The Journey to Converged Infrastructure Via Prevalidated Designs

To effectively architect your system to take advantage of the cloud in your data centre requires a solid, well-considered strategy in consultation with the appropriate outside experts. When you get this right, the result is a transformation of an enterprise’s service delivery with all the competitive advantages your business needs.

The first step is usually to partner with an appropriate managed services and outsourcing provider with the experience, expertise and top-level industry partnerships (all important boxes to tick) to work with your enterprise to get the best job done. It is well worth doing you proper due diligence and homework before you commit to a service provider, because cloud implementation can have its issues.

When evaluating a service provider, it’s important to consider its technical, operational and financial skills. You need to thoroughly evaluate exactly where you are currently at, to plan for where you want to be. A good question to ask is what pre-scoping facilities does the partner offer. Logicalis Australia, for example, offers a Cloud Advisory Workshop, a Cloud Readiness Assessment and Cloud Implementation and Migration Planning workshop.

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A good provider will also monitor and manage a cloud environment around the clock so your enterprise has the maximum operational efficiency, freeing your staff from complex data centre duties, to focus on core profit-generating business.

Such a partner can combine its proven systems and data centre methodology to reduce costs and accelerate the deployment of a cloud system for your organisation – be it public, private or hybrid – so it can be implemented in an effective and rapid timeframe to ensure your success.

Of course, the top service providers in turn partner with other major technology players, like VMware, Netapp, and Cisco to name just a few. The quality of these partnerships is in itself a good measure of the dependability and value of any particular outside service provider – the big technology companies don’t agree to such partnerships lightly.

Of course, in its enterprise cloud strategy, your ideal service provider partner should also combine the technical staff as well as the best technologies to deliver the most effective IT cloud services to your organisation. Logicalis offers the Logicalis Private Virtual Data Centre (LPVDC) providing a complete infrastructure solution and the Logicalis Virtual Workspace Cloud Edition, a complete hosted desktop offering.

Prevalidated design advantage

Top service providers typically offer prevalidated designs, such as VSPEX or Flexpod, for very good reasons, so your enterprise benefits from the accumulated knowledge and cloud wisdom of past years. These facilitate the journey to converged infrastructure, enabling enterprises to buy applications, servers, networking and storage together as pre-integrated or validated solutions rather than as individual components.

In a recent report, Gartner found that converged infrastructure is “a 3.5% slice of the total IT infrastructure business, but one growing at over 50% annually, hitting $83 billion this year”.

IT giant Cisco says that prevalidated designs are based on common use cases and current engineering system priorities. These “incorporate a broad set of technologies, features and applications, all which have been thoroughly tested and document with the aim of ensuring a faster, more reliable and fully predictable deployment for your enterprise”.

Popular prevalidated solutions

VSPEX is a virtualisation solution offered by Cisco and EMC, that helps deploy virtual machines in a range of sizes, to meet application needs. Cisco says that EMC VSPEX, with Cisco Unified Data Center is “a validated reference configuration which delivers a virtualised data center in a rack composed of leading computing, networking, storage, and infrastructure software components”.

FlexPod is a integrated computing, networking, and storage solution developed by Cisco and NetApp and there are versions for large enterprises, high capacity performance for specialized workloads, and even for small to medium sized enterprises. NetApp says that “The unique appeal of the FlexPod is how it can deliver these benefits of Converged Infrastructure while still being flexible.  It starts with the combination of best of breed components from VMware, Netapp, Cisco, along with a pre-validated design that still accommodates flexibility in scale and configuration.”

So, it can be a great comfort to enterprises who partner with external experts to draw on such expertise and experience as evidenced by prevalidated designs and big-end of town partnerships themselves. The journey towards converged infrastructure is much safe and more secure when an enterprise has an appropriate, forward-thinking professional guide.

To find out more how Logicalis can help you transform your data centre, click here.

The Partner Strategy for 3rd Platform Success

The IT tide seems to be turning away from organisations taking on the challenge of owning and operating their own internal data centres – they are turning instead to outsourcing to expert service providers and taking up outside managed services.

New research by KPMG concludes that outsourcing has become a key part of a broader enterprise operations strategy and that shared services and outsourcing are on the increase.

KPMG has found that: “One in four enterprise buyers are reinvesting heavily in their global shared services operations, while 70% are continuing to make (largely moderate) investments in their outsourcing delivery,” the KPMG report says. “This is driven by technology advancements and automation and the rampant globalization of enterprise supply chains and business ecosystems.

“There is a clear move towards integrated global services models that incorporate both shared services and outsourcing. The long and short of this is that 93% of enterprises today have shared services and 96% are outsourcing some element of their back office IT and business operations, while 27% are actually reducing their investments in their own internal business units. ”

It seems the vast and varied challenges of catering for the 3rd platform are becoming just too daunting for organisations – seeking to focus on their core business and profits – to manage internally. Of course, the outsourcing – partnering trend is easy to understand in the context of the glacial issues currently confronting today’s infrastructure and operations (I&O) managers. The 3rd platform has its foundation in the hugely disruptive forces of mobile computing, social networking, cloud services, and Big Data analytics technologies.

Research house IDC forecasts that today’s unprecedented pace of technological change means that, within five years – by 2020 – most organisations will simply stop managing their own infrastructure. They will turn instead to on-premise and hosted managed services for their existing IT assets. For new services, they will increasingly turn to dedicated and shared cloud offerings in service provider data centres.

These are some of the key findings of new IDC research which has also forecast that by 2018, the construction of ‘service provider mega-data centres’ – the primary server location for large collocation and cloud service providers – will take up nearly three-quarters of global data centre construction, based on space.

The IDC Report highlights the evolution of the datacentre: “Data centre and server rooms – closets are no longer just the places where organisations house their IT assets. The datacenter must serve as the primary point of engagement and information exchange with employees, partners, and customers in today’s interconnected world. The datacenter is also the foundation for new business models where leveraging large volumes of data and highly elastic compute resources are critical to delivering better insight and a superior product/user experience. This requires that data centres reliably deliver large and highly variable amounts of transaction, content serving, and analytic capacity on time, with no delays and no excuses.”

And this line in the report outlines why the (near) future role of the CIO and the IT department will likely be very different from today: “In this environment, building and running data centres as well as managing IT assets at the edge can no longer be a part-time or occasional job”.

Separate Gartner research hammers home the current challenging environment and why enterprise IT approaches must change: “Mobile and the proliferation of data are having dramatic impact and pressure on the supporting I&O infrastructure. The number of devices that need to be supported, and the amount of data being created everyday are growing exponentially. All this data is having a dramatic impact upstream on servers, storage, networking, facilities and IT operations, not to mention creating new security challenges. Just extending what I&O has done the last five to 10 years will no longer work, as many organizations cannot continue to scale doing business as usual.”

The trend towards ‘service provider mega-datacentres’ is not the only one pointing to the importance of enterprises partnering with the best expert service provider. IDC points to the growing popularity of ‘aaS’ (As-A-Service) offerings. In a November 2014 report, IDC says: “software as a service (SaaS) will continue to dominate public IT cloud services spending, accounting for 70% of 2014 cloud services expenditures. This is largely because most customer demand is at the application level.

“The second largest public IT cloud services category will be infrastructure as a service (IaaS), boosted by cloud storage’s 31% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the forecast period. Platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud storage services will be the fastest growing categories, driven by major upticks in developer cloud services adoption and big data-driven solutions, respectively.”

So the overall message seems to be that the traditional ‘do-it-yourself’ and ‘go-it-alone’ approach to IT and infrastructure management is no longer a feasible success strategy. Only by drawing on the expertise, experience and professionalism of expert external service providers, can organisations hope to be able to thrive and prosper on the 3rd platform and beyond.

Preparing for ‘The Internet of Things’

While the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) may sound like an exciting approaching future where everything is blissfully connected, it may be a bad dream for infrastructure and operations managers struggling to keep their data centres relevant.

The IoT is just one of the unstoppable trends impacting CIOs and enterprises, along with the cloud, mobility social networking and Big Data. Other potentially disruptive technologies include software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage, network function virtualisation, plus extreme low-energy processors and webscale-integrated infrastructure.

All of these demand an overhaul of past data centre infrastructure, design and management practices. If CIOs are not already involved in modernising their data centre, they may already be falling behind their competitors.

The IoT is part of the impending ‘big picture’ disruption for IT and it’s forecast to be a very powerful transformative influence for society overall and for most industries. It can mean many things, from web-connected refrigerators, to in-built GPS systems for motor vehicles and huge driverless mining trucks piloted from thousands of kilometres away. Huge, driveless, automated haul trucks, for example, are already being used by Rio Tinto in the Western Australian mining industry.

Research house Gartner defines IoT as ” the network of dedicated physical objects (things) that contain embedded technology to sense or interact with their internal state or external environment. The IoT comprises an ecosystem that includes things, communication, applications and data analysis”.

Gartner forecasts that the top three industry verticals being hit by the IoT will be manufacturing, utilities and transportation, which, by 2015, will have 736 million connected things being used. By 2015, Gartner says the consumer sector will have 2.9 billion connected things, increasing to 13 billion by 2020. They believe the automotive sector will show the highest IoT growth rate (96%) by 2015.

No enterprise can dodge the IoT bullet train and Gartner declares that business has no choice but to pursue it just like they’ve done with the consumerisation of IT. They have some advice for IT departments on how data centres need to adapt to today’s unstoppable trends, like IoT.

• Enterprises now need to think beyond traditional data centre models around build, lease or refurbishment to options such as colocation or outsourcing.
• There needs to be a more holistic approach to data centre modernisation, encompassing the overall facility, which has not been a priority for too many businesses.
• Enterprises need to plan and implement a data centre modernisation strategy whether that involves building and populating a new data centre, modernising an existing one or sourcing externally. They should focus on sourcing data centre capacity, follow best practices in building a new data centre, and revamp their data centre infrastructure management.

While today’s technology users – consumers and employees – expect user-friendliness and simplicity when interacting with business, the back end is becoming ever more complicated and the IoT will only makes things worse. CIOs must deal with this conundrum and many are finding that the best strategy is to partner with an experienced external service provider, like Logicalis. The DIY approach has been proven to be dangerous.

IDC forecasts that by 1919, most organisations will stop managing their own infrastructure: “They will make greater use of on-premise and hosted managed services for their existing IT assets, and turn to dedicated and shared cloud offerings in service provider data centres for new services. This will result in the consolidation and retirement of some existing internal datacenters, particularly at the low end. At the same time, service providers will continue their race to build, remodel, and acquire data centres to meet the growing demand for capacity.”

The goal for modernising data centre infrastructure to have it thrive in the looming IoT environment, is to transition it from the traditional, consolidated and virtualised environment which is already struggling to cope. Logicalis has strategies to develop data centres that are efficient, automated and service oriented. The end result can be reduced management complexity, cost reduction and growth.

It is all too easy to succumb to the uncertainty and fear of historic IT trends such as the IoT, but there is experienced, professional help available to ensure that enterprises can capitalise on these trends, rather than be intimidated by them.