Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Here are the rest of my thoughts from the recent Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit (HCTS) with The 451 Group in London. Be sure to read Part 1.
Do Less with Less
Recent 451 addition, Tony Bishop, hosted Digital Realty in a panel that saw the wholesale data center behemoth admit to seeing smaller KW pools from customers with intensified expectations of one-stop shopping from their data center providers, and a need to be more in touch with the need of agile apps. BBC validated the trend by exemplifying its use of Salesforce.com while simultaneously refreshing its SAP footprint and classifying the data in that system for future manipulation. At the same time, the company leverages Google (1bn video users per month) to deliver video content to its online customers. The move to a hybrid model allows it to free up internal data center space by leveraging things like SaaS to replace legacy email and CRM platforms. However, as the company increases its complexity of suppliers, it has demanded a service catalogue and single sign-on from its vendors in order to reduce complexity to it end-users.
So does that mean everyone is trying to tie together more of the stack with facilities and app intelligence in order to do more? On the contrary, they’re trying to do less with less. An interesting concept from CohesiveFT, that resigned the legacy mantra of doing more with less as passé. The reason was that people want to connect fixed assets (large data center capacity) into variable assets (i.e. flexible cloud) driving the ability to do less (less burdensome work day to day) with a lot less (less responsibility and cost of underlying infrastructure in the long term). In summation, data centers were designed for operations, while enterprise IT, leveraging the variable assets, is being designed for purpose. As the HSBC representative emphasized, enterprises today must have a strategy around classifying services and their fulfillment models. The orientation needs to commence from business strategy down in order to get a better view of cloud and data center requirements.
How much to invest in future data centers?
As has often been discussed, the future role of the Operations Manager will inevitably turn to one of Service Orchestrator. The data center infrastructure continues to commoditize, and open source technologies are the proof point. Take for example, the Open Compute initiative that many believe is the signal for the end of the line for IT servers. As Chris Swan pointed out, with such massive Technical Debt nowadays, it is becoming highly efficient to reduce your technical debt through things like Open Compute Technology. Even companies like Google, that created Hadoop and Mapreduce for internal infrastructure efficiency, are now seeing tremendous take-up by their friends at Microsoft and Apple. And if Google is setting the stage for emulation, bear in mind that its self-built data centers house what Gartner considers to be the world’s 4th biggest server builder: Google itself. The concentration then for operators (whether enterprise or MSP) is to orchestrate deployment and higher utilization higher up the stack.
Best Execution Venue
As Service Orchestrator, or broker, the IT/Ops manager, it can get incredibly confusing to choose from over 270 Cloud Infrastructure (IaaS and PaaS) providers, and a myriad of SaaS providers with growth rates faster than any other segment of technology. And this has created a new breed of service providers, such as Gravitant. The company had a customer that tried AWS as its foray into the cloud, but was disappointed by the lack of meaningful SLA available. In leveraging Gravitant to choose between 5 different providers, including AWS, the company found that Terremark and Savvis were more utilized due especially to backup and DR requirements. The broker helped to mitigate the difference in charges and SLAs that can hinder, and sometimes fool, enterprise users.
It’s all about chatty apps
We live in an increasingly collaborative business-place, and these apps are no longer seen as friendly social media outlets for one’s random thoughts. Rather, the surge in popularity that apps like Lync have brought to the business place, have also brought additional demands too. One look at the number of PowerShell commandlets available for Lync, and there is a rapid understanding of the core function such an app can have on all business communications and collaboration alike. More critically, these collaborative apps are driving many of today’s architectures, and seeing much faster life cycles than previous disruptive technologies.
To exemplify the point, 451’s Alan Pelz-Sharpe took a look at the history of the collaborative marketplace. The market evolution started with document management & knowledge management systems pre-2004. Then around 2004 email systems of Exchange and Outlook exploded globally, as pivot points for collaboration and shared documentation, calendaring, etc. This was followed by departmental shared network drives that quickly became overwhelmed. After 2008 there was the viral growth of SharePoint in the market place, followed up in 2011/12 with cloud based file sharing and mobile synch. The point is that nothing goes away, but most industries are seeing disruption cycles getting shorter and shorter, meaning that tools must adapt to this market frame; teams that leverage tools that adapt to agility and can pivot faster than competitors in the market place will produce winning operations teams in the future.