might be impacting their own businesses. For instance, you might think that IT is actually flying blind in the clouds as it were.
The cloud vendors are not providing the visibility. They are not providing enough information for people to be able to understand service delivery impacts.
So, one of my next questions was, Across the different monitoring ideas or types, what's needed for the hybrid IT environment? What should people be focusing on? Security infrastructure, getting better visibility, and end-user experience monitoring, service delivery monitoring and cloud costs – all had high ranking on what people believe they need to be able to monitor. Whether you are a provider or a consumer, most people end up being both. Monitoring is really key.
People say they really need to span infrastructure monitoring, metric that monitoring, and gain end-user security and compliance. But even that's not enough because to properly govern the service delivery, you are going to have to have an eye on the costs -- the cost of what's being deployed -- and how can you optimize the resources according to those costs. You need that analysis whether you are a consumer or the provider.
The last of our survey results shows the need for comprehensive enterprise monitoring. Now, people need things such as high-availability, automation, the ability to cover all types of data to find issues like root causes and issues, even from a predictive perspective. Clearly, here people expect scalability, they expect to be able to use a big data platform.
For consumers of cloud services, they should be measuring what they are receiving, and capable of seeing what's impacting the service delivery. No one is really so naive as to say that infrastructure is somebody else's problem. When it's part of this service, equally impacting the service that you are paying for, and that you are delivering to your business users -- then you better have the means to be able to see where the weak links are. It should be the minimum to seek, but there's still happenings to prove to your providers that they're underperforming and renegotiate what you pay for.
Ultimately, when you are sticking such composite services together, IT needs to become more of a service broker. We should be able to govern the aspects of detecting when the service is degrading.
So when their service is more PaaS, then workers' productivity is going to suffer and the business will expect IT to have the means to reverse that quickly.
So that, Dana, is the set of the different results that we got out of this survey.
A new need for analytics
Gardner: Thank you, Ian. We'll now go to Gary Brandt to learn about the need for analytics and how cloud monitoring solutions can be cobbled together anew to address these challenges.
Gary Brandt: Thanks, Dana. As the survey results were outlined and as Ian described, there are many challenges and numerous types of monitoring for enterprise hybrid IT environments. With such variety and volume of data from these different types of environments that gets generated in the complex hybrid environments, humans simply can't look at dashboards or use traditional tools and make sense of the data efficiently. Nor can they take necessary actions required in a timely manner, given the volume and the complexity of these environments.
So how do we deal with all of this? It's where analytics, advanced analytics via ML, really brings in value. What's needed is a set of automated capabilities such as those described in Gartner's definition of AIOps and these include traditional and streaming data management, log and wire metrics, and document ingestion from many different types of sources in these complex hybrid environments.
Dealing with all this, trying to, when you are not quite sure where to look, when you have all this information coming in, it requires some advanced analytics and some clever artificial intelligence (AI)-driven algorithms just to make sense of it. This is what Gartner is really trying to guide the market toward and show where the industry is moving. The key capabilities that they speak about are analytics that allow for predictive capabilities and the capability to find anomalies in vast amounts of data, and then try to pinpoint where your root cause is, or at least eliminate the noise and get to focus on those areas.
We are making this Gartner report available for a limited time. What we have found also is that people don't have the time or often the skill set to deal with activities and they focus on -- they need to focus on the business user and the target and the different issues that come up in these hybrid environments and these AIOpscapabilities that Gartner speaks about are great.
But, without the automation to drive out the activities or the response that needs to occur, it becomes a missing piece. So, we look at a survey -- some of our survey results and what our respondents said, it was clear that upward of the high-90 percent are clearly telling us that automation is considered highly critical. You need to see which event or metric trend so clearly impacts on a business service and whether that service pertains to a local, on-prem type of solution, or a remote solution in a cloud at some place.
Automation is key, and that requires a degree of that service definition, dependency mapping, which really should be automated. And to be declared more – just more easily or more importantly to be kept up to date, you don't need complex environments, things are changing so rapidly and so quickly.
Sense and significance of all that data?
Micro Focus' approach uses analytics to make sense of this vast amount of data that's coming in from these hybrid environments to drive automation. The automation of discovery, monitoring, service analytics, they are really critical -- and must be applied across hybrid IT against your resources and map them to your services that you define.
Those are the vast amounts of data that we just described. They come in the form of logs and events and metrics, generated from lots of different sources in a hybrid environment across cloud and on-prem. You have to begin to use analytics as Gartner describes to make sense of that, and we do that in a variety of ways, where we use ML to learn behavior, basically of your environment, in this hybrid world.
And we need to be able to suggest what the most significant data is, what the significant information is in your messages, to really try to help find the needle in a haystack. When you are trying to solve problems, we have capabilities through analytics to provide predictive learning to operators to give them the chance to anticipate and to remediate issues before they disrupt the services in a company's environment.
When you are trying to solve problems, we have capabilities through analytics to provide predictive learning to operators to remediate issues before they disrupt.
And then we take this further because we have the analytics capability that's described by Gartner and others. We couple that with the ability to execute different types of automation as a means to let the operator, the operations team, have more time to spend on what's really impacting the business and getting to the issues quicker than trying to spend time searching and sorting through that vast amount of data.
And we built this on different platforms. One of the key things that's critical when you have this hybrid environment is to have a common way, or an efficient way, to collect information and to store information, and then use that data to provide access to different functionality in your system. And we do that in the form of microservices in this complex environment.
We like to refer to this as autonomous operations and it'spart of our OpsBridge solution, which embodies a lot of different patented capabilities around AIOps. Harald is going to speak to our OpsBridgesolution in more detail.
Operations Bridge in more detail
Gardner: Thank you, Gary. Now that we know more about what users need and consider essential, let's explore a high-level look at where the solutions are going, how to access and assemble the data, and what new analytics platforms can do.
We'll now hear from Harald Burose, Director of Product Management at Micro Focus.
Harald Burose: When we listen carefully to the different problems that Ian was highlighting, we actually have a lot of those problems addressed in the Operations Bridge solution that we are currently bringing to market.
All core use cases for Operations Bridge tie it to the underpinning of the Vertica big data analytics platform. We're consolidating all the different types of data that we are getting; whether business transactions, IT infrastructure, application infrastructure, or business services data -- all of that is actually moved into a single data repository and then reduced in order to basically understand what the original root cause is.
And from there, these tools like the analytics that Gary described, not only identify the root cause, but move to remediation, to fixing the problem using automation.
This all makes it easy for the stakeholders to understand what the status is and provide the right dashboarding, reporting via the right interface to the right user across the full hybrid cloud infrastructure.
As we saw, some 88 percent of our customers are connecting their cloud infrastructure to their on-premises infrastructure. We are providing the ability to understand that connectivity through a dynamically updated model, and to show how these services are interconnecting -- independent of the technology -- whether deployed in the public cloud, a private cloud, or even in a classical, non-cloud infrastructure. They can then understand how they are connecting, and they can use the toolset to navigate through it all, a modern HTML5-based interface, to look at all the data in one place.
They are able to consolidate more than 250 different technologies and information into a single place: their log files, the events, metrics, topology -- everything together to understand the health of their infrastructure. That is the key element that we drive with the Operations Bridge.
Now, we have extended the capabilities further, specifically for the cloud. We basically took the generic capability and made it work specifically for the different cloud stacks, whether private cloud, your own stack implementations, a hyperconverged (HCI) stack, like Nutanix, or a Docker container infrastructure that you bring up on a public cloud like Azure, Amazon, or Google Cloud.
We are now automatically discovering and placing that all into the context of your business service application by using the Automated Service Modeling part of the Operations Bridge.
Now, once we actually integrate those toolsets, we tightly integrate them for native tools on Amazon or for Docker tools, for example. You can include these tools, so you can then automate processes from within our console.
Customers vote a top choice
And, best of all, we have been getting positive feedback from the cloud monitoring community, by the customers. And the feedback has helped earn us a Readers' Choice Award by the Cloud Computing Insider in 2017, by being ahead of the competition.
This success is not just about getting the data together, using ML to understand the problem, and using our capabilities to connect these things together. At the end of the day, you need to act on the activity.
Having a full-blown orchestration compatibility within OpsBridgeprovides more than 5,000 automated workflows, so you can automate different remediation tasks -- or potentially point to future provisioning tasks that solve the problems of whatever you can imagine. You can use this to not only identify the root cause, but you can automatically kick off a workflow to address the specific problems.
If you don't want to address a problem through the workflow, or cannot automatically address it, you still have a rich set of integrated tools to manually address a problem.
Having a full-blown orchestration capability with OpsBridge provides more than 5,000 automated workflows to automate many different remediation tasks.
Last, but not least, you need to keep your stakeholders up to date. They need to know, anywhere that they go, that the services are working. Our real-time dashboard is very open and can integrate with any type of data -- not just the operational data that we collect and manage with the Operations Bridge, but also third-party data, such as business data, video feeds, and sentiment data. This gets presented on a single visual dashboard that quickly gives the stakeholders the information: Is my business service actually running? Is it okay? Can I feel good about the business services that I am offering to my internal as well as external customer-users?
And you can have this on a network operations center (NOC) wall, on your tablet, or your phone -- wherever you'd like to have that type of dashboard. You can easily you create those dashboards using Microsoft Office toolsets, and create graphical, very appealing dashboards for your different stakeholders.
Gardner: Thank you, Harald. We are now going to go beyond just the telling, we are going to do some showing. We have heard a lot about what's possible. But now let's hear from an example in the field.
Multicloud monitoring in action
Next up is David Herrera, Cloud Service Manager at Banco Sabadell in Barcelona. Let's find out about this use case and their use of Micro Focus's OpsBridge solution.
David Herrera: Banco Sabadell is fourth largest Spanish banking group. We had a big project to migrate several systems into the cloud and we realized that we didn't have any kind of visibility about what was happening in the cloud.
We are working with private and public clouds and it's quite difficult to correlate the information in events and incidents. We need to aggregate this information in just one dashboard. And for that, OpsBridgeis a perfect solution for us.
We started to develop new functionalities on OpsBridge, to customize for our needs. We had to cooperate with a project development team in order to achieve this.
The main benefit is that we have a detailed view about what is happening in the cloud. In the dashboard we are able to show availability, number of resources that we are using -- almost in real time. Also, we are able to show what the cost is in real time of every resource, and we can do even the projection of the cost of the items.
The main benefit is we have a detailed view about what is happening in the cloud. We are able to show what the cost is in real time of every resource.
[And that's for] every single item that we have in the cloud now, even across the private and public cloud. The bank has invested a lot of money in this solution and we need to show them that it's really a good choice in economical terms to migrate several systems to the cloud, and this tool will help us with this.
Our response time will be reduced dramatically because we are able to filter and find what is happening, andcall the right people to fix the problem quickly. The business department will understand better what we are doing because they will be able to see all the information, and also select information that we haven't gathered. They will be more aligned with our work and we can develop and deliver better solutions because also we will understand them.
We were able to build a new monitoring system from scratch that doesn't exist on the market. Now, we are able to aggregate a lot of detailing information from different clouds.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Micro Focus.
You may also be interested in:
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- As enterprises face mounting hybrid IT complexity, new management solutions beckon
How HudsonAlpha transforms hybrid cloud complexity into an IT force multiplier
The next BriefingsDirect hybrid IT management success story examines how the nonprofit research institute HudsonAlpha improves how it harnesses and leverages a spectrum of IT deployment environments.
We'll now learn how HudsonAlpha has been testing a new Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) solution, OneSphere, to gain a common and simplified management interface to rule them all.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help explore the benefits of improved levels of multi-cloud visibility and process automation is Katreena Mullican, Senior Architect and Cloud Whisperer at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What's driving the need to solve hybrid IT complexity at HudsonAlpha?
Mullican: The big drivers at HudsonAlpha are the requirements for data locality and ease-of-adoption. We produce about 6 petabytes of new data every year, and that rate is increasing with every project that we do.
We support hundreds of research programs with data and trend analysis. Our infrastructure requires quickly iterating to identify the approaches that are both cost-effective and the best fit for the needs of our users.
Gardner: Do you find that having multiple types of IT platforms, environments, and architectures creates a level of complexity that's increasingly difficult to manage?
Mullican: Gaining a competitive edge requires adopting new approaches to hybrid IT. Even carefully contained shadow IT is a great way to develop new approaches and attain breakthroughs.
Gardner: You want to give people enough leash where they can go and roam and experiment, but perhaps not so much that you don't know where they are, what they are doing.
Software-defined everything
Mullican: Right. "Software-defined everything" is our mantra. That's what we aim to do at HudsonAlpha for gaining rapid innovation.
Gardner: How do you gain balance from too hard-to-manage complexity, with a potential of chaos, to the point where you can harness and optimize -- yet allow for experimentation, too?
Mullican: IT is ultimately responsible for the security and the up-time of the infrastructure. So it's important to have a good framework on which the developers and the researchers can compute. It's about finding a balance between letting them have provisioning access to those resources versus being able to keep an eye on what they are doing. And not only from a usage perspective, but from a cost perspective, too.
Hybrid Cloud
Gardner: Tell us about HudsonAlpha and its fairly extreme IT requirements.
Mullican: HudsonAlpha is a nonprofit organization of entrepreneurs, scientists, and educators who apply the benefits of genomics to everyday life. We also provide IT services and support for about 40 affiliate companies on our 150-acre campus in Huntsville, Alabama.
Gardner: What about the IT requirements? How you fulfill that mandate using technology?
Mullican: We produce 6 petabytes of new data every year. We have millions of hours of compute processing time running on our infrastructure. We have hardware acceleration. We have direct connections to clouds. We have collaboration for our researchers that extends throughout the world to external organizations. We use containers, and we use multiple cloud providers.
Gardner: So you have been doing multi-cloud before there was even a word for multi-cloud?
Mullican: We are the hybrid-scale and hybrid IT organization that no one has ever heard of.
Gardner: Let's unpack some of the hurdles you need to overcome to keep all of your scientists and researchers happy. How do you avoid lock-in? How do you keep it so that you can remain open and competitive?
Agnostic arrangements of clouds
Mullican: It's important for us to keep our local datacenters agnostic, as well as our private and public clouds. So we strive to communicate with all of our resources through application programming interfaces (APIs), and we use open-source technologies at HudsonAlpha. We are proud of that. Yet there are a lot of possibilities for arranging all of those pieces.
There are a lot [of services] that you can combine with the right toolsets, not only in your local datacenter but also in the clouds. If you put in the effort to write the code with that in mind -- so you don't lock into any one solution necessarily -- then you can optimize and put everything together.
Gardner: Because you are a nonprofit institute, you often seek grants. But those grants can come with unique requirements, even IT use benefits and cloud choice considerations.
Cloud cost control, granted
Mullican: Right. Researchers are applying for grants throughout the year, and now with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), when grants are awarded, they come with community cloud credits, which is an exciting idea for the researchers. It means they can immediately begin consuming resources in the cloud -- from storage to compute -- and that cost is covered by the grant.
So they are anxious to get started on that, which brings challenges to IT. We certainly don't want to be the holdup for that innovation. We want the projects to progress as rapidly as possible. At the same time, we need to be aware of what is happening in a cloud and not lose control over usage and cost.
Hybrid Cloud
Gardner: Certainly HudsonAlpha is an extreme test bed for multi-cloud management, with lots of different systems, changing requirements, and the need to provide the flexibility to innovate to your clientele. When you wanted a better management capability, to gain an overview into that full hybrid IT environment, how did you come together with HPE and test what they are doing?
Variety is the spice of IT
Mullican: We've invested in composable infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) in our datacenter, as well as blade server technology. We have a wide variety of compute, networking, and storage resources available to us.
The key is: How do we rapidly provision those resources in an automated fashion? I think the key there is not only for IT to be aware of those resources, but for developers to be as well. We have groups of developers dealing with bioinformatics at HudsonAlpha. They can benefit from all of the different types of infrastructure in our datacenter. What HPE OneSphere does is enable them to access -- through a common API -- that infrastructure. So it's very exciting.
Gardner: What did HPE OneSphere bring to the table for you in order to be able to rationalize, visualize, and even prioritize this very large mixture of hybrid IT assets?
Mullican: We have been beta testing HPE OneSphere since October 2017, and we have tied it into our VMware ESX Server environment, as well as our Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment successfully -- and that's at an IT level. So our next step is to give that to researchers as a single pane of glass where they can go and provision the resources themselves.
Gardner: What this might capability bring to you and your organization?
Cross-training the clouds
Mullican: We want to do more with cross-cloud. Right now we are very adept at provisioning within our datacenters, provisioning within each individual cloud. HudsonAlpha has a presence in all the major public clouds -- AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure. But the next step would be to go cross-cloud, to provision applications across them all.
For example, you might have an application that runs as a series of microservices. So you can have one microservice take advantage of your on-premises datacenter, such as for local storage. And then another piece could take advantage of object storage in the cloud. And even another piece could be in another separate public cloud.
But the key here is that our developer and researchers -- the end users of OneSphere – they don't need to know all of the specifics of provisioning in each of those environments. That is not a level of expertise in their wheelhouse. In this new OneSphere way, all they know is that they are provisioning the application in the pipeline -- and that's what the researchers will use. Then it's up to us in IT to come along and keep an eye on what they are doing through the analytics that HPE OneSphere provides.
Gardner: Because OneSphere gives you the visibility to see what the end users are doing, potentially, for cost optimization and remaining competitive, you may be able to play one cloud off another. You may even be able to automate and orchestrate that.
Hybrid Cloud
Mullican: Right, and that will be an ongoing effort to always optimize cost -- but not at the risk of slowing the research. We want the research to happen, and to innovate as quickly as possible. We don't want to be the holdup for that. But we definitely do need to loop back around and keep an eye on how the different clouds are being used and make decisions going forward based on the analytics.
Gardner: There may be other organizations that are going to be more cost-focused, and they will probably want to dial back to get the best deals. It's nice that we have the flexibility to choose an algorithmic approach to business, if you will.
Mullican: Right. The research that we do at HudsonAlpha saves lives and the utmost importance is to be able to conduct that research at the fastest speed.
Gardner: HPE OneSphere seems geared toward being cloud-agnostic. They are beginning on AWS, yet they are going to be adding more clouds. And they are supporting more internal private cloud infrastructures, and using an API-driven approach to microservices and containers.
The research that we do at HudsonAlpha saves lives, and the utmost importance is to be able to conduct the research at the fastest speed.
As an early tester, and someone who has been a long-time user of HPE infrastructure, is there anything about the combination of HPE Synergy, HPE SimpliVity HCI, and HPE 3PAR intelligent storage -- in conjunction with OneSphere -- that's given you a "whole greater than the sum of the parts" effect?
Mullican: HPE Synergy and composable infrastructure is something that is very near and dear to me. I have a lot of hours invested with HPE Synergy Image Streamer and customizing open-source applications on Image Streamer -– open-source operating systems and applications.
The ability to utilize that in the mix that I have architected natively with OneSphere -- in addition to the public clouds -- is very powerful, and I am excited to see where that goes.
Gardner: Any words of wisdom to others who may be have not yet gone down this road? What do you advise others to consider as they are seeking to better compose, automate, and optimize their infrastructure?
Get adept at DevOps
Mullican: It needs to start with IT. IT needs to take on more of a DevOps approach.
As far as putting an emphasis on automation -- and being able to provision infrastructure in the datacenter and the cloud through automated APIs -- a lot of companies probably are still slow to adopt that. They are still provisioning in older methods, and I think it's important that they do that. But then, once your IT department is adept with DevOps, your developers can begin feeding from that and using what IT has laid down as a foundation. So it needs to start with IT.
It involves a skill set change for some of the traditional system administrators and network administrators. But now, with software-defined networking (SDN) and with automated deployments and provisioning of resources -- that's a skill set that IT really needs to step up and master. That's because they are going to need to set the example for the developers who are going to come along and be able to then use those same tools.
That's the partnership that companies really need to foster -- and it's between IT and developers. And something like HPE OneSphere is a good fit for that, because it provides a unified API.
On one hand, your IT department can be busy mastering how to communicate with their infrastructure through that tool. And at the same time, they can be refactoring applications as microservices, and that's up to the developer teams. So both can be working on all of this at the same time.
Then when it all comes together with a service catalog of options, in the end it's just a simple interface. That's what we want, to provide a simple interface for the researchers. They don't have to think about all the work that went into the infrastructure, they are just choosing the proper workflow and pipeline for future projects.
We want to provide a simple interface to the researchers. They don't have to think about all the work that went into the infrastructure.
Gardner: It also sounds, Katreena, like you are able to elevate IT to a solutions-level abstraction, and that OneSphere is an accelerant to elevating IT. At the same time, OneSphere is an accelerant to the adoption of DevOps, which means it's also elevating the developers. So are we really finally bringing people to that higher plane of business-focus and digital transformation?
HCI advances across the globe
Mullican: Yes. HPE OneSphere is an advantage to both of those departments, which in some companies can be still quite disparate. Now at HudsonAlpha, we are DevOps in IT. It's not a distinguished department, but in some companies that's not the case.
And I think we have a lot of advantages because we think in terms of automation, and we think in terms of APIs from the infrastructure standpoint. And the tools that we have invested in, the types of composable and hyperconverged infrastructure, are helping accomplish that.
Gardner: I speak with a number of organizations that are global, and they have some data sovereignty concerns. I'd like to explore, before we close out, how OneSphere also might be powerful in helping to decide where data sets reside in different clouds, private and public, for various regulatory reasons.
Is there something about having that visibility into hybrid IT that extends into hybrid data environments?
Mullican: Data locality is one of our driving factors in IT, and we do have on-premises storage as well as cloud storage. There is a time and a place for both of those, and they do not always mix, but we have requirements for our data to be available worldwide for collaboration.
So, the services that HPE OneSphere makes available are designed to use the appropriate data connections, whether that would be back to your object storage on-premises, or AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), for example, in the cloud.
Hybrid Cloud
Gardner: Now we can think of HPE OneSphere as also elevating data scientists -- and even the people in charge of governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) around adhering to regulations. It seems like it's a gift that keeps giving.
Hybrid hard work pays off
Mullican: It is a good fit for hybrid IT and what we do at HudsonAlpha. It's a natural addition to all of the preparation work that we have done in IT around automated provisioning with HPE Synergy and Image Streamer.
HPE OneSphere is a way to showcase to the end user all of the efforts that have been, and are being, done by IT. That's why it's a satisfying tool to implement, because, in the end, you want what you have worked on so hard to be available to the researchers and be put to use easily and quickly.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
You may also be interested in:
- South African insurer King Price gives developers the royal treatment as HCI meets big data
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- Pay-as-you-go IT models provide cost and operations advantages for Northrop Grumman
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- Retail gets a makeover thanks to data-driven insights, edge computing, and revamped user experiences
- Inside story on HPC's role in the Bridges Research Project at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
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South African insurer King Price gives developers the royal treatment as HCI meets big data
The next BriefingsDirect developer productivity insights interview explores how a South African insurance innovator has built a modern hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) IT environment that replicates databases so fast that developers can test and re-test to their hearts' content.
We'll now learn how King Price in Pretoria also gained data efficiencies and heightened disaster recovery benefits from their expanding HCI-enabled architecture.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help us explore the myriad benefits of a data transfer intensive environment is Jacobus Steyn, Operations Manager at King Price in Pretoria, South Africa. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What have been the top trends driving your interest in modernizing your data replication capabilities?
Steyn: One of the challenges we had was the business was really flying blind. We had to create a platform and the ability to get data out of the production environment as quickly as possible to allow the business to make informed decisions -- literally in almost real-time.
Gardner: What were some of the impediments to moving data and creating these new environments for your developers and your operators?
How to solve key challenges
With HPE SimpliVity HCI
Steyn: We literally had to copy databases across the network and onto new environments, and that was very time consuming. It literally took us two to three days to get a new environment up and running for the developers. You would think that this would be easy -- like replication. It proved to be quite a challenge for us because there are vast amounts of data. But the whole HCI approach just eliminated all of those challenges.
Gardner: One of the benefits of going at the infrastructure level for such a solution is not only do you solve one problem-- but you probably solve multiple ones; things like replication and deduplication become integrated into the environment. What were some of the extended benefits you got when you went to a hyperconverged environment?
Time, Storage Savings
Steyn: Deduplication was definitely one of our bigger gains. We have had six to eight development teams, and I literally had an identical copy of our production environment for each of them that they used for testing, user acceptance testing (UAT), and things like that.
At any point in time, we had at least 10 copies of our production environment all over the place. And if you don't dedupe at that level, you need vast amounts of storage. So that really was a concern for us in terms of storage.
Gardner: Of course, business agility often hinges on your developers' productivity. When you can tell your developers, "Go ahead, spin up; do what you want," that can be a great productivity benefit.
Steyn: We literally had daily fights between the IT operations and infrastructure guys and the developers because they were needed resources and we just couldn't provide them with those resources. And it was not because we didn't have resources at hand, but it was just the time to spin it up, to get to the guys to configure their environments, and things like that.
It was literally a three- to four-day exercise to get an environment up and running. For those guys who are trying to push the agile development methodology, in a two-week sprint, you can't afford to lose two or three days.
Gardner: You don't want to be in a scrum where they are saying, "You have to wait three or four days." It doesn't work.
Steyn: No, it doesn't, definitely not.
Gardner: Tell us about King Price. What is your organization like for those who are not familiar with it?
As your vehicle depreciates, so does your monthly insurance premium. That has been our biggest selling point.
Steyn: King Price initially started off as a short-term insurance company about five years ago in Pretoria. We have a unique, one-of-a-kind business model. The short of it is that as your vehicle's value depreciates, so does your monthly insurance premium. That has been our biggest selling point.
We see ourselves as disruptive. But there are also a lot of other things disrupting the short-term insurance industry in South Africa -- things like Uber and self-driving cars. These are definitely a threat in the long term for us.
It's also a very competitive industry in South Africa. Sowe have been rapidly launching new businesses. We launched commercial insurance recently. We launched cyber insurance. Sowe are really adopting new business ventures.
How to solve key challenges
With HPE SimpliVity HCI
Gardner: And, of course, in any competitive business environment, your margins are thin; you have to do things efficiently. Were there any other economic benefits to adopting a hyperconverged environment, other than developer productivity?
Steyn: On the data center itself, the amount of floor space that you need, the footprint, is much less with hyperconverged. It eliminates a lot of requirements in terms of networking, switching, and storage. The ease of deployment in and of itself makes it a lot simpler.
On the business side, we gained the ability to have more data at-hand for the guys in the analytics environment and the ratings environment. They can make much more informed decisions, literally on the fly, if they need to gear-up for a call center, or to take on a new marketing strategy, or something like that.
Gardner: It's not difficult to rationalize the investment to go to hyperconverged.
Worth the HCI Investment
Steyn: No, it was actually quite easy. I can't imagine life or IT without the investment that we've made. I can't see how we could have moved forward without it.
Gardner: Give our audience a sense of the scale of your development organization. How many developers do you have? How many teams? What numbers of builds do you have going on at any given time?
Steyn: It's about 50 developers, or six to eight teams, depending on the scale of the projects they are working on. Each development team is focused on a specific unit within the business. They do two-week sprints, and some of the releases are quite big.
It means getting the product out to the market as quickly as possible, to bring new functionality to the business. We can't afford to have a piece of product stuck in a development hold for six to eight weeks because, by that time, you are too late.
Gardner: Let's drill down into the actual hyperconverged infrastructure you have in place. What did you look at? How did you make a decision? What did you end up doing?
Steyn: We had initially invested in Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) SimpliVity 3400 cubes for our development space, and we thought that would pretty much meet our needs. Prior to that, we had invested in traditional blades and storage infrastructure. We were thinking that we would stay with that for the production environment, and the SimpliVity systems would be used for just the development environments.
The gains we saw were just so big ... Now we have the entire environment running on SimpliVity cubes.
But the gains we saw in the development environment were just so big that we very quickly made a decision to get additional cubes and deploy them as the production environment, too. And it just grew from there. Sowe now have the entire environment running on SimpliVity cubes.
We still have some traditional storage that we use for archiving purposes, but other than that, it's 100 percent HPE SimpliVity.
Gardner: What storage environment do you associate with that to get the best benefits?
Keep Storage Simple
Steyn: We are currently using the HPE 3PAR storage, and it's working quite well. We have some production environments running there; a lot of archiving uses for that. It's still very complementary to our environment.
Gardner: A lot of organizations will start with HCI in something like development, move it toward production, but then they also extend it into things like data warehouses, supporting their data infrastructure and analytics infrastructure. Has that been the case at King Price?
Steyn: Yes, definitely. We initially began with the development environment, and we thought that's going to be it. We very soon adopted HCI into the production environments. And it was at that point where we literally had an entire cube dedicated to the enterprise data warehouse guys. Those are the teams running all of the modeling, pricing structures, and things like that. HCI is proving to be very helpful for them as well, because those guys, they demand extreme data performance, it's scary.
How to solve key challenges
With HPE SimpliVity HCI
Gardner: I have also seen organizations on a slippery slope, that once they have a certain critical mass of HCI, they begin thinking about an entire software-defined data center (SDDC). They gain the opportunity to entirely mirror data centers for disaster recovery, and for fast backup and recovery security and risk avoidance benefits. Are you moving along that path as well?
Steyn: That's a project that we launched just a few months ago. We are redesigning our entire infrastructure. We are going to build in the ease of failover, the WAN optimization, and the compression. It just makes a lot more sense to just build a second active data center. So that's what we are busy doing now, and we are going to deploy the next-generation technology in that data center.
Gardner: Is there any point in time where you are going to be experimenting more with cloud, multi-cloud, and then dealing with a hybrid IT environment where you are going to want to manage all of that? We've recently heard news from HPE about OneSphere. Any thoughts about how that might relate to your organization?
Cloud Common Sense
Steyn: Yes, in our engagement with Microsoft, for example, in terms of licensing of products, this is definitely something we have been talking about. Solutions like HPE OneSphere are definitely going to make a lot of sense in our environment.
There are a lot of workloads that we can just pass onto the cloud that we don't need to have on-premises, at least on a permanent basis. Even the guys from our enterprise data warehouse, there are a lot of jobs that every now and then they can just pass off to the cloud. Something like HPE OneSphere is definitely going to make that a lot easier for us.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
You may also be interested in:
- Containers, microservices, and HCI help governments in Norway provide safer public data sharing
- Pay-as-you-go IT models provide cost and operations advantages for Northrop Grumman
- Ericsson and HPE accelerate digital transformation via customizable mobile business infrastructure stacks
- A tale of two hospitals—How healthcare economics in Belgium hastens need for new IT buying schemes
- How VMware, HPE, and Telefonica together bring managed cloud services to a global audience
- Retail gets a makeover thanks to data-driven insights, edge computing, and revamped user experiences
- Inside story on HPC's role in the Bridges Research Project at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
- How UBC gained TCO advantage via flash for its EduCloud cloud storage service
- As enterprises face mounting hybrid IT complexity, new management solutions beckon
Containers, microservices, and HCI help governments in Norway provide safer public data sharing
The next BriefingsDirect digital transformation success story examines how local governments in Norway benefit from a common platform approach for safe and efficient public data distribution.
We'll now learn how Norway's 18 counties are gaining a common shared pool for data on young people's health and other sensitive information thanks to streamlined benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), containers, and microservices.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help us discover the benefits of a modern platform for smarter government data sharing is FrodeSjovatsen, Head of Development for FINT Project in Norway. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What is driving interest in having a common platform for public information in your country?
Sjovatsen: We need interactions between the government and the community to be more efficient. Sowe needed to build the infrastructure that supports automatic solutions for citizens. That's the main driver.
Gardner: What problems do you need to overcome in order to create a more common approach?
Common API at the core
Sjovatsen: One of the biggest issues is [our users] buy business applications such as human resources for school administrators to use and everyone is happy. They have a nice user interface on the data. But when we need to use that data across all the other processes -- that's where the problem is. And that's what the FINT project is all about.
[Due to apps heterogeneity] we then need to have developers create application programming interfaces (APIs), and it costs a lot of money, and it is of variable quality. What we're doing now is creating a common API that's horizontal -- for all of those business applications. It gives us the ability to use our data much more efficiently.
Gardner: Please describe for us what the FINT project is and why this is so important for public health.
Sjovatsen: It's all about taking the power back, regarding the information we've handed the vendors. There is an initiative in Norway where the government talks about getting control ofallthe information. And the thought behind the FINT project is that we need to get ahold of all the information, describe it, define it, and then make it available via APIs -- both for public use and also for internal use.
Gardner: What sort of information are we dealing with here? Why is it important for the general public health?
Sjovatsen: It's all kinds of information. For example, it's school information, such as about how the everyday processes run, the schedules, the grades, and so on. All of that data is necessary to create good services, for the teachers and students. We also want to make that data available so that we can build new innovations from businesses that want to create new and better solutions for us.
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Gardner: When you were tasked with creating this platform, why did you seek an API-driven, microservices-based architecture? What did you look for to maintain simplicity and cost efficiency in the underlying architecture and systems?
Agility, scalability, and speed
Sjovatsen: We needed something that was agile so that we can roll out updates continuously. We also needed a way to roll back quickly, if something fails.
The reason we are running this on one of the county council's datacenters is we wanted to separate it from their other production environments. We need to be able to scale these services quickly. When we talked to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the solution they suggested was using HCI.
Gardner: Where are you in the deployment and what have been some of the benefits of such a hyperconverged approach?
Sjovatsen: We are in the late stage of testing and we're going into production in early 2018. At the moment, we're looking into using HPE SimpliVity.
Container comfort
Gardner: Containers are an important part of moving toward automation and simplicity for many people these days. Is that another technology that you are comfortable with and, if so, why?
Sjovatsen: Yes, definitely. We are very comfortable with that. The biggest reason is that when we use containers, we isolate the application; the whole container is the application and we are able to test the code before it goes into production. That's one of the main drivers.
The second reason is that it's easy to roll out andit's easy to roll back. We also have developers in and out of the project, and containers make it easy for them to quickly get in to the environment they are working on. It's not that much work if they need to install on another computer to get a working environment running.
Gardner: A lot of IT organizations are trying to reduce the amount of money and time they spend on maintaining existing applications, so they can put more emphasis into creating new applications. How do containers, microservices, and API-driven services help you flip from an emphasis on maintenance to an emphasis on innovation?
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Sjovatsen: The container approach is very close to the DevOps environment, so the time from code to production is very small compared to what we did before when we had some operations guys installing the stuff on servers. Now, we have a very rapid way to go from code to production.
Gardner: With the success of the FINT Project, would you consider extending this to other types of data and applications in other public sectoractivities or processes? If your success here continues, is this a model that you think has extensibility into other public sector applications?
Unlocking the potential
Sjovatsen: Yes, definitely. At the moment, there are 18 county councils in this project. We are just beginning to introduce this to all of the 400 municipalities [in Norway]. So that's the next step. Those are the same data sets that we want to share or extend. But there are also initiatives with central registers in Norway and we will add value to those using our approach in the next year or so.
Gardner: That could have some very beneficial impacts, very good payoffs.
Sjovatsen: Yes, it could. There are other uses. For example, in Oslo we have made an API extend over the locks on many doors. So, we can now have one API to open multiple locking systems. So that's another way to use this approach.
In Oslo we have made an API extend over the locks on many doors. We can now have one API to open multiple locking systems.
Gardner: It shows the wide applicability of this. Any advice, Frode, for other organizations that are examining more of a container, DevOps, and API-driven architecture approach? What might you tell them as they consider taking this journey?
Sjovatsen: I definitely recommend it -- it's simple and agile. The main thing with containers is to separate the storage from the applications. That's probably what we worked on the most to make it scalable. We wrote the application so it's scalable, and we separated the data from the presentation layer.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
You may also be interested in:
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- Inside story: How Ormuco abstracts the concepts of private and public cloud across the globe
Pay-as-you-go IT models provide cost and operations advantages for Northrop Grumman
The next BriefingsDirect IT business model innovation interview explores how pay-as-you-go models have emerged as a new way to align information technology (IT) needs with business imperatives.
We'll now learn how global aerospace and defense integrator Northrop Grumman has sought a revolution in business model transformation in how it acquires and manages IT.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help explore how cloud computing-like consumption models can be applied more broadly is Ron Foudray, Vice President, Business Development for Technology Services at Northrop Grumman. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
A tale of two hospitals—How healthcare economics in Belgium hastens need for new IT buying schemes
The next BriefingsDirect data center financing agility interview explores how two Belgian hospitals are adjusting to dynamic healthcare economics to better compete and cooperate.
We will now explore how a regional hospital seeking efficiency -- and a teaching hospital seeking performance -- are meeting their unique requirements thanks to modern IT architectures and innovative IT buying methods
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help us understand the multilevel benefits of the new economics of composable infrastructure and software defined data center (SDDC) in the fast-changing healthcare field are Filip Hens, Infrastructure Manager at UZA Hospital in Antwerp, and Kim Buts, Infrastructure Manager at Imelda Hospital in Bonheiden, both in Belgium.The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Retailers get a makeover thanks to data-driven insights, edge computing, and revamped user experiences
How VMware, HPE, and Telefonica together bring managed cloud services to a global audience
The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer optimized cloud design interview explores how a triumvirate of VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Telefonica together bring managed cloud services to global audiences.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Learn how Telefonica's vision for delivering flexible cloud services capabilities to Latin American and European markets has proven so successful. Here to explain how they developed the right recipe for rapid delivery of agile Infrastructure-as-a-Services (IaaS) deployments is Joe Baguley, Vice President and CTO of VMware EMEA, and Antonio Oriol Barat, Head of Cloud IT Infrastructure Services at Telefonica. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What challenges are mobile and telecom operators now facing as they transition to becoming managed service providers?
Oriol Barat: The main challenge we face at this moment is to help customers navigate in a multi-cloud environment. We now have local platforms, some legacy, some virtualized platforms, hyperscale public cloud providers, and data communications networks. We want to help our customers manage these in a secure way.
Gardner: How have your cloud services evolved? How have partnerships allowed you to enter new markets to quickly provide services?
Oriol Barat: We have had to transition from being a hosting provider with data centers in many countries. Our movement to cloud was a natural evolution of those hosting services. As a telecommunications company (telco), our main business is shared networks, and the network is a shared asset between many customers. So when we thought about the hosting business, we similarly wanted to be able to have shared assets. VMware, with its virtualization technology, came as a natural partner to help us evolve our hosting services.
Gardner: Joe, it's as if you designed the VMware stack with customers such as Telefonica in mind.
Baguley: You could say that, yes. The vision has always been for us at VMware to develop what was originally called the software-defined data center (SDDC). Now, with multi-cloud, for me, it's an operating system (OS) for clouds.
We're bringing together storage, networking and compute into one OS that can run both on-premises and off-premises. You could be running on-premises the same OS as someone like Telefonica is running for their public cloud -- meaning that you have a common operating environment, a common infrastructure.
So, yes, entirely, it was built as part of this vision that everyone runs this OS to build his or her clouds.
Gardner: To have a core, common infrastructure -- yet have the ability to adapt on top of that for localized markets -- is the best of all worlds.
Baguley: That's entirely it. Like someone said, "If all of the clouds are running the same OS, what's the differentiation?" Well, the differentiation is, you want to go with the biggest player in Latin America. You want to go with the player that has the best direct connections: The guys that can give you service levels maybe that the cloud providers can't give. They can give you over-the-top services that other cloud providers don't provide. They can give you an integrated solution for your business that includes the cloud -- and other enterprise services.
It's about providing the tools for cloud providers to build differentiated powerful clouds for their customers.
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Gardner: Antonio, please, for those of our listeners and readers that aren't that familiar with Telefonica, tell us about the breadth and depth of your company.
Oriol Barat: Telefonica is one of the top 10 global telco providers in the world. We are in 21 countries. We have fixed and mobile data services, and now we are in the process of digital transformation, where we have our focus in four areas: cloud, security, Internet of Things (IoT), and big data.
We used to think that our core business was in communications. Now we see what we call a new core of our business at the intersection of data communications, cloud, and security. We think this is really the foundation, the platform, of all the services that come on top.
Gardner: And, of course, we would all like to start with brand-new infrastructure when we enter markets. But as you know, we have to deal with what is already in place, too. When it came time for you to come up with the right combination of vendors, the right combination of technologies, to produce your new managed services capabilities, why did you choose HPE and VMware to create this full solution?
Sharing requires trust
Oriol Barat: VMware was our natural choice with its virtualization technologies to start providing shared IT platforms -- even before cloud, as a word, was invented. We launched "virtual hosting" in 2007. That was 10 years ago, and since then we have been evolving from this virtual hosting that had no portal but was a shared platform for customers, to the cloud services that we have today.
The hardware part is important; we have to have reliable and powerful technology. For us, it's very important to provide trust to the customers. Trust, because what they are running in their data centers is similar to what we have in our data centers. Having VMware and HPE as partners provides this trust to the customers so that they will move the applications, and they know it will work fine.
Gardner: HPE is very fond of its Synergy platform, with composable infrastructure. How did that help you and VMware pull together the full solution for Telefonica, Joe?
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Baguley: We have been on this journey together, as Antonio mentioned, since 2007 -- since before cloud was a thing. We don't have a test environment that's as big as Telefonica's production environment -- and neither does HPE. What we have been doing is working together -- and like any of these journeys, there have been missteps along the way. We stumbled occasionally, but it's been good to work together as a partnership.
As we have grown, we have also both understood how the requirements of the market are changing and evolving. Ten years ago providing a combined cloud platform on a composable infrastructure was unheard of -- and people wouldn't believe you could do it. But that's what we have evolved together, with the work that we have done with companies such as Telefonica.
The need for something like HPE Synergy and the Gen10 stack -- where there are these very configurable stacks that you can put together -- has literally grown out of the work that we have done together, along with what we have done in our management stack, with the networking, compute, and storage.
Gardner: The combination of composable infrastructure and SDDC makes for a pretty strong tag team.
Baguley: Yes, definitely. It gives you that flexibility and the agility that a cloud provider needs to then meet the agility requirements of their customers, definitely.
Gardner: When it comes to bringing more end users into the clouds for your managed services providers, one of the important things is for end users to move into that cloud with as much ease as possible. Because VMware is a de facto standard in many markets with its vSphere Hypervisor, how does that help you, being a VMware stack, create that ease of joining these clouds?
Seamless migrations
Oriol Barat: Having the same technology in the customer data center and in our cloud makes things a lot easier. In the first place, in terms of confidence, the customer can be confident that it's going to work well when it is in place. The other thing is that VMware is providing us with the tools that make these migrations easier.
Baguley: At VMworld 2017, we announced VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX), which is our hybrid cloud connector. It allows customers to locally install software that connects at a Layer 2 [network] level, as well as right back to vSphere 5.0 in clouds. Those clouds now are IBM and VMware cloud native, but we are extending it to other service providers like Telefonica in 2018.
The important thing here is by going down this road, people can take some of the fear out of going to the cloud.
So a customer can truly feel that their connecting and migrations will be seamless. Things like vSphere vMotion across that gap are going to be possible, too. I think the important thing here is by going down this road, people can take some of the fear out of going to the cloud, because some of the fear is about getting locked in: "I am going to make decisions that I will regret in two years by converting my virtual machines (VMs) to run on another platform." Right here, there isn't that fear, there is just more choice, and Telefonica is very much part of that story of choice.
Gardner: It sounds like you have made things attractive for managed service providers in many markets. For example, they gain ease of migration from enterprises into the provider's cloud. In the case of Telefonica, users gain support, services and integration, knowing that the venerable vendors like VMware and HPE are behind the underlying services.
Do you have any examples where you have been able to bring this total solution to a typical managed service provider account? How has it worked out for them?
Everyone's doing it
Oriol Barat: We have use cases in all the vertical industries. Because cloud is a horizontal technology, it's the foundation of everything. I would say that all companies of all verticals are in this process of transformation.
We have a lot of customers in retail that are moving their platforms to cloud. We have had, for example, US companies coming to Europe and deploying their SAP systems on top of our platforms.
For example in Spain, we have a very strong tourism industry with a lot of hotel chains that are also using our cloud services for their reservation systems and for more of their IT.
We have use cases in healthcare, of companies moving their medical systems to our clouds.
We have use cases of software vendors that are growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses and they need a flexible platform that can grow as their businesses grow.
A lot of people are using these platforms as disaster recovery (DR) for the platforms that they have on-premises.
I would say that all verticals are into this transformation.
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Gardner: It's interesting, you mentioned being able to gain global reach from a specific home economy by putting data centers in place with a managed service provider model.
It's also important for data sovereignty and compliance and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other issues for that to happen. It sounds like a very good market opportunity.
And that brings us to the last part of our discussion. What happens next? When we have proven technology in place, and we have cloud adoption, where would you like to be in 12 months?
Gaining the edge
Baguley: There has been a lot of talk at recent events, like HPE Discover, about intelligent edge developments. We are doing a lot at the edge, too. When you look at telcos, the edge is going to become something quite interesting.
What we are talking about is taking that same blend of storage, networking and compute, and running it on as small a device as possible. So think micro data centers, nano data centers. How far out can we push this cloud? How much can we distribute this cloud? How close to the point of need can we get our customers to execute their workloads, to do their artificial intelligence (AI), to do their data gathering, et cetera?
And working in partnership with someone who has a fantastic cloud and a fantastic network just means that a customer who is looking to build some kind of distributed edge-to-cloud core capability is something that Telefonica and VMware could probably do over the next 12 months. That could be really, really strong.
Gardner: Antonio?
Oriol Barat: In this transformation that all the enterprises are in, maybe we are in the 20 percent of execution range. So we still have 80 percent of the transformation ahead of us. The potential is huge.
Looking ahead with our services, for example, it's very important that the network is also in transformation, leveraging the software-defined networking (SDN) technologies. These networks are going to be more flexible. We think that we are in a good position to put together cloud services with such network services -- with security, also with more software-defined capabilities, and create really flexible solutions for our customers.
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Baguley: One example that I would like to add is if you can imagine that maybe Real Madrid C.F. are playing at home next weekend ... It's theoretical that Telefonica could have the bottom of those network base stations -- because of VMware Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), it's no longer specific base station hardware, it's x86 HPE servers in there. They can maybe turn around to a betting company and say, "Would you like to move your front-end web servers with running containers to run in the base station, in Real Madrid's stadium, for the four hours in the afternoon of that match?" And suddenly they are the best performing website.
That's the kind of out-there transformative ideas that are now possible due to new application infrastructures, new cloud infrastructures, edge, and technologies like the network all coming together. So those are the kind of things you are going to see from this kind of solutions approach going forward.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
You may also be interested in:
- As enterprises face mounting hybrid IT complexity, new management solutions beckon
- How mounting complexity, multi-cloud sprawl, and need for maturity hinder hybrid IT's ability to grow and thrive
- Get ready for the Post-Cloud World
- Inside story on HPC's AI role in Bridges 'strategic reasoning' research at CMU
- Philips teams with HPE on ecosystem approach to improve healthcare informatics-driven outcome
- Inside story: How Ormuco abstracts the concepts of private and public cloud across the globe
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- IoT capabilities open new doors for Miami telecoms platform provider Identidad IoT
- Inside story on developing the ultimate SDN-enabled hybrid cloud object storage environment
- How IoT and OT collaborate to usher in the data-driven factory of the future
Inside story on HPC's role in the Bridges Research Project at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer high-performance computing (HPC) success story interview examines how Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has developed a research computing capability, Bridges, and how that's providing new levels of analytics, insights, and efficiencies.
We'll now learn how advances in IT infrastructure and memory-driven architectures are combining to meet the new requirements for artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, and deep machine learning.
How UBC gained TCO advantage via flash for its EduCloud cloud storage service
The next BriefingsDirect cloud efficiency case study explores how a storage-as-a-service offering in a university setting gains performance and lower total cost benefits by a move to all-flash storage.
We'll now learn how the University of British Columbia (UBC) has modernized its EduCloud storage service and attained both efficiency as well as better service levels for its diverse user base.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help us explore new breeds of SaaS solutions is Brent Dunington, System Architect at UBC in Vancouver. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: How is satisfying the storage demands at a large and diverse university setting a challenge? Is there something about your users and the diverse nature of their needs that provides you with a complex requirements list?
Dunington: A university setting isn't much different than any other business. The demands are the same. UBC has about 65,000 students and about 15,000 staff. The students these days are younger kids, they all have iPhones and iPads, and they just want to push buttons and get instant results and instant gratification. And that boils down to the services that we offer.
We have to be able to offer those services, because as most people know, there are choices -- and they can go somewhere else and choose those other products.
Our team is a rather small team. There are 15 members in our team, so we have to be agile, we have to be able to automate things, and we need tools that can work and fulfill those needs. So it's just like any other business, even though it's a university setting.
Flash Performance
Gardner: Can you give us a sense of the scale that describes your storage requirements?
Dunington: We do SaaS, we also do infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). EduCloud is a self-service IaaS product that we deliver to UBC, but we also deliver it to 25 other higher institutions in the Province of British Columbia.
We have been doing IaaS for five years, and we have been very, very successful. So more people are looking to us for guidance.
Because we are not just delivering to UBC, we have to be up running and always able to deliver, because each school has different requirements. At different times of the year -- because there is registration, there are exam times -- these things have to be up. You can't not be functioning during an exam and have 600 students not able to take the tests that they have been studying for. So it impacts their life and we want to make sure that we are there and can provide the services for what they need.
Gardner: In order to maintain your service levels within those peak times, do you in your IaaS and storage services employ hybrid-cloud capabilities so that you can burst? Or are you doing this all through your own data center and your own private cloud?
On-Campus Cloud
Dunington: We do it all on-campus. British Columbia has a law that says all the data has to stay in Canada. It's a data-sovereignty law, the data can't leave the borders.
That's why EduCloud has been so successful, in my opinion, because of that option. They can just go and throw things out in the private cloud.
The public cloud providers are providing more services in Canada: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure cloud are putting data centers in Canada, which is good and it gives people an option. Our team's goal is to provide the services, whether it's a hybrid model or all on-campus. We just want to be able to fulfill those needs.
Gardner: It sounds like the best of all worlds. You are able to give that elasticity benefit, a lot of instant service requirements met for your consumers. But you are starting to use cloud pay-as-you-go types of models and get the benefit of the public cloud model -- but with the security, control and manageability of the private clouds.
What decisions have you made about your storage underpinnings, the infrastructure that supports your SaaS cloud?
Dunington: We have a large storage footprint. For our site, it's about 12 petabytes of storage. We realized that we weren't meeting the needs with spinning disks. One of the problems was that we had runaway virtual workloads that would cause problems, and they would impact other services. We needed some mechanism to fix that.
We wanted to make sure that we had the ability to attain quality of service levels and control those runaway virtual machines in our footprint.
We went through the whole request for proposal (RFP) process, and all the IT infrastructure vendors responded, but we did have some guidelines that we wanted to go through. One of the things we did is present our problems and make sure that they understood what the problems were and what they were trying to solve.
And there were some minimum requirements. We do have a backup vendor of choice that they needed to merge with. And quality of service is a big thing. We wanted to make sure that we had the ability to attain quality of service levels and control those runaway virtual machines in our footprint.
Gardner: You gained more than just flash benefits when you got to flash storage, right?
Streamlined, safe, flash storage
Dunington: Yes, for sure. With an entire data center full of spinning disks, it gets to the point where the disks start to manage you; you are no longer managing the disks. And the teams out there changing drives, removing volumes around it, it becomes unwieldy. I mean, the power, the footprint, and all that starts to grow.
Also, Vancouver is in a seismic zone, we are right up against the Pacific plate and it's a very active seismic area. Heaven forbid anything happens, but one of the requirements we had was to move the data center into the interior of the province. So that was what we did.
When we brought this new data center online, one of the decisions the team made was to move to an all-flash storage environment. We wanted to be sure that it made financial sense because it's publicly funded, and also improved the user experience, across the province.
Gardner: As you were going about your decision-making process, you had choices, what made you choose what you did? What were the deciding factors?
Dunington: There were a lot of deciding factors. There's the technology, of being able to meet the performance and to manage the performance. One of the things was to lock down runaway virtual machines and to put performance tiers on others.
But it's not just the technology; it's also the business part, too. The financial part had to make sense. When you are buying any storage platform, you are also buying the support team and the sales team that come with it.
Our team believes that technology is a certain piece of the pie, and the rest of it is relationship. If that relationship part doesn't work, it doesn't matter how well the technology part works -- the whole thing is going to break down.
Because software is software, hardware is hardware -- it breaks, it has problems, there are limitations. And when you have to call someone, you have to depend on him or her. Even though you bought the best technology and got the best price -- if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and you need someone to call.
So those service and support issues were all wrapped up into the decision.
Flash Performance
We chose the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) 3PAR all-flash storage platform. We have been very happy with it. We knew the HPE team well. They came and worked with us on the server blade infrastructure, so we knew the team. The team knew how to support all of it.
We also use the HPE OneView product for provisioning, and it integrated into that all. It also supported the performance optimization tool (IT Operations Management for HPE OneView) to let us set those values, because one of the things in EduCloud is customers choose their own storage tier, and we mark the price on it. So basically all we would do is present that new tier as new data storage within VMware and then they would just move their workloads across non-disruptively. So it has worked really well.
The 3PAR storage piece also integrates with VMware vRealize Operations Manager. We offer that to all our clients as a portal so they can see how everything is working and they can do their own diagnostics. Because that's the one goal we have with EduCloud, it has to be self-service. We can let the customers do it, that's what they want.
Gardner: Not that long ago people had the idea that flash was always more expensive and that they would use it for just certain use-cases rather than pervasively. You have been talking in terms of a total cost of ownership reduction. So how does that work? How does the economics of this over a period of time, taking everything into consideration, benefit you all?
Economic sense at scale
Dunington: Our IT team and our management team are really good with that part. They were able to break it all down, and they found that this model would work at scale. I don't know the numbers per se, but it made economic sense.
Spinning disks will still have a place in the data center. I don't know a year from now if an all-flash data center will make sense, because there are some records that people will throw in and never touch. But right now with the numbers on how we worked it out, it makes sense, because we are using the standard bronze, the gold, the silver tiers, and with the tiers it makes sense.
The 3PAR solution also has dedupe functionality and the compression that they just released. We are hoping to see how well that trends. Compression has only been around for a short period of time, so I can't really say, but the dedupe has done really well for us.
Gardner: The technology overcomes some of the other baseline economic costs and issues, for sure.
We have talked about the technology and performance requirements. Have you been able to qualify how, from a user experience, this has been a benefit?
Dunington: The best benchmark is the adoption rate. People are using it, and there are no help desk tickets, so no one is complaining. People are using it, and we can see that everything is ramping up, and we are not getting tickets. No one is complaining about the price, the availability. Our operational team isn't complaining about it being harder to manage or that the backups aren't working. That makes me happy.
The big picture
Gardner: Brent, maybe a word of advice to other organizations that are thinking about a similar move to private cloud SaaS. Now that you have done this, what might you advise them to do as they prepare for or evaluate a similar activity?
Not everybody needs that speed, not everybody needs that performance, but it is the future and things will move there.
Dunington: Look at the full picture, look at the total cost of ownership. There's the buying of the hardware, and there's also supporting the hardware, too. Make sure that you understand your requirements and what your customers are looking for first before you go out and buy it. Not everybody needs that speed, not everybody needs that performance, but it is the future and things will move there. We will see in a couple of years how it went.
Look at the big picture, step back. It's just not the new shiny toy, and you might have to take a stepped approach into buying, but for us it worked. I mean, it's a solid platform, our team sleeps well at night, and I think our customers are really happy with it.
Gardner: This might be a little bit of a pun in the education field, but do your homework and you will benefit.
Flash Performance
Dunington: Yes, for sure.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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How modern storage provides hints on optimizing and best managing hybrid IT and multi-cloud resources
The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst interview examines the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum.
Managing hybrid IT necessitates not only a choice between public cloud and private cloud, but a more granular approach to picking and choosing which assets go where based on performance, costs, compliance, and business agility.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to report on how to begin to better assess what IT variables should be managed and thoughtfully applied to any cloud model is Mark Peters, Practice Director and Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Now that cloud adoption is gaining steam, it may be time to step back and assess what works and what doesn't. In past IT adoption patterns, we've seen a rapid embrace that sometimes ends with at least a temporary hangover. Sometimes, it's complexity or runaway or unmanaged costs, or even usage patterns that can't be controlled. Mark, is it too soon to begin assessing best practices in identifying ways to hedge against any ill effects from runaway adoption of cloud?
Peters: The short answer, Dana, is no. It's not that the IT world is that different. It's just that we have more and different tools. And that is really what hybrid comes down to -- available tools.
It's not that those tools themselves demand a new way of doing things. They offer the opportunity to continue to think about what you want. But if I have one repeated statement as we go through this, it will be that it's not about focusing on the tools, it's about focusing on what you're trying to get done. You just happen to have more and different tools now.
Gardner: We hear sometimes that at as high as board of director levels, they are telling people to go cloud-first, or just dump IT all together. That strikes me as an overreaction. If we're looking at tools and to what they do best, is cloud so good that we can actually just go cloud-first or cloud-only?
Cloudy cloud adoption
Peters: Assuming you're speaking about management by objectives (MBO), doing cloud or cloud-only because that's what someone with a C-level title saw on a Microsoft cloud ad on TV and decided that is right, well -- that clouds everything.
You do see increasingly different people outside of IT becoming involved in the decision. When I say outside of IT, I mean outside of the operational side of IT.
You get other functions involved in making demands. And because the cloud can be so easy to consume, you see people just running off and deploying some software-as-a-service (SaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model because it looked easy to do, and they didn't want to wait for the internal IT to make the change.
All of the research we do shows that the world is hybrid for as far ahead as we can see.
Running away from internal IT and on-premises IT is not going to be a good idea for most organizations -- at least for a considerable chunk of their workloads. All of the research we do shows that the world is hybrid for as far ahead as we can see.
Gardner: I certainly agree with that. If it's all then about a mix of things, how do I determine the correct mix? And if it's a correct mix between just a public cloud and private cloud, how do I then properly adjust to considerations about applications as opposed to data, as opposed to bringing in microservices and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) when they're the best fit?
How do we begin to rationalize all of this better? Because I think we've gotten to the point where we need to gain some maturity in terms of the consumption of hybrid IT.
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Peters: I often talk about what I call the assumption gap. And the assumption gap is just that moment where we move from one side where it's okay to have lots of questions about something, in this case, in IT. And then on the other side of this gap or chasm, to use a well-worn phrase, is where it's not okay to ask anything because you'll see you don't know what you're talking about. And that assumption gap seems to happen imperceptibly and very fast at some moment.
So, what is hybrid IT? I think we fall into the trap of allowing ourselves to believe that having some on-premises workloads and applications and some off-premises workloads and applications is hybrid IT. I do not think it is. It's using a couple of tools for different things.
It's like having a Prius and a big diesel and/or gas F-150 pickup truck in your garage and saying, "I have two hybrid vehicles." No, you have one of each, or some of each. Just because someone has put an application or a backup off into the cloud, "Oh, yeah. Well, I'm hybrid." No, you're not really.
The cloud approach
The cloud is an approach. It's not a thing per se. It's another way. As I said earlier, it's another tool that you have in the IT arsenal. So how do you start figuring what goes where?
I don't think there are simple answers, because it would be just as sensible a question to say, "Well, what should go on flash or what should go on disk, or what should go on tape, or what should go on paper?" My point being, such decisions are situational to individual companies, to the stage of that company's life, and to the budgets they have. And they're not only situational -- they're also dynamic.
I want to give a couple of examples because I think they will stick with people. Number one is you take something like email, a pretty popular application; everyone runs email. In some organizations, that is the crucial application. They cannot run without it. Probably, what you and I do would fall into that category. But there are other businesses where it's far less important than the factory running or the delivery vans getting out on time. So, they could have different applications that are way more important than email.
When instant messaging (IM) first came out, Yahoo IM text came out, to be precise. They used to do the maintenance between 9 am and 5 pm because it was just a tool to chat to your friends with at night. And now you have businesses that rely on that. So, clearly, the ability to instant message and text between us is now crucial. The stock exchange in Chicago runs on it. IM is a very important tool.
The answer is not that you or I have the ability to tell any given company, "Well, x application should go onsite and Y application should go offsite or into a cloud," because it will vary between businesses and vary across time.
If something is or becomes mission-critical or high-risk, it is more likely that you'll want the feeling of security, I'm picking my words very carefully, of having it … onsite.
You have to figure out what you're trying to get done before you figure out what you're going to do with it.
But the extent to which full-production apps are being moved to the cloud is growing every day. That's what our research shows us. The quick answer is you have to figure out what you're trying to get done before you figure out what you're going to do it with.
Gardner: Before we go into learning more about how organizations can better know themselves and therefore understand the right mix, let's learn more about you, Mark.
Tell us about yourself, your organization at ESG. How long have you been an IT industry analyst?
Peters: I grew up in my working life in the UK and then in Europe, working on the vendor side of IT. I grew up in storage, and I haven't really escaped it. These days I run ESG's infrastructure practice. The integration and the interoperability between the various elements of infrastructure have become more important than the individual components. I stayed on the vendor side for many years working in the UK, then in Europe, and now in Colorado. I joined ESG 10 years ago.
Lessons learned from storage
Gardner: It's interesting that you mentioned storage, and the example of whether it should be flash or spinning media, or tape. It seems to me that maybe we can learn from what we've seen happen in a hybrid environment within storage and extrapolate to how that pertains to a larger IT hybrid undertaking.
Is there something about the way we've had to adjust to different types of storage -- and do that intelligently with the goals of performance, cost, and the business objectives in mind? I'll give you a chance to perhaps go along with my analogy or shoot it down. Can we learn from what's happened in storage and apply that to a larger hybrid IT model?
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Peters: The quick answer to your question is, absolutely, we can. Again, the cloud is a different approach. It is a very beguiling and useful business model, but it's not a panacea. I really don't believe it ever will become a panacea.
Now, that doesn't mean to say it won't grow. It is growing. It's huge. It's significant. You look at the recent announcements from the big cloud providers. They are at tens of billions of dollars in run rates.
But to your point, it should be viewed as part of a hierarchy, or a tiering, of IT. I don't want to suggest that cloud sits at the bottom of some hierarchy or tiering. That's not my intent. But it is another choice of another tool.
Let's be very, very clear about this. There isn't "a" cloud out there. People talk about the cloud as if it exists as one thing. It does not. Part of the reason hybrid IT is so challenging is you're not just choosing between on-prem and the cloud, you're choosing between on-prem and many clouds -- and you might want to have a multi-cloud approach as well. We see that increasingly.
What we should be looking for are not bright, shiny objects -- but bright, shiny outcomes.
Those various clouds have various attributes; some are better than others in different things. It is exactly parallel to what you were talking about in terms of which server you use, what storage you use, what speed you use for your networking. It's exactly parallel to the decisions you should make about which cloud and to what extent you deploy to which cloud. In other words, all the things you said at the beginning: cost, risk, requirements, and performance.
People get so distracted by bright, shiny objects. Like they are the answer to everything. What we should be looking for are not bright, shiny objects -- but bright, shiny outcomes. That's all we should be looking for.
Focus on the outcome that you want, and then you figure out how to get it. You should not be sitting down IT managers and saying, "How do I get to 50 percent of my data in the cloud?" I don't think that's a sensible approach to business.
Gardner: Lessons learned in how to best utilize a hybrid storage environment, rationalizing that, bringing in more intelligence, software-defined, making the network through hyper-convergence more of a consideration than an afterthought -- all these illustrate where we're going on a larger scale, or at a higher abstraction.
Going back to the idea that each organization is particular -- their specific business goals, their specific legacy and history of IT use, their specific way of using applications and pursuing business processes and fulfilling their obligations. How do you know in your organization enough to then begin rationalizing the choices? How do you make business choices and IT choices in conjunction? Have we lost sufficient visibility, given that there are so many different tools for doing IT?
Get down to specifics
Peters: The answer is yes. If you can't see it, you don't know about it. So to some degree, we are assuming that we don't know everything that's going on. But I think anecdotally what you propose is absolutely true.
I've beaten home the point about starting with the outcomes, not the tools that you use to achieve those outcomes. But how do you know what you've even got -- because it's become so easy to consume in different ways? A lot of people talk about shadow IT. You have this sprawl of a different way of doing things. And so, this leads to two requirements.
Number one is gaining visibility. It's a challenge with shadow IT because you have to know what's in the shadows. You can't, by definition, see into that, so that's a tough thing to do. Even once you find out what's going on, the second step is how do you gain control? Control -- not for control's sake -- only by knowing all the things you were trying to do and how you're trying to do them across an organization. And only then can you hope to optimize them.
You can't manage what you can't measure. You also can't improve things that can't be managed or measured.
Again, it's an old, old adage. You can't manage what you can't measure. You also can't improve things that can't be managed or measured. And so, number one, you have to find out what's in the shadows, what it is you're trying to do. And this is assuming that you know what you are aiming toward.
This is the next battleground for sophisticated IT use and for vendors. It's not a battleground for the users. It's a choice for users -- but a battleground for vendors. They must find a way to help their customers manage everything, to control everything, and then to optimize everything. Because just doing the first and finding out what you have -- and finding out that you're in a mess -- doesn't help you.
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Visibility is not the same as solving. The point is not just finding out what you have – but of actually being able to do something about it. The level of complexity, the range of applications that most people are running these days, the extremely high levels of expectations both in the speed and flexibility and performance, and so on, mean that you cannot, even with visibility, fix things by hand.
You and I grew up in the era where a lot of things were done on whiteboards and Excel spreadsheets. That doesn't cut it anymore. We have to find a way to manage what is automated. Manual management just will not cut it -- even if you know everything that you're doing wrong.
Gardner: Yes, I agree 100 percent that the automation -- in order to deal with the scale of complexity, the requirements for speed, the fact that you're going to be dealing with workloads and IT assets that are off of your premises -- means you're going to be doing this programmatically. Therefore, you're in a better position to use automation.
I'd like to go back again to storage. When I first took a briefing with Nimble Storage, which is now a part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), I was really impressed with the degree to which they used intelligence to solve the economic and performance problems of hybrid storage.
Given the fact that we can apply more intelligence nowadays -- that the cost of gathering and harnessing data, the speed at which it can be analyzed, the degree to which that analysis can be shared -- it's all very fortuitous that just as we need greater visibility and that we have bigger problems to solve across hybrid IT, we also have some very powerful analysis tools.
Mark, is what worked for hybrid storage intelligence able to work for a hybrid IT intelligence? To what degree should we expect more and more, dare I say, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to be brought to bear on this hybrid IT management problem?
Intelligent automation a must
Peters: I think it is a very straightforward and good parallel. Storage has become increasingly sophisticated. I've been in and around the storage business now for more than three decades. The joke has always been, I remember when a megabyte was a lot, let alone a gigabyte, a terabyte, and an exabyte.
And I'd go for a whole day class, when I was on the sales side of the business, just to learn something like dual parsing or about cache. It was so exciting 30 years ago. And yet, these days, it's a bit like cars. I mean, you and I used to use a choke, or we'd have to really go and check everything on the car before we went on 100-mile journey. Now, we press the button and it better work in any temperature and at any speed. Now, we just demand so much from cars.
To stretch that analogy, I'm mixing cars and storage -- and we'll make it all come together with hybrid IT in that it's better to do things in an automated fashion. There's always one person in every crowd I talk to who still believes that a stick shift is more economic and faster than an automatic transmission. It might be true for one in 1,000 people, and they probably drive cars for a living. But for most people, 99 percent of the people, 99.9 percent of the time, an automatic transmission will both get you there faster and be more efficient in doing so. The same became true of storage.
We used to talk about how much storage someone could capacity-plan or manage. That's just become old hat now because you don't talk about it in those terms. Storage has moved to be -- how do we serve applications? How do we serve up the right place in the right time, get the data to the right person at the right time at the right price, and so on?
We don't just choose what goes where or who gets what, we set the parameters -- and we then allow the machine to operate in an automated fashion. These days, increasingly, if you talk to 10 storage companies, 10 of them will talk to you about machine learning and AI because they know they've got to be in that in order to make that execution of change ever more efficient and ever faster. They're just dealing with tremendous scale, and you could not do it even with simple automation that still involves humans.
It will be self-managing and self-optimizing. It will not be a "recommending tool," it will be an "executing tool."
We have used cars as a social analogy. We used storage as an IT analogy, and absolutely, that's where hybrid IT is going. It will be self-managing and self-optimizing. Just to make it crystal clear, it will not be a "recommending tool," it will be an "executing tool." There is no time to wait for you and me to finish our coffee, think about it, and realize we have to do something, because then it's too late. So, it's not just about the knowledge and the visibility. It's about the execution and the automated change. But, yes, I think your analogy is a very good one for how the IT world will change.
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Gardner: How you execute, optimize and exploit intelligence capabilities can be how you better compete, even if other things are equal. If everyone is using AWS, and everyone is using the same services for storage, servers, and development, then how do you differentiate?
How you optimize the way in which you gain the visibility, know your own business, and apply the lessons of optimization, will become a deciding factor in your success, no matter what business you're in. The tools that you pick for such visibility, execution, optimization and intelligence will be the new real differentiators among major businesses.
So, Mark, where do we look to find those tools? Are they yet in development? Do we know the ones we should expect? How will organizations know where to look for the next differentiating tier of technology when it comes to optimizing hybrid IT?
What's in the mix?
Peters: We're talking years ahead for us to be in the nirvana that you're discussing.
I just want to push back slightly on what you said. This would only apply if everyone were using exactly the same tools and services from AWS, to use your example. The expectation, assuming we have a hybrid world, is they will have kept some applications on-premises, or they might be using some specialist, regional or vertical industry cloud. So, I think that's another way for differentiation. It's how to get the balance. So, that's one important thing.
And then, back to what you were talking about, where are those tools? How do you make the right move?
We have to get from here to there. It's all very well talking about the future. It doesn't sound great and perfect, but you have to get there. We do quite a lot of research in ESG. I will throw just a couple of numbers, which I think help to explain how you might do this.
We already find that the multi-cloud deployment or option is a significant element within a hybrid IT world. So, asking people about this in the last few months, we found that about 75 percent of the respondents already have more than one cloud provider, and about 40 percent have three or more.
You're getting diversity -- whether by default or design. It really doesn't matter at this point. We hope it's by design. But nonetheless, you're certainly getting people using different cloud providers to take advantage of the specific capabilities of each.
This is a real mix. You can't just plunk down some new magic piece of software, and everything is okay, because it might not work with what you already have -- the legacy systems, and the applications you already have. One of the other questions we need to ask is how does improved management embrace legacy systems?
Some 75 percent of our respondents want hybrid management to be from the infrastructure up, which means that it's got to be based on managing their existing infrastructure, and then extending that management up or out into the cloud. That's opposed to starting with some cloud management approach and then extending it back down to their infrastructure.
People want to enhance what they currently have so that it can embrace the cloud. It's enhancing your choice of tiers so you can embrace change.
People want to enhance what they currently have so that it can embrace the cloud. It's enhancing your choice of tiers so you can embrace change. Rather than just deploying something and hoping that all of your current infrastructure -- not just your physical infrastructure but your applications, too -- can use that, we see a lot of people going to a multi-cloud, hybrid deployment model. That entirely makes sense. You're not just going to pick one cloud model and hope that it will come backward and make everything else work. You start with what you have and you gradually embrace these alternative tools.
Gardner: We're creating quite a list of requirements for what we'd like to see develop in terms of this management, optimization, and automation capability that's maybe two or three years out. Vendors like Microsoft are just now coming out with the ability to manage between their own hybrid infrastructures, their own cloud offerings like Azure Stack and their public cloud Azure.
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Where will we look for that breed of fully inclusive, fully intelligent tools that will allow us to get to where we want to be in a couple of years? I've heard of one from HPE, it's called Project New Hybrid IT Stack. I'm thinking that HPE can't be the only company. We can't be the only analysts that are seeing what to me is a market opportunity that you could drive a truck through. This should be a big problem to solve.
Who's driving?
Peters: There are many organizations, frankly, for which this would not be a good commercial decision, because they don't play in multiple IT areas or they are not systems providers. That's why HPE is interested, capable, and focused on doing this.
Many vendor organizations are either focused on the cloud side of the business -- and there are some very big names -- or on the on-premises side of the business. Embracing both is something that is not as difficult for them to do, but really not top of their want-to-do list before they're absolutely forced to.
From that perspective, the ones that we see doing this fall into two categories. There are the trendy new startups, and there are some of those around. The problem is, it's really tough imagining that particularly large enterprises are going to risk [standardizing on them]. They probably even will start to try and write it themselves, which is possible – unlikely, but possible.
Where I think we will get the list for the other side is some of the other big organizations --- Oracle and IBM spring to mind in terms of being able to embrace both on-premises and off-premises. But, at the end of the day, the commonality among those that we've mentioned is that they are systems companies. At the end of the day, they win by delivering the best overall solution and package to their clients, not individual components within it.
If you're going to look for a successful hybrid IT deployment took, you probably have to look at a hybrid IT vendor.
And by individual components, I include cloud, on-premises, and applications. If you're going to look for a successful hybrid IT deployment tool, you probably have to look at a hybrid IT vendor. That last part I think is self-descriptive.
Gardner: Clearly, not a big group. We're not going to be seeking suppliers for hybrid IT management from request for proposals (RFPs) from 50 or 60 different companies to find some solutions.
Peters: Well, you won't need to. Looking not that many years ahead, there will not be that many choices when it comes to full IT provisioning.
Gardner: Mark, any thoughts about what IT organizations should be thinking about in terms of how to become proactive rather than reactive to the hybrid IT environment and the complexity, and to me the obvious need for better management going forward?
Management ends, not means
Peters: Gaining visibility into not just hybrid IT but the on-premise and the off-premise and how you manage these things. Those are all parts of the solution, or the answer. The real thing, and it's absolutely crucial, is that you don't start with those bright shiny objects. You don't start with, "How can I deploy more cloud? How can I do hybrid IT?" Those are not good questions to ask. Good questions to ask are, "What do I need to do as an organization? How do I make my business more successful? How does anything in IT become a part of answering those questions?"
In other words, drum roll, it's the thinking about ends, not means.
Gardner: If our listeners and readers want to follow you and gain more of your excellent insight, how should they do that?
Peters: The best way is to go to our website, www.esg-global.com. You can find not just me and all my contact details and materials but those of all my colleagues and the many areas we cover and study in this wonderful world of IT.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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Globalization risks and data complexity demand new breed of hybrid IT management, says Wikibon's Burris
The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst interview explores how globalization and distributed business ecosystems factor into hybrid cloud challenges and solutions.
Mounting complexity and a lack of multi-cloud services management maturity are forcing companies to seek new breeds of solutions so they can grow and thrive as digital enterprises.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to report on how international companies must factor localization, data sovereignty and other regional factors into any transition to sustainable hybrid IT is Peter Burris, Head of Research at Wikibon. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Peter, companies doing business or software development just in North America can have an American-centric view of things. They may lack an appreciation for the global aspects of cloud computing models. We want to explore that today. How much more complex is doing cloud -- especially hybrid cloud -- when you're straddling global regions?
Burris: There are advantages and disadvantages to thinking cloud-first when you are thinking globalization first. The biggest advantage is that you are able to work in locations that don't currently have the broad-based infrastructure that's typically associated with a lot of traditional computing modes and models.
The downside of it is, at the end of the day, that the value in any computing system is not so much in the hardware per se; it's in the data that's the basis of how the system works. And because of the realities of working with data in a distributed way, globalization that is intended to more fully enfranchise data wherever it might be introduces a range of architectural implementation and legal complexities that can't be discounted.
So, cloud and globalization can go together -- but it dramatically increases the need for smart and forward-thinking approaches to imagining, and then ultimately realizing, how those two go together, and what hybrid architecture is going to be required to make it work.
Gardner: If you need to then focus more on the data issues -- such as compliance, regulation, and data sovereignty -- how is that different from taking an applications-centric view of things?
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Burris: Most companies have historically taken an infrastructure-centric approach to things. They start by saying, "Where do I have infrastructure, where do I have servers and storage, do I have the capacity for this group of resources, and can I bring the applications up here?" And if the answer is yes, then you try to ultimately economize on those assets and build the application there.
That runs into problems when we start thinking about privacy, and in ensuring that local markets and local approaches to intellectual property management can be accommodated.
But the issue is more than just things like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, which is a series of regulations in the European Union (EU) that are intended to protect consumers from what the EU would regard as inappropriate leveraging and derivative use of their data.
It can be extremely expensive and sometimes impossible to even conceive of a global cloud strategy where the service is being consumed a few thousand miles away from where the data resides, if there is any dependency on time and how that works.
Ultimately, the globe is a big place. It's 12,000 miles or so from point A to the farthest point B, and physics still matters. So, the first thing we have to worry about when we think about globalization is the cost of latency and the cost of bandwidth of moving data -- either small or very large -- across different regions. It can be extremely expensive and sometimes impossible to even conceive of a global cloud strategy where the service is being consumed a few thousand miles away from where the data resides, if there is any dependency on time and how that works.
So, the issues of privacy, the issues of local control of data are also very important, but the first and most important consideration for every business needs to be: Can I actually run the application where I want to, given the realities of latency? And number two: Can I run the application where I want to given the realities of bandwidth? This issue can completely overwhelm all other costs for data-rich, data-intensive applications over distance.
Gardner: As you are factoring your architecture, you need to take these local considerations into account, particularly when you are factoring costs. If you have to do some heavy lifting and make your bandwidth capable, it might be better to have a local closet-sized data center, because they are small and efficient these days, and you can stick with a private cloud or on-premises approach. At the least, you should factor the economic basis for comparison, with all these other variables you brought up.
Edge centers
Burris: That's correct. In fact, we call them "edge centers." For example, if the application features any familiarity with Internet of Things (IoT), then there will likely be some degree of latency considerations obtained, and the cost of doing a round trip message over a few thousand miles can be pretty significant when we consider the total cost of how fast computing can be done these days.
The first consideration is what are the impacts of latency for an application workload like IoT and is that intending to drive more automation into the system? Imagine, if you will, the businessperson who says, "I would like to enter into a new market expand my presence in the market in a cost-effective way. And to do that, I want to have the system be more fully automated as it serves that particular market or that particular group of customers. And perhaps it's something that looks more process manufacturing-oriented or something along those lines that has IoT capabilities."
The goal is to bring in the technology in a way that does not explode the administration, management, and labor cost associated with the implementation.
The goal, therefore, is to bring in the technology in a way that does not explode the administration, managements, and labor cost associated with the implementation.
The other way you are going to do that is if you do introduce a fair amount of automation and if, in fact, that automation is capable of operating within the time constraints required by those automated moments, as we call them.
If the round-trip cost of moving the data from a remote global location back to somewhere in North America -- independent of whether it's legal or not – comes at a cost that exceeds the automation moment, then you just flat out can't do it. Now, that is the most obvious and stringent consideration.
On top of that, these moments of automation necessitate significant amounts of data being generated and captured. We have done model studies where, for example, the cost of moving data out of a small wind farm can be 10 times as expensive. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to do relatively simple and straightforward types of data analysis on the performance of that wind farm.
Process locally, act globally
It's a lot better to have a local presence that can handle local processing requirements against models that are operating against locally derived data or locally generated data, and let that work be automated with only periodic visibility into how the overall system is working closely. And that's where a lot of this kind of on-premise hybrid cloud thinking is starting.
It gets more complex than in a relatively simple environment like a wind farm, but nonetheless, the amount of processing power that's necessary to run some of those kinds of models can get pretty significant. We are going to see a lot more of this kind of analytic work be pushed directly down to the devices themselves. So, the Sense, Infer, and Act loop will occur very, very closely in some of those devices. We will try to keep as much of that data as we can local.
But there are always going to be circumstances when we have to generate visibility across devices, we have to do local training of the data, we have to test the data or the models that we are developing locally, and all those things start to argue for sometimes much larger classes of systems.
Gardner: It's a fascinating subject as to what to push down the edge given that the storage cost and processing costs are down and footprint is down and what to then use the public cloud environment or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment for.
But before we go into any further, Peter, tell us about yourself, and your organization, Wikibon.
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Burris: Wikibon is a research firm that's affiliated with something known as TheCUBE. TheCUBE conducts about 5,000 interviews per year with thought leaders at various locations, often on-site at large conferences.
I came to Wikibon from Forrester Research, and before that I had been a part of META Group, which was purchased by Gartner. I have a longstanding history in this business. I have also worked with IT organizations, and also worked inside technology marketing in a couple of different places. So, I have been around.
Wikibon's objective is to help mid-sized to large enterprises traverse the challenges of digital transformation. Our opinion is that digital transformation actually does mean something. It's not just a set of bromides about multichannel or omnichannel or being "uberized," or anything along those lines.
The difference between a business and a digital business is the degree to which data is used as an asset.
The difference between a business and a digital business is the degree to which data is used as an asset. In a digital business, data absolutely is used as a differentiating asset for creating and keeping customers.
We look at the challenges of what does it mean to use data differently, how to capture it differently, which is a lot of what IoT is about. We look at how to turn it into business value, which is a lot of what big data and these advanced analytics like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning are all about. And then finally, how to create the next generation of applications that actually act on behalf of the brand with a fair degree of autonomy, which is what we call "systems of agency" are all about. And then ultimately how cloud and historical infrastructure are going to come together and be optimized to support all those requirements.
We are looking at digital business transformation as a relatively holistic thing that includes IT leadership, business leadership, and, crucially, new classes of partnerships to ensure that the services that are required are appropriately contracted for and can be sustained as it becomes an increasing feature of any company's value proposition. That's what we do.
Global risk and reward
Gardner: We have talked about the tension between public and private cloud in a global environment through speeds and feeds, and technology. I would like to elevate it to the issues of culture, politics and perception. Because in recent years, with offshoring and looking at intellectual property concerns in other countries, the fact is that all the major hyperscale cloud providers are US-based corporations. There is a wide ecosystem of other second tier providers, but certainly in the top tier.
Is that something that should concern people when it comes to risk to companies that are based outside of the US? What's the level of risk when it comes to putting all your eggs in the basket of a company that's US-based?
Burris: There are two perspectives on that, but let me add one more just check on this. Alibaba clearly is one of the top-tier, and they are not based in the US and that may be one of the advantages that they have. So, I think we are starting to see some new hyperscalers emerge, and we will see whether or not one will emerge in Europe.
I had gotten into a significant argument with a group of people not too long ago on this, and I tend to think that the political environment almost guarantees that we will get some kind of scale in Europe for a major cloud provider.
If you are a US company, are you concerned about how intellectual property is treated elsewhere? Similarly, if you are a non-US company, are you concerned that the US companies are typically operating under US law, which increasingly is demanding that some of these hyperscale firms be relatively liberal, shall we say, in how they share their data with the government? This is going to be one of the key issues that influence choices of technology over the course of the next few years.
Cross-border compute concerns
We think there are three fundamental concerns that every firm is going to have to worry about.
I mentioned one, the physics of cloud computing. That includes latency and bandwidth. One computer science professor told me years ago, "Latency is the domain of God, and bandwidth is the domain of man." We may see bandwidth costs come down over the next few years, but let's just lump those two things together because they are physical realities.
The second one, as we talked about, is the idea of privacy and the legal implications.
The third one is intellectual property control and concerns, and this is going to be an area that faces enormous change over the course of the next few years. It's in conjunction with legal questions on contracting and business practices.
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From our perspective, a US firm that wants to operate in a location that features a more relaxed regime for intellectual property absolutely needs to be concerned. And the reason why they need to be concerned is data is unlike any other asset that businesses work with. Virtually every asset follows the laws of scarcity.
Money, you can put it here or you can put it there. Time, people, you can put here or you can put there. That machine can be dedicated to this kind of wire or that kind of wire.
Data is weird, because data can be copied, data can be shared. The value of data appreciates as we us it more successfully, as we integrate it and share it across multiple applications.
Scarcity is a dominant feature of how we think about generating returns on assets. Data is weird, though, because data can be copied, data can be shared. Indeed, the value of data appreciates as we use it more successfully, as we use it more completely, as we integrate it and share it across multiple applications.
And that is where the concern is, because if I have data in one location, two things could possibly happen. One is if it gets copied and stolen, and there are a lot of implications to that. And two, if there are rules and regulations in place that restrict how I can combine that data with other sources of data. That means if, for example, my customer data in Germany may not appreciate, or may not be able to generate the same types of returns as my customer data in the US.
Now, that sets aside any moral question of whether or not Germany or the US has better privacy laws and protects the consumers better. But if you are basing investments on how you can use data in the US, and presuming a similar type of approach in most other places, you are absolutely right. On the one hand, you probably aren't going to be able to generate the total value of your data because of restrictions on its use; and number two, you have to be very careful about concerns related to data leakage and the appropriation of your data by unintended third parties.
Gardner: There is the concern about the appropriation of the data by governments, including the United States with the PATRIOT Act. And there are ways in which governments can access hyperscalers' infrastructure, assets, and data under certain circumstances. I suppose there's a whole other topic there, but at least we should recognize that there's some added risk when it comes to governments and their access to this data.
Burris: It's a double-edged sword that US companies may be worried about hyperscalers elsewhere, but companies that aren't necessarily located in the US may be concerned about using those hyperscalers because of the relationship between those hyperscalers and the US government.
These concerns have been suppressed in the grand regime of decision-making in a lot of businesses, but that doesn't mean that it's not a low-intensity concern that could bubble up, and perhaps, it's one of the reasons why Alibaba is growing so fast right now.
All hyperscalers are going to have to be able to demonstrate that they can protect their clients, their customers' data, utilizing the regime that is in place wherever the business is being operated.
All hyperscalers are going to have to be able to demonstrate that they can, in fact, protect their clients, their customers' data, utilizing the regime that is in place wherever the business is being operated. [The rationale] for basing your business in these types of services is really immature. We have made enormous progress, but there's a long way yet to go here, and that's something that businesses must factor as they make decisions about how they want to incorporate a cloud strategy.
Gardner: It's difficult enough given the variables and complexity of deciding a hybrid cloud strategy when you're only factoring the technical issues. But, of course, now there are legal issues around data sovereignty, privacy, and intellectual property concerns. It's complex, and it's something that an IT organization, on its own, cannot juggle. This is something that cuts across all the different parts of a global enterprise -- their legal, marketing, security, risk avoidance and governance units -- right up to the board of directors. It's not just a willy-nilly decision to get out a credit card and start doing cloud computing on any sustainable basis.
Burris: Well, you're right, and too frequently it is a willy-nilly decision where a developer or a business person says, "Oh, no sweat, I am just going to grab some resources and start building something in the cloud."
I can remember back in the mid-1990s when I would go into large media companies to meet with IT people to talk about the web, and what it would mean technically to build applications on the web. I would encounter 30 people, and five of them would be in IT and 25 of them would be in legal. They were very concerned about what it meant to put intellectual property in a digital format up on the web, because of how it could be misappropriated or how it could lose value. So, that class of concern -- or that type of concern -- is minuscule relative to the broader questions of cloud computing, of the grabbing of your data and holding it a hostage, for example.
There are a lot of considerations that are not within the traditional purview of IT, but CIOs need to start thinking about them on their own and in conjunction with their peers within the business.
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Gardner: We've certainly underlined a lot of the challenges. What about solutions? What can organizations do to prevent going too far down an alley that's dark and misunderstood, and therefore have a difficult time adjusting?
How do we better rationalize for cloud computing decisions? Do we need better management? Do we need better visibility into what our organizations are doing or not doing? How do we architect with foresight into the larger picture, the strategic situation? What do we need to start thinking about in terms of the solutions side of some of these issues?
Cloud to business, not business to cloud
Burris: That's a huge question, Dana. I can go on for the next six hours, but let's start here. The first thing we tell senior executives is, don't think about bringing your business to the cloud -- think about bringing the cloud to your business. That's the most important thing. A lot of companies start by saying, "Oh, I want to get rid of IT, I want to move my business to the cloud."
It's like many of the mistakes that were made in the 1990s regarding outsourcing. When I would go back and do research on outsourcing, I discovered that a lot of the outsourcing was not driven by business needs, but driven by executive compensation schemes, literally. So, where executives were told that they would be paid on the basis of return in net assets, there was a high likelihood that the business was going to go to outsourcers to get rid of the assets, so the executives could pay themselves an enormous amount of money.
Think about how to bring the cloud to your business, and to better manage your data assets, and don't automatically default to the notion that you're going to take your business to the cloud.
The same type of thinking pertains here -- the goal is not to get rid of IT assets since those assets, generally speaking, are becoming less important features of the overall proposition of digital businesses.
Think instead about how to bring the cloud to your business, and to better manage your data assets, and don't automatically default to the notion that you're going to take your business to the cloud.
Every decision-maker needs to ask himself or herself, "How can I get the cloud experience wherever the data demands?" The goal of the cloud experience, which is a very, very powerful concept, ultimately needs to be able to get access to a very rich set of services associated with automation. We need visible pricing and metering, self-sufficiency, and self-service. These are all the experiences that we want out of cloud.
What we want, however, are those experiences wherever the data requires it, and that's what's driving hybrid cloud. We call it "true private cloud," and the idea is of having a technology stack that provides a consistent cloud experience wherever the data has to run -- whether that's because of IoT or because of privacy issues or because of intellectual property concerns. True private cloud is our concept for describing how the cloud experience is going to be enacted where the data requires, so that you don't just have to move the data to get to the cloud experience.
Weaving IT all together
The third thing to note here is that ultimately this is going to lead to the most complex integration regime we've ever envisioned for IT. By that I mean, we are going to have applications that span Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), public cloud, IaaS services, true private cloud, legacy applications, and many other types of services that we haven't even conceived of right now.
And understanding how to weave all of those different data sources, and all those different service sources, into coherent application framework that runs reliably and providers a continuous ongoing service to the business is essential. It must involve a degree of distribution that completely breaks most models. We're thinking about infrastructure, architecture, but also, data management, system management, security management, and as I said earlier, all the way out to even contractual management, and vendor management.
The arrangement of resources for the classes of applications that we are going to be building in the future are going to require deep, deep, deep thinking.
That leads to the fourth thing, and that is defining the metric we're going to use increasingly from a cost standpoint. And it is time. As the costs of computing and bandwidth continue to drop -- and they will continue to drop -- it means ultimately that the fundamental cost determinant will be, How long does it take an application to complete? How long does it take this transaction to complete? And that's not so much a throughput question, as it is a question of, "I have all these multiple sources that each on their own are contributing some degree of time to how this piece of work finishes, and can I do that piece of work in less time if I bring some of the work, for example, in-house, and run it close to the event?"
This relationship between increasing distribution of work, increasing distribution of data, and the role that time is going to play when we think about the event that we need to manage is going to become a significant architectural concern.
The fifth issue, that really places an enormous strain on IT is how we think about backing up and restoring data. Backup/restore has been an afterthought for most of the history of the computing industry.
As we start to build these more complex applications that have more complex data sources and more complex services -- and as these applications increasingly are the basis for the business and the end-value that we're creating -- we are not thinking about backing up devices or infrastructure or even subsystems.
We are thinking about what does it mean to backup, even more importantly, applications and even businesses. The issue becomes associated more with restoring. How do we restore applications in business across this incredibly complex arrangement of services and data locations and sources?
There's a new data regime that's emerging to support application development. How's that going to work -- the role the data scientists and analytics are going to play in working with application developers?
I listed five areas that are going to be very important. We haven't even talked about the new regime that's emerging to support application development and how that's going to work. The role the data scientists and analytics are going to play in working with application developers – again, we could go on and on and on. There is a wide array of considerations, but I think all of them are going to come back to the five that I mentioned.
Gardner: That's an excellent overview. One of the common themes that I keep hearing from you, Peter, is that there is a great unknown about the degree of complexity, the degree of risk, and a lack of maturity. We really are venturing into unknown territory in creating applications that draw on these resources, assets and data from these different clouds and deployment models.
When you have that degree of unknowns, that lack of maturity, there is a huge opportunity for a party to come in to bring in new types of management with maturity and with visibility. Who are some of the players that might fill that role? One that I am familiar with, and I think I have seen them on theCUBE is Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) with what they call Project New Hybrid IT Stack. We still don't know too much about it. I have also talked about Cloud28+, which is an ecosystem of global cloud environments that helps mitigate some of the concerns about a single hyperscaler or a handful of hyperscale providers. What's the opportunity for a business to come in to this problem set and start to solve it? What do you think from what you've heard so far about Project New Hybrid IT Stack at HPE?
Key cloud players
Burris: That's a great question, and I'm going to answer it in three parts. Part number one is, if we look back historically at the emergence of TCP/IP, TCP/IP killed the mini-computers. A lot of people like to claim it was microprocessors, and there is an element of truth to that, but many computer companies had their own proprietary networks. When companies wanted to put those networks together to build more distributed applications, the mini-computer companies said, "Yeah, just bridge our network." That was an unsatisfyingly bad answer for the users. So along came Cisco, TCP/IP, and they flattened out all those mini-computer networks, and in the process flattened the mini-computer companies.
HPE was one of the few survivors because they embraced TCP/IP much earlier than anybody else.
We are going to need the infrastructure itself to use deep learning, machine learning, and advanced technology for determining how the infrastructure is managed, optimized, and economized.
The second thing is that to build the next generations of more complex applications -- and especially applications that involve capabilities like deep learning or machine learning with increased automation -- we are going to need the infrastructure itself to use deep learning, machine learning, and advanced technology for determining how the infrastructure is managed, optimized, and economized. That is an absolute requirement. We are not going to make progress by adding new levels of complexity and building increasingly rich applications if we don't take full advantage of the technologies that we want to use in the applications -- inside how we run our infrastructures and run our subsystems, and do all the things we need to do from a hybrid cloud standpoint.
Ultimately, the companies are going to step up and start to flatten out some of these cloud options that are emerging. We will need companies that have significant experience with infrastructure, that really understand the problem. They need a lot of experience with a lot of different environments, not just one operating system or one cloud platform. They will need a lot of experience with these advanced applications, and have both the brainpower and the inclination to appropriately invest in those capabilities so they can build the type of platforms that we are talking about. There are not a lot of companies out there that can.
There are few out there, and certainly HPE with its New Stack initiative is one of them, and we at Wikibon are especially excited about it. It's new, it's immature, but HPE has a lot of piece parts that will be required to make a go of this technology. It's going to be one of the most exciting areas of invention over the next few years. We really look forward to working with our user clients to introduce some of these technologies and innovate with them. It's crucial to solve the next generation of problems that the world faces; we can't move forward without some of these new classes of hybrid technologies that weave together fabrics that are capable of running any number of different application forms.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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How modern architects transform the messy mix of hybrid cloud into a force multiplier
The next BriefingsDirect cloud strategies insights interview focuses on how IT architecture and new breeds of service providers are helping enterprises manage complex cloud scenarios.
We'll now learn how composable infrastructure and auto-scaling help improve client services, operations, and business goals attainment for a New York cloud services and architecture support provider.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help us learn what's needed to reach the potential of multiple -- and often overlapping -- cloud models is Arthur Reyenger, Cloud Practice Lead and Chief Cloud Architect at International Integrated Solutions (IIS) Ltd. in New York.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: How are IT architecture and new breeds of service providers coming together? What's different now from just a few years ago for architecture when we have cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud services?
Reyenger: Like the technology trends themselves, everything is accelerating. Before, you would have three-year or even five-year plans that were developed by the business. They were designed to reach certain business outcomes, they would design the technology to support that and it was then heads-down to build my rocket ship.
It's changed now to where it's a 12-month strategy that needs to be modular enough to be reevaluated at the end of those 12 months, and be re-architected -- almost as if it were made of Lego blocks.
Gardner: More moving parts, less time.
Reyenger: Absolutely.
Gardner: How do you accomplish that?
Reyenger: You leverage different cloud service providers, different managed services providers, and traditional value-added resellers, like International Integrated Solutions (IIS), in order to meet those business demands. We see a large push around automation, orchestration and auto-scaling. It's becoming a way to achieve those business initiatives at that higher speed.
Gardner: There is a cloud continuum. You are choosing which workloads and what data should be on-premises, and what should be in a cloud, or multi-clouds. Trying to do this as a regular IT shop -- buying it, specifying, integrating it -- seems like it demands more than the traditional IT skills. How is the culture of IT adjusting?
Reyenger: Every organization, including ours, has its own business transformation that they have to undergo. We think that we are extremely proactive. I see some companies that are developing in-house skill sets, and trying to add additional departments that would be more cloud-aware in order to meet those demands.
On the other side, you have folks that are leveraging partners like IIS, which has acumen within those spaces to supplement their bench, or they are building out a completely separate organization that will hopefully take them to the new frontier.
Gardner: Tell us about your company. What have you done to transform?
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Reyenger: IIS has spent 26 years building out an amazing book of business with amazing relationships with a lot of enterprise customers. But as times change, you need to be able to add additional practices like our cloud practice and our managed services practice. We have taken the knowledge we have around traditional IT services and then added in our internal developers and delivery consultants. They are very well-versed and aware of the new architecture. So we can marry the two together and help organizations reach that new end-state.
It's very easy for startups to go 100 percent to the cloud and just run with it. It's different when you have 2,000 existing applications and you want to move to the future as well. It's nice to have someone who understands both of those worlds -- and the appropriate way to integrate them.
Gardner: I suppose there is no typical cloud engagement, but what is a common hurdle that organizations are facing as they go from that traditional IT mindset to the more cloud-centric thinking and hybrid deployment models?
The cloud answer
Reyenger: The concept of auto-scaling or bursting has become very, very prevalent. You see that within different lines of business. Ultimately, they are all asking for essentially the same thing -- and the cloud is a pretty good answer.
At the same time, you really need to understand your business and the triggers. You need to be able to put the necessary intelligence together around those capabilities in order to make it really beneficial and align to the ebbs and flows of your business. So that's been one of the very, very common requests across the board.
We've built out solutions that include intellectual property from IIS and our developers, as well as cloud management tools built around backup to the cloud to eliminate tape and modernize backup for customers. This builds out a dedicated object store that customers can own that also tiers to the different public cloud providers out there.
And we've done this in a repeatable fashion so that our customers get the cloud consumption look and feel, and we've leveraged innovative contractual arrangements to allow customers to consume against the scope of work rather than on lease. We've been able to marry that with the different standardized offerings out there to give someone the head start that they need in order to achieve their objectives.
Gardner: You brought up the cloud consumption model. Organizations want the benefit of a public cloud environment and user experience for bursting, auto-scaling, and price efficiency. They might want to have workloads on-premises, to use a managed service, or take advantage of public clouds under certain circumstances.
How are you working with companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), for example, to provide composable auto-scaling capabilities with the look and feel of public cloud on their private cloud?
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Reyenger: Now it's becoming a multi-cloud strategy. It's one thing to say only on-premises and using one cloud. But using just one cloud has risk, and this is a problem.
We try to standardize everything through a single cloud management stack for our customers. We're agnostic to a whole slew of toolsets around both orchestration and automation. We want to help them achieve that.
Intelligent platform performance
We looked at some of the very unique things that HPE has done, specifically around their Synergy platform, to allow for cloud management and cloud automation to deliver true composable infrastructure. That has huge value around energizing a company's goals, strengthening their profitability, boosting productivity, and enhancing innovation. We've been able to extend that into the public cloud. So now we have customers that truly are getting the best of both worlds.
Composable infrastructure is having true infrastructure that you can deploy as code. It's being able to standardize on a single RESTful API set.
Gardner: How do you define composable infrastructure?
Reyenger: It's having true infrastructure that you can deploy as code. You'll hear a lot of folks say that and what it really means is being able to standardize on a single RESTful API set.
That allows your platform to have intelligence when you look at infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and then delivering things as either platform (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS) -- from either a DevOps approach, or from the lines of business directly to consumers. So it's the ability to bridge those two worlds.
Traditionally, you may have underlying infrastructure that doesn't have the intelligence or doesn't have the visibility into the cloud automation. So I may be scaling, but I can't scale into infinity. I really need an underlying infrastructure to be able to mold and adapt in order to meet those needs.
We're finally reaching the point where we have that visibility and we have that capability, thanks to software-defined data center (SDDC) and a platform to ultimately be able to execute on.
Gardner: When I think about composable infrastructure, I often wonder, "Who is the composer?" I know who composes the apps, that's the developer -- but who composes the infrastructure?
Reyenger: This gets to a lot of the digital transformation that we talked about in seeking different resources, or cultivating your existing resources to gain more of a developer's view.
But now you have IT operations and DevOps both able to come under a single management console. They are able to communicate effectively and then script on either side in order to compose based on the code requirements. Or they can put guardrails on different segments of their workloads in order to dictate importance or assign guidelines. The developers can ultimately make those requests or modify the environment.
Gardner: When you get to composable infrastructure in a data center or private cloud, that's fine. But that's sort of like 2D Chess. When I think about multi-cloud or hybrid cloud -- it's more like 3D Chess. So how do I compose infrastructure, and who is the composer, when it comes to deciding where to support a workload in a certain way, and at what cost?
Consult before composing
Reyenger: We offer a series of consulting services around the delivery of managed services and the actual development to take an existing cloud management stack -- whether that is Red Hat CloudForms, vRealize from VMware, or Terraform -- it really doesn't matter.
We are ultimately allowing that to be the single pane of glass, the single console. And then because it's RESTful API integrations into those public cloud providers, we're able to provide that transparency from that management interface, which mitigates risk and gives you control.
Then we deploy things like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible within those different virtual private clouds and within those public cloud fabrics. Then, using that cloud management stack, you can have uniformity and you can take that composition and that intelligence and bring it wherever you like -- whether that's based on geography or a particular cloud service provider preference.
There are many different ways to ultimately achieve that end-state. We just want to make sure that that standardization, to your point, doesn't get lost the second you leave that firewall.
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Gardner: We are in the early days of composability of infrastructure in a multi-cloud world. But as the complexity and scale increases, it seems likely to me that we are going to need to bring things like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) because humans doing this manually will run out of runway.
Projecting into the future, do you see a role for an algorithmic, programmatic approach putting in certain variables, certain thresholds, and contextual learning to then make this composable infrastructure capability part of a machine process?
Reyenger: The things that companies like HPE have done, and their new acquisition, Nimble, as well as at Red Hat, and several others in the industry, to leverage the intelligence they have from all of their different support calls and lifecycle management across applications allows them to provide feedback to the customer.
And in some cases, if you are tying it back from an automation engine that will actually give you the information as to how to solve your problem. A lot of the precursors to what you are talking about are already in the works and everyone is trying to be that data-cloud management company.
We will see more of that single pane of glass that they will leverage across multiple cloud providers.
It's really early to ultimately pick favorites, but you are going to see more standardization. Rather than having 50 different RESTful APIs that everyone is standardizing on and that are constantly changing, so that I have to provide custom integrations. What we will see is more of that single pane of glass they will leverage across multiple cloud providers. That will leverage a lot of the same automation and orchestration toolsets that we talked about.
Gardner: And HPE has their sights set on this with Project New Hybrid IT Stack?
Reyenger: 100 percent.
Gardner: Looking at composable infrastructure, auto-scaling, using things like HPE Synergy, if you're an enterprise and you do this right, how do you take this up to the C-Suite and say, "Aha, we told you so. Now give us more so we can do more"? In other words, how does this improve business outcomes?
Fulfilling the promise
Reyenger: Every organization is different. I've spent a good chunk of my career being tactically deployed within very large organizations that are trying to achieve certain goals.
For me, I like to go to a customer's 10-K SEC filing and look at the promises they've made to their investors. We want to ultimately be able to marry back what this IT investment will do for the short-term goals that they are all being judged against, as well as from both the key performance indicators (KPI) standpoint and from the health of the company.
It means meeting DevOps challenges and timelines, ruling out new green space workload issues, and taking data that sits within traditional business intelligence (BI) relational databases and giving access to some of that data to different departments. They should be able to run big data analytics against that data from those departments in real-time.
These are the types of testing methodologies that we like to set up so that we can help a customer actually rationalize what this means today in terms of dollars and cents and what it could mean in terms of that perceived value.
Gardner: When you do this well, you get agility, and you get to choose your deployment models. It seems to me that there's going to be a concept that arises of minimal viable cloud, or hybrid cloud.
Are we going to see IT costs at an operating level adjusted favorably? Is this something that ultimately will be so optimized -- with higher utilization, leveraging the competitive market for cloud services -- that meaningful decreases will occur in the total operating costs of IT in an organization?
An uphill road to lower IT costs
Reyenger: I definitely think that it's quite possible. The way that most organizations are set up today, IT operations rolls back into finance. So if you sit underneath the CFO, like most organizations do, and a request gets made by marketing or sales or another line of business -- it has to go up the chain, get translated, and then come back down.
A lot of times it's difficult to push a rock up a hill. You don't have all the visibility unless you can get back up to finance or back over to that line of business. If you are able to break down those silos, then I believe that your statement is 100 percent true.
But changing all of those internal controls for a lot of these organizations is very difficult, which is why some are deploying net-new teams to be ultimately the future of their internal IT service provider operations.
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Gardner: Arthur, I have been in this business long enough to know that every time we've gotten into the point where we think we are going to meaningfully decrease IT costs, some other new paradigm of IT comes up that requires a whole new round of investment. But it seems to me that this could be different this time, that we actually are getting to a standardized approach for supporting workloads and that traditional economics that impact any procurement service will become in effect here, too.
Mining to minimize risk
Reyenger: Absolutely. One of our big pushes has been around object storage. This still allows for traditional file- and block-level support. We are trying to help customers achieve that new economic view -- of which cloud approach ultimately provides them that best price point, but still gives them low risk, visibility, and control over their data.
I will give you an example. There is a very large financial exchange that had a lot of intellectual property (IP) data that they traditionally mined internally, and then they provided it back to different, smaller financial institutions as a service, as financial reports. A few years back, they came to us and said, "I really want to leverage the agility of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in terms of being able to spin up a huge Hadoop form and mine this data very, very quickly -- and leverage that without having to increase my overall cost. But I don't feel comfortable providing that data into S3 within AWS, where now they have two extra copies of my data as part of the service level agreement. So what do I do?"
And we ultimately stood up the same object storage service next to AWS, so you wouldn't have to pay any data eviction fees, and you could mine everything right there, leveraging the AWS Redshift, or Hadoop-as-a-service.
Then once these artifacts, or these reports, were created, they no longer had the IP. The reports came from the IP, but these are all roll-ups and comparisons, and now they are not sensitive to the company. We went ahead and put those into S3 and allowed Amazon to manage all of their customers' identity and access management to go ahead and get access to that -- and that all minimized risk for this exchange. We are able to prevent anyone outside of the organization to get behind the firewall to get at their data. You don't have to worry about the SLAs associated with keeping this stuff up and available and it became a really nice hybrid story.
We help customers gain all the benefits associated with cloud – without taking on any of the additional risk.
These are the types of projects that we really like to work on with customers, to be able to help them gain all the benefits associated with cloud – without taking on any of the additional risk, or the negatives, associated with jumping into cloud with both feet.
Gardner: You heard your customers, you saw a niche opportunity for object storage as a service, and you have put that together. I assume that you want a composable infrastructure to do that. So is this something on a HPE Synergy a future foundation?
Reyenger: HPE Synergy doesn't really have the disk density to get to the public cloud price point, but it does support object storage natively. So it's great from a DevOps standpoint for object storage. We definitely think that as time progresses and HPE continues down the Synergy roadmap that that cloud role will eventually fix itself.
A lot of the cloud role is centered on hyper-converged infrastructure. And in this kind of mantra, I don't see compute and storage growing at the same rates. I see storage growing considerably faster than the need for compute. So this is a way for us to be able to help supplement a Synergy deployment, or we can help our customers get the true ROI/TCO they are looking for out of the hyper-converged.
Gardner: So maybe the question I should ask is what storage providers are you using in order to make this economically viable?
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Reyenger: We are absolutely using the HPE Apollo storage line, and the different flavors of solid-state disks (SSD) down to SATA physical drives. And we are leveraging best-in-breed object storage software from Red Hat. We also have an OpenStack flavor as well.
We leverage things like automation and orchestration technologies, and our ServiceNow capabilities -- all married with our RIP in order to give customers the choice of buying this, deploying it, and having us layer services on top if you want or if you want to consume a fully managed service for something that's on-premises. I have a per-GB price and the same SLAs as those public cloud providers. So all of it's coming together to allow customers to really have the true choice and flexibility that everyone claimed you could years ago.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
You may also be interested in:
- As enterprises face mounting hybrid IT complexity, new management solutions beckon
- How mounting complexity, multi-cloud sprawl, and need for maturity hinder hybrid IT's ability to grow and thrive
- Get ready for the Post-Cloud World
- Inside story on HPC's AI role in Bridges 'strategic reasoning' research at CMU
- Philips teams with HPE on ecosystem approach to improve healthcare informatics-driven outcome
- Inside story: How Ormuco abstracts the concepts of private and public cloud across the globe
- How Nokia refactors the video delivery business with new time-managed IT financing models
- IoT capabilities open new doors for Miami telecoms platform provider Identidad IoT
- Inside story on developing the ultimate SDN-enabled hybrid cloud object storage environment
- How IoT and OT collaborate to usher in the data-driven factory of the future
- DreamWorks Animation crafts its next era of dynamic IT infrastructure
As enterprises face hybrid IT complexity, new management solutions beckon
The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst interview examines how new machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are being applied to hybrid IT complexity challenges.
We'll explore how mounting complexity and a lack of multi-cloud services management maturity must be solved in order for businesses to grow and thrive as digital enterprises.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to report on how companies and IT leaders are seeking new means to manage an increasingly complex transition to sustainable hybrid IT is Paul Teich, Principal Analyst at TIRIAS Research in Austin, Texas. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Paul, there's a lot of evidence that businesses are adopting cloud models at a rapid pace. There is also lingering concern about the complexity of managing so many fast-moving parts. We have legacy IT, private cloud, public cloud, software as a service (SaaS) and, of course, multi-cloud. So as someone who tracks technology and its consumption, how much has technology itself been tapped to manage this sprawl, if you will, across hybrid IT.
Teich: So far, not very much, mostly because of the early state of multi-cloud and the hybrid cloud business model. As you know, it takes a while for management technology to catch up with the actual compute technology and storage. So I think we are seeing that management is the tail of the dog, it's getting wagged by the rest of it, and it just hasn't caught up yet.
Gardner: Things have been moving so quickly with cloud computing that few organizations have had an opportunity to step back and examine what's actually going on around them -- never mind properly react to it. We really are playing catch up.
Teich: As we look at the options available, the cloud giants -- the public cloud services -- don't have much incentive to work together. So you are looking at a market where there will be third parties stepping in to help manage multi-cloud environments, and there's a lag time between having those services available and having the cloud services available and then seeing the third-party management solution step in.
Gardner: It's natural to see that a specific cloud environment, whether it's purely public like AWS or a hybrid like Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack, want to help their customers, but they want to help their customers all get to their solutions first and foremost. It's a natural thing. We have seen this before in technology.
There are not that many organizations willing to step into the neutral position of being ecumenical, of saying they want to help the customer first, manage it all from the first.
As we look to how this might unfold, it seems to me that the previous models of IT management -- agent-based, single-pane-of-glass, and unfortunately still in some cases spreadsheets and Post-It notes -- have been brought to bear on this. But we might be in a different ball game, Paul, with hybrid IT, that there's just too many moving parts, too much complexity, and that we might need to look at data-driven approaches. What is your take on that?
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Teich: I think that's exactly correct. One of the jokes in the industry right now is if you want to find your stranded instances in the cloud, cancel your credit card and AWS or Microsoft will be happy to notify you of all of the instances that you are no longer paying for because your credit card expired. It's hard to keep track of this, because we don't have adequate tools yet.
When you are an IT manager and you have a lot of folks on public cloud services, you don't have a full picture.
That single pane of glass, looking at a lot of data and information, is soon overloaded. When you are an IT manager, you are at a mid-sized or a large corporation, you have a lot of folks paying out-of-pocket right now, slapping a credit card down on public cloud services, so you don't have a full picture. Where you do have a picture, there are so many moving parts.
I think we have to get past having a screen full of data, a screen full of information, and to a point where we have insight. And that is going to require a new generation of tools, probably borrowing from some of the machine learning evolution that's happening now in pattern analytics.
Gardner: The timing in some respects couldn't be better, right? Just as we are facing this massive problem of complexity of volume and velocity in managing IT across a hybrid environment, we have some of the most powerful and cost-effective means to deal with big data problems just like that.
Life in the infrastructure
Paul, before we go further let's hear about you and your organization, and tell us, if you would, what a typical day is like in the life of Paul Teich?
Teich: At TIRIAS Research we are boutique industry analysts. By boutique we mean there are three of us -- three principal analysts; we have just added a few senior analysts. We are close to the metal. We live in the infrastructure. We are all former engineers and/or product managers. We are very familiar with deep technology.
My day tends to be first, a lot of reading. We look at a lot of chips, we look at a lot of service-level information, and our job is to, at a very fundamental level, take very complex products and technologies and surface them to business decision-makers, IT decision-makers, folks who are trying to run lines of business (LOB) and make a profit. So we do the heavy lifting on why new technology is important, disruptive, and transformative.
Gardner: Thanks. Let's go back to this idea of data-driven and analytical values as applied to hybrid IT management and complexity. If we can apply AI and machine learning to solve business problems outside of IT -- in such verticals as retail, pharmaceutical, transportation -- with the same characteristics of data volume, velocity, and variety, why not apply that to IT? Is this a case of the cobbler's kids having no shoes? You would think that IT would be among the first to do this.
Dig deep, gain insight
Teich: The cloud giants have already implemented systems like this because of necessity. So they have been at the front-end of that big data mantra of volume, velocity -- and all of that.
To successfully train for the new pattern recognition analytics, especially the deep learning stuff, you need a lot of data. You can't actually train a system usefully without presenting it with a lot of use cases.
The public clouds have this data. They are operating social media services, large retail storefronts, and e-tail, for example. As the public clouds became available to enterprises, the IT management problem ballooned into a big data problem. I don't think it was a big data problem five or 10 years ago, but it is now.
That's a big transformation. We haven't actually internalized what that means operationally when your internal IT department no longer runs all of your IT jobs anymore.
We are generating big data and that means we need big data tools to go analyze it and to get that relevant insight.
That's the biggest sea change -- we are generating big data in the course of managing our IT infrastructure now, and that means we need big data tools to go analyze it, and to get that relevant insight. It's too much data flowing by for humans to comprehend in real time.
Gardner: And, of course, we are also talking about islands of such operational data. You might have a lot of data in your legacy operations. You might have tier 1 apps that you are running on older infrastructure, and you are probably happy to do that. It might be very difficult to transition those specific apps into newer operating environments.
You also have multiple SaaS and cloud data repositories and logs. There's also not only the data within those apps, but there's the metadata as to how those apps are running in clusters and what they are doing as a whole. It seems to me that not only would you benefit from having a comprehensive data and analytics approach for your IT operations, but you might also have a workflow and process business benefit by being an uber analyst, by being on top of all of these islands of operational data.
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To me, moving toward a comprehensive intelligence and data analysis capability for IT is the gift that keeps giving. You would then be able to also provide insight for an uber approach to processes across your entire organization -- across the supply chains, across partner networks, and back to your customers. Paul, do you also see that there's an ancillary business benefit to having that data analysis capability, and not ceding it to your cloud providers?
Manage data, improve workflow
Teich: I do. At one end of the spectrum it's simply what do you need to do to keep the lights on, where is your data, all of it, in the various islands and collections and the data you are sharing with your supply chain as well. Where is the processing that you can apply to that data? Increasingly, I think, we are looking at a world in which the location of the stored data is more important than the processing power.
The management of all the data you have needs to segue into visible workflows.
We have processing power pretty much everywhere now. What's key is moving data from place to place and setting up the connections to acquire it. It means that the management of all the data you have needs to segue into visible workflows.
Once I know what I have, and I am managing it at a baseline effectively, then I can start to improve my processes. Then I can start to get better workflows, internally as well as across my supply chain. But I think at first it's simply, "What do I have going on right now?"
As an IT manager, how can I rein in some of these credit card instances, credit card storage on the public clouds, and put that all into the right mix. I have to know what I know first -- then I can start to streamline. Then I can start to control my costs. Does that make sense?
Gardner: Yes, absolutely. And how can you know which people you want to give even more credit to on their credit cards – and let them do more of what they are doing? It might be very innovative, and it might be very cost-effective. There might also be those wasting money, spinning their wheels, repaving cow paths, over and over again.
If you don't have the ability to make those decisions with insight, without the visibility, and then further analyze it as to how best to go about it – it seems to me a no-brainer.
It also comes at an auspicious time as IT is trying to re-factor its value to the organization. If in fact they are no longer running servers and networks and keeping the trains running on time, they have to start being more in the business of defining what trains should be running and then how to make them the best business engines, if you will.
If IT departments needs to rethink their role and step up their game, then they need to use technologies like advanced hybrid IT management from vendors with a neutral perspective. Then they become the overseers of operations at a fundamentally different level.
Data revelation, not revolution
Teich: I think that's right. It's evolutionary stuff. I don't think it's revolutionary. I think that in the same way you add servers to a virtual machine farm, as your demand increases, as your baseline demand increases, IT needs to keep a handle on costs -- so you can understand which jobs are running where and how much more capacity you need.
One of the things they are missing with random access to the cloud is bulk purchasing. And so at a very fundamental level, helping your organization manage which clouds you are spending on by aggregating the purchase of storage, aggregating the purchase of compute instances to get just better buying power, doing price arbitrage when you can. To me, those are fundamental qualities of IT going forward in a multi-cloud environment.
They are extensions of where we are today; it just doesn't seem like it yet. They have always added new servers to increasing internal capacity and this is just the next evolutionary step.
Gardner: It certainly makes sense that you would move as maturity occurs in any business function toward that orchestration, automation and optimization – rather than simply getting the parts in place. What you are describing is that IT is becoming more like a procurement function and less like a building, architecture, or construction function, which is just as powerful.
Not many people can make those hybrid IT procurement decisions without knowing a lot about the technology. Someone with just business acumen can't walk in and make these decisions. I think this is an opportunity for IT to elevate itself and become even more essential to the businesses.
Teich: The opportunity is a lot like the Sabre airline scheduling system that nearly every airline uses now. That's a fundamental capability for doing business, and it's separate from the technology of Sabre. It's the ability to schedule -- people and airplanes – and it's a lot like scheduling storage and jobs on compute instances. So I think there will be this step.
But to go back to the technology versus procurement, I think some element of that has always existed in IT in terms of dealing with vendors and doing the volume purchases on one side, but also having some architect know how to compose the hardware and the software infrastructure to serve those applications.
Connect the clouds
We're simply translating that now into a multi-cloud architecture. How do I connect those pieces? What network capacity do I need to buy? What kind of storage architectures do I need? I don't think that all goes away. It becomes far more important as you look at, for example, AWS as a very large bag of services. It's very powerful. You can assemble it in any way you want, but in some respect, that's like programming in C. You have all the power of assembly language and all the danger of assembly language, because you can walk up in the memory and delete stuff, and so, you have to have architects who know how to build a service that's robust, that won't go down, that serves your application most efficiently and all of those things are still hard to do.
So, architecture and purchasing are both still necessary. They don't go away. I think the important part is that the orchestration part now becomes as important as deploying a service on the side of infrastructure because you've got multiple sets of infrastructure.
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Gardner: For hybrid IT, it really has to be an enlightened procurement, not just blind procurement. And the people in the trenches that are just buying these services -- whether the developers or operations folks -- they don't have that oversight, that view of the big picture to make those larger decisions about optimization of purchasing and business processes.
That gets us back to some of our earlier points of, what are the tools, what are the management insights that these individuals need in order to make those decisions? Like with Sabre, where they are optimizing to fill every hotel room or every airplane seat, we're going to want in hybrid IT to fill every socket, right? We're going to want all that bare metal and all those virtualization instances to be fully optimized -- whether it's your cloud or somebody else's.
It seems to me that there is an algorithmic approach eventually, right? Somebody is going to need to be the keeper of that algorithm as to how this all operates -- but you can't program that algorithm if you don't have the uber insights into what's going on, and what works and what doesn't.
What's the next step, Paul, in terms of the technology catching up to the management requirements in this new hybrid IT complex environment?
Teich: People can develop some of that experience on a small scale, but there are so many dimensions to managing a multi-cloud, hybrid IT infrastructure business model. It's throwing off all of this metadata for performance and efficiency. It's ripe for machine learning.
We're moving so fast right now that if you are an organization of any size, machine learning has to come into play to help you get better economies of scale.
In a strong sense, we're moving so fast right now that if you are an organization of any size, machine learning has to come into play to help you get better economies of scale. It's just going to be looking at a bigger picture, it's going to be managing more variables, and learning across a lot more data points than a human can possibly comprehend.
We are at this really interesting point in the industry where we are getting deep-learning approaches that are coming online cost effectively; they can help us do that. They have a little while to go before they are fully mature. But IT organizations that learn to take advantage of these systems now are going to have a head start, and they are going to be more efficient than their competitors.
Gardner: At the end of the day, if you're all using similar cloud services then that differentiation between your company and your competitor is in how well you utilize and optimize those services. If the baseline technologies are becoming commoditized, then optimization -- that algorithm-like approach to smartly moving workloads and data, and providing consumption models that are efficiency-driven -- that's going to be the difference between a 1 percent margin and a 5 percent margin over time.
The deep-learning difference
Teich: The important part to remember is that these machine-training algorithms are somewhat new, so there are several challenges with deploying them. First is the transparency issue. We don't quite yet know how a deep-learning model makes specific decisions. We can't point to one aspect and say that aspect is managing the quality of our AWS services, for example. It's a black box model.
We can't yet verify the results of these models. We know they are being efficient and fast but we can't verify that the model is as efficient as it could possibly be. There is room for improvement over the next few years. As the models get better, they'll leave less money on the table.
We're also validating that when you build a machine-learning model that it's covering all the situations you want it to cover. You need an audit trail for specific sets of decisions, especially with data that is subject to regulatory constraints. You need to know why you made decisions.
So the net is, once you are training a machine-learning model, you have to keep retraining it over time. Your model is not going to do the same thing as your competitor's model. There is a lot of room for differentiation, a lot of room for learning. You just have to go into it with your eyes open that, yeah, occasionally things will go sideways. Your model might do something unexpected, and you just have to be prepared for that. We're still in the early days of machine learning.
Gardner: You raise an interesting point, Paul, because even as the baseline technology services in the multi-cloud era become commoditized, you're going to have specific, unique, and custom approaches to your own business' management.
Your hybrid IT optimization is not going to be like that of any other company. I think getting that machine-learning capability attuned to your specific hybrid IT panoply of resources and assets is going to be a gift that keeps giving. Not only will you run your IT better, you will run your business better. You'll be fleet and agile.
If some risk arises -- whether it's a cyber security risk, a natural disaster risk, a business risk of unintended or unexpected changes in your supply chain or in your business environment -- you're going to be in a better position to react. You're going to have your eyes to the ground, you're going to be well tuned to your specific global infrastructure, and you'll be able to make good choices. So I am with you. I think machine learning is essential, and the sooner you get involved with it, the better.
Before we sign off, who are the vendors and some of the technologies that we will look to in order to fill this apparent vacuum on advanced hybrid IT management? It seems to me that traditional IT management vendors would be a likely place to start.
Who's in?
Teich: They are a likely place to start. All of them are starting to say something about being in a multi-cloud environment, about being in a multi-cloud-vendor environment. They are already finding themselves there with virtualization, and the key is they have recognized that they are in a multi-vendor world.
There are some start-ups, and I can't name them specifically right now. But a lot of folks are working on this problem of how do I manage hybrid IT: In-house IT, and multi-cloud orchestration, a lot of work going on there. We haven't seen a lot of it publicly yet, but there is a lot of venture capital being placed.
I think this is the next step, just like PCs came in the office, smartphones came in the office as we move from server farms to the clouds, going from cloud to multi-cloud, it's attracting a lot of attention. The hard part right now is nailing whom to place your faith in. The name brands that people are buying their internal IT from right now are probably good near-term bets. As the industry gets more mature, we'll have to see what happens.
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Gardner: We did hear a vision described on this from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) back in June at their Discover event in Las Vegas. I'm expecting to hear quite a bit more on something they've been calling New Hybrid IT Stack that seems to possess some of the characteristics we've been describing, such as broad visibility and management.
So at least one of the long-term IT management vendors is looking in this direction. That's a place I'm going to be focusing on, wondering what the competitive landscape is going to be, and if HPE is going to be in the leadership position on hybrid IT management.
Teich: Actually, I think HPE is the only company I've heard from so far talking at that level. Everybody is voicing some opinion about it, but from what I've heard, it does sound like a very interesting approach to the problem.
Microsoft actually constrained their view on Azure Stack to a very small set of problems, and is actively saying, "No, I don't." If you're looking at doing virtual machine migration and taking advantage of multi-cloud for general-purpose solutions, it's probably not something that you want to do yet. It was very interesting for me then to hear about the HPE Project New Hybrid IT Stack and what HPE is planning to do there.
Gardner: For Microsoft, the more automated and constrained they can make it, the more likely you'd be susceptible or tempted to want to just stay within an Azure and/or Azure Stack environment. So I can appreciate why they would do that.
Before we sign off, one other area I'm going to be keeping my eyes on is around orchestration of containers, Kubernetes, in particular. If you follow orchestration of containers and container usage in multi-cloud environments, that's going to be a harbinger of how the larger hybrid IT management demands are going to go as well. So a canary in the coal mine, if you will, as to where things could get very interesting very quickly.
The place to be
Teich: Absolutely. And I point out that the Linux Foundation's CloudNativeCon in early December 2017 looks like the place to be -- with nearly everyone in the server infrastructure community and cloud infrastructure communities signing on. Part of the interest is in basically interchangeable container services. We'll see that become much more important. So that sleepy little technical show is going to be invaded by "suits," this year, and we're paying a lot of attention to it.
Gardner: Yes, I agree. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. Paul, how can our listeners and readers best follow you to gain more of your excellent insights?
Teich: You can follow us at www.tiriasresearch.com, and also we have a page on Forbes Tech, and you can find us there.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
You may also be interested in:
- How mounting complexity, multi-cloud sprawl, and need for maturity hinder hybrid IT's ability to grow and thrive
- Get Ready for the Post-Cloud World
- Inside story on HPC's AI role in Bridges 'strategic reasoning' research at CMU
- Philips teams with HPE on ecosystem approach to improve healthcare informatics-driven outcome
- Inside story: How Ormuco abstracts the concepts of private and public cloud across the globe
- How Nokia refactors the video delivery business with new time-managed IT financing models
- IoT capabilities open new doors for Miami telecoms platform provider Identidad IoT
- Inside story on developing the ultimate SDN-enabled hybrid cloud object storage environment
- How IoT and OT collaborate to usher in the data-driven factory of the future
- DreamWorks Animation crafts its next era of dynamic IT infrastructure
How mounting complexity, multi-cloud sprawl, and need for maturity hinder hybrid IT's ability to grow and thrive
The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst interview examines how the economics and risk management elements of hybrid IT factor into effective cloud adoption and choice.
We'll now explore how mounting complexity and a lack of multi-cloud services management maturity must be solved in order to have businesses grow and thrive as digital enterprises.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Tim Crawford, CIO Strategic Advisor at AVOA in Los Angeles joins us to report on how companies are managing an increasingly complex transition to sustainable hybrid IT. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Tim, there's a lot of evidence that businesses are adopting cloud models at a rapid pace. But there is also lingering concern about how to best determine the right mix of cloud, what kinds of cloud, and how to mitigate the risks and manage change over time.
As someone who regularly advises chief information officers (CIOs), who or which group is surfacing that is tasked with managing this cloud adoption and its complexity within these businesses? Who will be managing this dynamic complexity?
Crawford: For the short-term, I would say everyone. It's not as simple as it has been in the past where we look to the IT organization as the end-all, be-all for all things technology. As we begin talking about different consumption models -- and cloud is a relatively new consumption model for technology -- it changes the dynamics of it. It's the combination of changing that consumption model -- but then there's another factor that comes into this. There is also the consumerization of technology, right? We are "democratizing" technology to the point where everyone can use it, and therefore everyone does use it, and they begin to get more comfortable with technology.
It's not as it used to be, where we would say, "Okay, I'm not sure how to turn on a computer." Now, businesses may be more familiar outside of the IT organization with certain technologies. Bringing that full-circle, the answer is that we have to look beyond just IT. Cloud is something that is consumed by IT organizations. It's consumed by different lines of business, too. It's consumed even by end-consumers of the products and services. I would say it's all of the above.
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Gardner: The good news is that more and more people are able to -- on their own – innovate, to acquire cloud services, and they can factor those into how they obtain business objectives. But do you expect that we will get to the point where that becomes disjointed? Will the goodness of innovation become something that spins out of control, or becomes a negative over time?
Crawford: To some degree, we've already hit that inflection-point where technology is being used in inappropriate ways. A great example of this -- and it's something that just kind of raises the hair on the back of my neck -- is when I hear that boards of directors of publicly traded companies are giving mandates to their organization to "Go cloud."
The board should be very business-focused and instead they're dictating specific technology -- whether it's the right technology or not. That's really what this comes down to.
What's the right use of cloud – in all forms, public, private, software as a service (SaaS). What's the right combination to use for any given application?
Another example is folks that try and go all-in on cloud but aren't necessarily thinking about what's the right use of cloud – in all forms, public, private, software as a service (SaaS). What's the right combination to use for any given application? It's not a one-size-fits-all answer.
We in the enterprise IT space haven't really done enough work to truly understand how best to leverage these new sets of tools. We need to both wrap our head around it but also get in the right frame of mind and thought process around how to take advantage of them in the best way possible.
Another example that I've worked through from an economic standpoint is if you were to do the math, which I have done a number of times with clients -- you do the math to figure out what's the comparative between the IT you're doing on-premises in your corporate data center with any given application -- versus doing it in a public cloud.
Think differently
If you do the math, taking an application from a corporate data center and moving it to public cloud will cost you four times as much money. Four times as much money to go to cloud! Yet we hear the cloud is a lot cheaper. Why is that?
When you begin to tease apart the pieces, the bottom line is that we get that four-times-as-much number because we're using the same traditional mindset where we think about cloud as a solution, the delivery mechanism, and a tool. The reality is it's a different delivery mechanism, and it's a different kind of tool.
When used appropriately, in some cases, yes, it can be less expensive. The challenge is you have to get yourself out of your traditional thinking and think differently about the how and why of leveraging cloud. And when you do that, then things begin to fall into place and make a lot more sense both organizationally -- from a process standpoint, and from a delivery standpoint -- and also economically.
Gardner: That "appropriate use of cloud" is the key. Of course, that could be a moving target. What's appropriate today might not be appropriate in a month or a quarter. But before we delve into more … Tim, tell us about your organization. What's a typical day in the life for Tim Crawford like?
It's not tech for tech's sake, rather it's best to say, "How do we use technology for business advantage?"
Crawford: I love that question. AVOA stands for that position in which we sit between business and technology. If you think about the intersection of business and technology, of using technology for business advantage, that's the space we spend our time thinking about. We think about how organizations across a myriad of different industries can leverage technology in a meaningful way. It's not tech for tech's sake, and I want to be really clear about that. But rather it's best to say, "How do we use technology for business advantage?"
We spend a lot of time with large enterprises across the globe working through some of these challenges. It could be as simple as changing traditional mindsets to transformational, or it could be talking about tactical objectives. Most times, though, it's strategic in nature. We spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to solve these big problems and to change the way that companies function, how they operate.
A day in a life of me could range from, if I'm lucky, being able to stay in my office and be on the phone with clients, working with folks and thinking through some of these big problems. But I do spend a lot of time on the road, on an airplane, getting out in the field, meeting with clients, understanding what people really are contending with.
I spent well over 20 years of my career before I began doing this within the IT organization, inside leading IT organizations. It's incredibly important for me to stay relevant by being out with these folks and understanding what they're challenged by -- and then, of course, helping them through their challenges.
Any given day is something new and I love that diversity. I love hearing different ideas. I love hearing new ideas. I love people who challenge the way I think.
It's an opportunity for me personally to learn and to grow, and I wish more of us would do that. So it does vary quite a bit, but I'm grateful that the opportunities that I've had to work with have been just fabulous, and the same goes for the people.
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Gardner: I've always enjoyed my conversations with you, Tim, because you always do challenge me to think a little bit differently -- and I find that very valuable.
Okay, let's get back to this idea of "appropriate use of cloud." I wonder if we should also expand that to be "appropriate use of IT and cloud." So including that notion of hybrid IT, which includes cloud and hybrid cloud and even multi-cloud. And let's not forget about the legacy IT services.
How do we know if we're appropriately using cloud in the context of hybrid IT? Are there measurements? Is there a methodology that's been established yet? Or are we still in the opening innings of how to even measure and gain visibility into how we consume and use cloud in the context of all IT -- to therefore know if we're doing it appropriately?
The monkey-bread model
Crawford: The first thing we have to do is take a step back to provide the context of that visibility -- or a compass, as I usually refer to these things. You need to provide a compass to help understand where we need to go.
If we look back for a minute, and look at how IT operates -- traditionally, we did everything. We had our own data center, we built all the applications, we ran our own servers, our own storage, we had the network – we did it all. We did it all, because we had to. We, in IT, didn't really have a reasonable alternative to running our own email systems, our own file storage systems. Those days have changed.
Fast-forward to today. Now, you have to pick apart the pieces and ask, "What is strategic?" When I say, "strategic," it doesn't mean critically important. Electrical power is an example. Is that strategic to your business? No. Is it important? Heck, yeah, because without it, we don't run. But it's not something where we're going out and building power plants next to our office buildings just so we can have power, right? We rely on others to do it because there are mature infrastructures, mature solutions for that. The same is true with IT. We have now crossed the point where there are mature solutions at an enterprise level that we can capitalize on, or that we can leverage.
Part of the methodology I use is the monkey bread example. If you're not familiar with monkey bread, it's kind of a crazy thing where you have these balls of dough. When you bake it, the balls of dough congeal together and meld. What you're essentially doing is using that as representative of, or an analogue to, your IT portfolio of services and applications. You have to pick apart the pieces of those balls of dough and figure out, "Okay. Well, these systems that support email, those could go off to Google or Microsoft 365. And these applications, well, they could go off to this SaaS-based offering. And these other applications, well, they could go off to this platform."
And then, what you're left with is this really squishy -- but much smaller -- footprint that you have to contend with. That problem in the center is much more specific -- and arguably that's what differentiates your company from your competition.
Whether you run email [on-premises] or in a cloud, that's not differentiating to a business. It's incredibly important, but not differentiating. When you get to that gooey center, that's the core piece, that's where you put your resources in, that's what you focus on.
This example helps you work through determining what's critical, and -- more importantly -- what's strategic and differentiating to my business, and what is not. And when you start to pick apart these pieces, it actually is incredibly liberating. At first, it's a little scary, but once you get the hang of it, you realize how liberating it is. It brings focus to the things that are most critical for your business.
Identify opportunities where cloud makes sense – and where it doesn't. It definitely is one of the most significant opportunities for most IT organizations today.
That's what we have to do more of. When we do that, we identify opportunities where cloud makes sense -- and where it doesn't. Cloud is not the end-all, be-all for everything. It definitely is one of the most significant opportunities for most IT organizations today.
So it's important: Understand what is appropriate, how you leverage the right solutions for the right application or service.
Gardner: IT in many organizations is still responsible for everything around technology. And that now includes higher-level strategic undertakings of how all this technology and the businesses come together. It includes how we help our businesses transform to be more agile in new and competitive environments.
So is IT itself going to rise to this challenge, of not doing everything, but instead becoming more of that strategic broker between in IT functions and business outcomes? Or will those decisions get ceded over to another group? Maybe enterprise architects, business architects, business process management (BPM) analysts? Do you think it's important for IT to both stay in and elevate to the bigger game?
Changing IT roles and responsibilities
Crawford: It's a great question. For every organization, the answer is going to be different. IT needs to take on a very different role and sensibility. IT needs to look different than how it looks today. Instead of being a technology-centric organization, IT really needs to be a business organization that leverages technology.
The CIO of today and moving forward is not the tech-centric CIO. There are traditional CIOs and transformational CIOs. The transformational CIO is the business leader first who happens to have responsibility for technology. IT, as a whole, needs to follow the same vein.
For example, if you were to go into a traditional IT organization today and ask them what's the nature of their business, ask them to tell you what they do as an administrator, as a developer, to help you understand how that's going to impact the company and the business -- unfortunately, most of them would have a really hard time doing that.
The IT organization of the future, will articulate clearly the work they're doing and how that impacts their customers and their business, and how making different changes and tweaks will impact their business. They will have an intimate knowledge of how their business functions much more than how the technology functions. That's a very different mindset, that's the place we have to get to for IT on the whole. IT can't just be this technology organization that sits in a room, separate from the rest of the company. It has to be integral, absolutely integral to the business.
Gardner: If we recognize that cloud is here to stay -- but that the consumption of it needs to be appropriate, and if we're at some sort of inflection point, we're also at the risk of consuming cloud inappropriately. If IT and leadership within IT are elevating themselves, and upping their game to be that strategic player, isn't IT then in the best position to be managing cloud, hybrid cloud and hybrid IT? What tools and what mechanisms will they need in order to make that possible?
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Crawford: Theoretically, the answer is that they really need to get to that level. We're not there, on the whole, yet. Many organizations are not prepared to adopt cloud. I don't want to be a naysayer of IT, but I think in terms of where IT needs to go on the whole, on the sum, we need to move into that position where we can manage the different types of delivery mechanisms -- whether it's public cloud, SaaS, private cloud, appropriate data centers -- those are all just different levers we can pull depending on the business type.
Businesses change, customers change, demand changes and revenue comes from different places. IT needs to be able to shift gears just as fast and in anticipation of where the company goes.
As you mentioned earlier, businesses change, customers change, demand changes, and revenue comes from different places. In IT, we need to be able to shift gears just as fast and be prepared to shift those gears in anticipation of where the company goes. That's a very different mindset. It's a very different way of thinking, but it also means we have to think of clever ways to bring these tools together so that we're well-prepared to leverage things like cloud.
The challenge is many folks are still in that classic mindset, which unfortunately holds back companies from being able to take advantage of some of these new technologies and methodologies. But getting there is key.
Gardner: Some boards of directors, as you mentioned, are saying, "Go cloud," or be cloud-first. People are taking them at that, and so we are facing a sort of cloud sprawl. People are doing micro services and as developers spinning up cloud instances and object storage instances. Sometimes they'll keep those running into production; sometimes they'll shut them down. We have line of business (LOB) managers going out and acquiring services like SaaS applications, running them for a while, perhaps making them a part of their standard operating procedures. But, in many organizations, one hand doesn't really know what the other is doing.
Are we at the inflection point now where it's simply a matter of measurement? Would we stifle innovation if we required people to at least mention what it is that they're doing with their credit cards or petty cash when it comes to IT and cloud services? How important is it to understand what's going on in your organization so that you can begin a journey toward better management of this overall hybrid IT?
Why, oh why, oh why, cloud?
Crawford: It depends on how you approach it. If you're doing it from an IT command-and-control perspective, where you want to control everything in cloud -- full stop, that's failure right out of the gate. But if you're doing it from a position of -- I'm trying to use it as an opportunity to understand why are these folks leveraging cloud, and why are they not coming to IT, and how can I as CIO be better positioned to be able to support them, then great! Go forth and conquer.
The reality is that different parts of the organization are consuming cloud-based services today. I think there's an opportunity to bring those together where appropriate. But at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself a very important question. It's a very simple question, but you have to ask it, and it has to do with each of the different ways that you might leverage cloud. Even when you go beyond cloud and talk about just traditional corporate data assets -- especially as you start thinking about Internet of things (IoT) and start thinking about edge computing -- you know that public cloud becomes problematic for some of those things.
The important question you have to ask yourself is, "Why?" A very simple question, but it can have a really complicated answer. Why are you using public cloud? Why are you using three different forms of public cloud? Why are you using private cloud and public cloud together?
Once you begin to ask yourself those questions, and you keep asking yourself that question … it's like that old adage. Ask yourself why three times and you kind of get to the core as the true reason why. You'll bring greater clarity as to the reasons, and typically the business reasons, of why you're actually going down that path. When you start to understand that, it brings clarity to what decisions are smart decisions -- and what decisions maybe you might want to think about doing differently.
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Gardner: Of course, you may begin doing something with cloud for a very good reason. It could be a business reason, a technology reason. You'll recognize it, you gain value from it -- but then over time you have to step back with maturity and ask, "Am I consuming this in such a way that I'm getting it at the best price-point?" You mentioned a little earlier that sometimes going to public cloud could be four times as expensive.
So even though you may have an organization where you want to foster innovation, you want people to spread their wings, try out proofs of concept, be agile and democratic in terms of their ability to use myriad IT services, at what point do you say, "Okay, we're doing the business, but we're not running it like a good business should be run." How are the economic factors driven into cloud decision-making after you've done it for a period of time?
Cloud's good, but is it good for business?
Crawford: That's a tough question. You have to look at the services that you're leveraging and how that ties into business outcomes. If you tie it back to a business outcome, it will provide greater clarity on the sourcing decisions you should make.
For example, if you're spending $5 to make $6 in a specialty industry, that's probably not a wise move. But if you're spending $5 to make $500, okay, that's a pretty good move, right? There is a trade-off that you have to understand from an economic standpoint. But you have to understand what the true cost is and whether there's sufficient value. I don't mean technological value, I mean business value, which is measured in dollars.
If you begin to understand the business value of the actions you take -- how you leverage public cloud versus private cloud versus your corporate data center assets -- and you match that against the strategic decisions of what is differentiating versus what's not, then you get clarity around these decisions. You can properly leverage different resources and gain them at the price points that make sense. If that gets above a certain amount, well, you know that's not necessarily the right decision to make.
Economics plays a very significant role -- but let's not kid ourselves. IT organizations haven't exactly been the best at economics in the past. We need to be moving forward. And so it's just one more thing on that overflowing plate that we call demand and requirements for IT, but we have to be prepared for that.
Gardner: There might be one other big item on that plate. We can allow people to pursue business outcomes using any technology that they can get their hands on -- perhaps at any price – and we can then mature that process over time by looking at price, by finding the best options.
But the other item that we need to consider at all times is risk. Sometimes we need to consider whether getting too far into a model like a public cloud, for example, that we can't get back out of, is part of that risk. Maybe we have to consider that being completely dependent on external cloud networks across a global supply chain, for example, has inherent cyber security risks. Isn't it up to IT also to help organizations factor some of these risks -- along with compliance, regulation, data sovereignty issues? It's a big barrel of monkeys.
Before we sign off, as we're almost out of time, please address for me, Tim, the idea of IT being a risk factor mitigator for a business.
Safety in numbers
Crawford: You bring up a great point, Dana. Risk -- whether it is risk from a cyber security standpoint or it could be data sovereignty issues, as well as regulatory compliance -- the reality is that nobody across the organization truly understands all of these pieces together.
It really is a team effort to bring it all together -- where you have the privacy folks, the information security folks, and the compliance folks -- that can become a united team.
It really is a team effort to bring it all together -- where you have the privacy folks, the information security folks, and the compliance folks -- that can become a united team. I don't think IT is the only component of that. I really think this is a team sport. In any organization that I've worked with, across the industry it's a team sport. It's not just one group.
It's complicated, and frankly, it's getting more complicated every single day. When you have these huge breaches that sit on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and other publications, it's really hard to get clarity around risk when you're always trying to fight against the fear factor. So that's another balancing act that these groups are going to have to contend with moving forward. You can't ignore it. You absolutely shouldn't. You should get proactive about it, but it is complicated and it is a team sport.
Gardner: Some take-aways for me today are that IT needs to raise its game. Yet again, they need to get more strategic, to develop some of the tools that they'll need to address issues of sprawl, complexity, cost, and simply gaining visibility into what everyone in the organization is – or isn't -- doing appropriately with hybrid cloud and hybrid IT.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
You may also be interested in:
- Inside story on HPC's AI role in Bridges 'strategic reasoning' research at CMU
- Case study: How HCI-powered private clouds accelerate efficient digital transformation
- Philips teams with HPE on ecosystem approach to improve healthcare informatics-driven outcome
- Inside story: How Ormuco abstracts the concepts of private and public cloud across the globe
- How Nokia refactors the video delivery business with new time-managed IT financing models
- IoT capabilities open new doors for Miami telecoms platform provider Identidad IoT
- Inside story on developing the ultimate SDN-enabled hybrid cloud object storage environment
- How IoT and OT collaborate to usher in the data-driven factory of the future
- DreamWorks Animation crafts its next era of dynamic IT infrastructure
Case study: How HCI-powered private clouds accelerate efficient digital transformation
The next BriefingsDirect cloud efficiency case study examines how a world-class private cloud project evolved in the financial sector.
We'll now learn how public cloud-like experiences, agility, and cost structures are being delivered via a strictly on-premises model built on hyper-converged infrastructure for a risk-sensitive financial services company.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Jim McKittrick joins to help explore the potential for cloud benefits when retaining control over the data center is a critical requirement. He is Senior Account Manager at Applied Computer Solutions (ACS) in Huntington Beach, California. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Many enterprises want a private cloud for security and control reasons. They want an OpEx-like public cloud model, and that total on-premises control. Can you have it both ways?
McKittrick: We are showing that you can. People are learning that the public cloud isn't necessarily all it has been hyped up to be, which is what happens with newer technologies as they come out.
Gardner: What are the drivers for keeping it all private?
McKittrick: Security, of course. But if somebody actually analyzes it, a lot of times it will be about cost and data access, and the ease of data egress because getting your data back can sometimes be a challenge.
Also, there is a realization that even though I may have strict service-level agreements (SLAs), if something goes wrong they are not going to save my business. If that thing tanks, do I want to give that business away? I have some clients who absolutely will not.
Gardner: Control, and so being able to sleep well at night.
McKittrick: Absolutely. I have other clients that we can speak about who have HIPAA requirements, and they are privately held and privately owned. And literally the CEO says, "I am not doing it." And he doesn't care what it costs.
Gardner: If there were a huge delta between the price of going with a public cloud or staying private, sure. But that deltais closing. So you can have the best of both worlds -- and not pay a very high penalty nowadays.
McKittrick: If done properly, certainly from my experience. We have been able to prove that you can run an agile, cloud-like infrastructure or private cloud as cost-effectively -- or even more cost effectively -- than you can in the public clouds. There are certainly places for both in the market.
Gardner: It's going to vary, of course, from company to company -- and even department to department within a company -- but the fact is that that choice is there.
McKittrick: No doubt about it, it absolutely is.
Gardner: Tell us about ACS, your role there, and how the company is defining what you consider the best of hybrid cloud environments.
McKittrick: We are a relatively large reseller, about $600 million. We have specialized in data center practices for 27 years. So we have been in business quite some time and have had to evolve with the IT industry.
We have a head start on what's really coming down the pipe -- we are one to two years ahead of the general marketplace.
Structurally, we are fairly conventional from the standpoint that we are a typical reseller, but we pride ourselves on our technical acumen. Because we have some very, very large clients and have worked with them to get on their technology boards, we feel like we have a head start on what's really coming down the pipe -- we are maybe one to two years ahead of the general marketplace. We feel that we have a thought leadership edge there, and we use that as well as very senior engineering leadership in our organization to tell us what we are supposed to be doing.
Gardner: I know you probably can't mention the company by name, but tell us about a recent project that seems a harbinger of things to come.
Hyper-convergent control
McKittrick: It began as a proof of concept (POC), but it's in production, it's live globally.
I have been with ACS for 18 years, and I have had this client for 17 of those years. We have been through multiple data center iterations.
When this last one came up, three things happened. Number one, they were under tremendous cost pressure -- but public cloud was not an option for them.
The second thing was that they had grown by acquisition, and so they had dozens of IT fiefdoms. You can imagine culturally and technologically the challenges involved there. Nonetheless, we were told to consolidate and globalize all these operations.
Thirdly, I was brought in by a client who had run the US presence for this company. We had created a single IT infrastructure in the US for them. He said, "Do it again for the whole world, but save us a bunch of money." The gauntlet was thrown down. The customer was put in the position of having to make some very aggressive choices. And so he effectively asked me bring them "cool stuff."
You could give control to anybody in the organization across the globe and they would be able to manage it.
They asked, "What's new out there? How can we do this?" Our senior engineering staff brought a couple of ideas to the table, and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) was central to that. HCI provided the ability to simplify the organization, as well as the IT management for the organization. You could give control of it to anybody in the organization across the globe and they would be able to manage it, working with partners in other parts of the world.
Gardner: Remote management being very important for this.
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McKittrick: Absolutely, yes. We also gained failover capabilities, and disaster recovery within these regional data centers. We ended going from -- depending on whom you spoke to -- somewhere between seven to 19 data centers globally, down to three. We were able to consolidate down to three. The data center footprint shrank massively. Just in the US, we went to one data center; we got rid of the other data center completely. We went from 34 racks down to 3.5.
Gardner: Hyper-convergence being a big part of that?
McKittrick: Correct, that was really the key, hyper-convergence and virtualization.
The other key enabling technology was data de-duplication, so the ability to shrink the data and then be able to move it from place to place without crushing bandwidth requirements, because you were only moving the changes, the change blocks.
Gardner: So more of a modern data lifecycle approach?
McKittrick: Absolutely. The backup and recovery approach was built in to the solution itself. So we also deployed a separate data archive, but that's different than backup and recovery. Backup and recovery were essentially handled by VMware and the capability to have the same machine exist in multiple places at the same time.
Gardner: Now, there is more than just the physical approach to IT, as you described it, there is the budgetary financial approach. So how do they maybe get the benefit of the OpEx approach that people are fond of with public cloud models and apply that in a private cloud setting?
Budget benefits
McKittrick: They didn't really take that approach. I mean we looked at it. We looked at essentially leasing. We looked at the pay-as-you-go models and it didn't work for them. We ended up doing essentially a purchase of the equipment with a depreciation schedule and traditional support. It was analyzed, and they essentially said, "No, we are just going to buy it."
Gardner: So total cost of ownership (TCO) is a better metric to look at. Did you have the ability to measure that? What were some of the metrics of success other than this massive consolidation of footprint and better control over management?
McKittrick: We had to justify TCO relative to what a traditional IT refresh would have cost. That's what I was working on for the client until the cost pressure came to bear. We then needed to change our thinking. That's when hyper-convergence came through.
What we would have spent on just hardware and infrastructure costs, not including network and bandwidth -- would have been $55 million over five years, and we ended up doing it for $15 million.
The cost analysis was already done, because I was already costing it with a refresh, including compute and traditional SAN storage. The numbers I had over a five-year period – just what we would have spent on hardware and infrastructure costs, and not including network and bandwidth – would have been $55 million over five years, and we ended up doing it for $15 million.
Gardner: We have mentioned HCI several times, but you were specifically using SimpliVity, which is now part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Tell us about why SimpliVity was a proof-point for you, and why you think that's going to strengthen HPE's portfolio.
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McKittrick: This thing is now built and running, and it's been two years since inception. So that's a long time in technology, of course. The major factors involved were the cost savings.
As for HPE going forward, the way the client looked at it -- and he is a very forward-thinking technologist -- he always liked to say, "It's just VMware." So the beauty of it from their perspective – was that they could just deploy on VMware virtualization. Everyone in our organization knows how to work with VMware, we just deploy that, and they move things around. Everything is managed in that fashion, as virtual machines, as opposed to traditional storage, and all the other layers of things that have to be involved in traditional data centers.
The HCI-based data centers also included built-in WAN optimization, built-in backup and recovery, and were largely on solid-state disks (SSDs). All of the other pieces of the hardware stack that you would traditionally have -- from the server on down -- folded into a little box, so to speak, a physical box. With HCI, you get all of that functionality in a much simpler and much easier to manage fashion. It just makes everything easier.
Gardner: When you bring all those HCI elements together, it really creates a solution. Are there any other aspects of HPE's portfolio, in addition now to SimpliVity, that would be of interest for future projects?
McKittrick: HPE is able to take this further. You have to remember, at the time, SimpliVity was a widget, and they would partner with the server vendors. That was really it, and with VMware.
Now with HPE, SimpliVity can really build out their roadmap. There is all kinds of innovation that's going to come.
Now with HPE, SimpliVity has behind them one of the largest technology companies in the world. They can really build out their roadmap. There is all kinds of innovation that's going to come. When you then pair that with things like Microsoft Azure Stack and HPE Synergy and its composable architecture -- yes, all of that is going to be folded right in there.
I give HPE credit for having seen what HCI technology can bring to them and can help them springboard forward, and then also apply it back into things that they are already developing. Am I going to have more opportunity with this infrastructure now because of the SimpliVity acquisition? Yes.
Gardner: For those organizations that want to take advantage of public cloud options, also having HCI-powered hybrid clouds, and composable and automated-bursting and scale-out -- and soon combining that multi-cloud options via HPE New Stack – this gives them the best of all worlds.
Learn How to Transform
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McKittrick: Exactly. There you are. You have your hybrid cloud right there. And certainly one could do that with traditional IT, and still have that capability that HPE has been working on. But now, [with SimpliVity HCI] you have just consolidated all of that down to a relatively simple hardware approach. You can now quickly deploy and gain all those hybrid capabilities along with it. And you have the mobility of your applications and workloads, and all of that goodness, so that you can decide where you want to put this stuff.
Gardner: Before we sign off, let's revisit this notion of those organizations that have to have a private cloud. What words of advice might you give them as they pursue such dramatic re-architecting of their entire IT systems?
A people-first process
McKittrick: Great question. The technology was the easy part. This was my first global HCI roll out, and I have been in the business well over 20 years. The differences come when you are messing with people -- moving their cheese, and messing with their rice bowl. It's profound. It always comes back to people.
The people and process were the hardest things to deal with, and quite frankly, still are. Make sure that everybody is on-board. They must understand what's happening, why it's happening, and then you try to get all those people pulling in the same direction. Otherwise, you end up in a massive morass and things don't get done, or they become almost unmanageable.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
You may also be interested in:
- Inside story on HPC's AI role in Bridges 'strategic reasoning' research at CMU
- Philips teams with HPE on ecosystem approach to improve healthcare informatics-driven outcome
- Inside story: How Ormuco abstracts the concepts of private and public cloud across the globe
- How Nokia refactors the videodelivery business with new time-managed IT financing models
- IoT capabilities open new doors for Miami telecoms platform provider Identidad IoT
- Inside story on developing the ultimate SDN-enabled hybrid cloud object storage environment
- How IoT and OT collaborate tousher in the data-driven factory of the future
- DreamWorks Animation crafts its next era of dynamic IT infrastructure