Infrastructure Blog

We’ve seen a lot of tech trends take shape over the past 18 months. Keeping a close eye on how infrastructure is impacted, it’s been interesting to listen to technology executives sharing that the cloud is not an infrastructure omni solution. To balance agility, cost and control, a hybrid solution is required. Most technology leaders agree that a cloud-based infrastructure brings the agility needed to adapt faster to market conditions and explore new options quicker, with lower cost and risk. What is often forgotten is that the financial expenditure category (e.g. OPEX for cloud, CAPEX for in-house) can play an important role in the decision-making process as to where to host a certain workload. Hybrid cloud trend continues to gain momentum The benefits of running compute and storage services in-house are often underappreciated. For example, a finely tuned yet dynamic in-house environment may allow your teams to develop more complex solutions faster. Therefore, it’s crucial for tech leaders to decide the level of commitment and control they need first. The more benefits you get from being able to make a longer commitment to the workload and/or the more control you can assert to achieve higher efficiencies, the closer to home you should have the compute and storage. And investment continues. IDC is forecasting cloud infrastructure spending to grow 12% to $74.3 billion for 2021, while non-cloud infrastructure is expected to grow 2.7% to $58.9 billion after two years of declines. As always, the right path depends on the unique needs of a company, as well as the marketplace itself. A successful hybrid approach addresses the following challenges: ARCHITECTURE: To be agile in a fast-changing landscape, CIOs and tech leaders should consider leveraging hyperconverged and dynamic compute, storage and network technologies to deliver service-oriented applications where possible. This requires a high level of visibility combined with highly optimized and automated deployment processes. A robust architecture management platform will help address the operational aspects of availability, security, performance, economics and change (ASPECs). In today’s business climate, many cloud originated technologies and practices can be transposed onto “on-prem” compute and storage. ORGANIZATION: Culture is foundational to the success of our next generation infrastructure operations capabilities. How teams manage chaos, embrace change, or are able to rapidly recover (instead of trying to prevent every possible disaster scenario) determines a positive outcome. This is where leaders should invest in cloud skills, even if still primarily on-prem, as well as organize around the common shared services (e.g. SSO, database, storage, compute etc.) that go across the domain specific business requirements. PROCESS: Devops and ITIL are, in essence, different sides of the same coin. Managing IT activities and assets still centers around good process and workflows -- automated or embedded in the application, or not. Continually improving these is critical as the ongoing digital transformations continue to change the landscape. So, embrace SRE, agile and other technology centric approaches. Leaders should look at automating as much as possible because it drives standardization and speed. But don’t forget an automated bad process is still a bad process, only faster. ROADMAP: Agile infrastructure requires a plan. Below are the 3 key phases that will create a continuous improvement loop. Visibility : You can’t manage or improve what you don’t know. Invest in finding out what you have and how the system interacts internally and externally. Measure : Define the metrics that matter. In SRE they are SLOs that measure the customer experience. Failure to meet the SLO must have consequences. Not the monetary kind but an action that moves the metric toward a better value. Control : Develop the technologies, methods and skills to be able to drive the key metrics in the desired directions. Your IT Infrastructure will be a competitive advantage when you are able to solve business problems quickly, have the controls to manage investments efficiently, and map a path that provides data-informed insights to all corners of the business. Learn more about cloud infrastructure challenges and how you can overcome them. Contact Edward Wustenhoff to get started!

Companies are looking to improve their infrastructure’s systemic qualities -- availability, security, performance, economics and change -- and set up their organizations for future success by aligning better to market dynamics and through benchmarking against known best practices. Recently, we looked at the 2020 effect of transformation and enhanced work capabilities. Building on that, we also know the key objective is to adopt new technologies to leverage as a competitive weapon. That means deeply aligning business and product teams to IT to catch up and keep up with a continually and rapidly changing technology landscape, especially where existing processes and organizational capabilities are most impacted. After decades of underestimating the original IT mission, which resulted in adoption of new technologies directly into business organizations, a disconnected and misaligned ecosystem of infrastructure services has emerged in many organizations. Now, we find ourselves in a time where many organizations are looking around, seeing these challenges and wonder how to move ahead. The first step is to identify what silos have been created and what gaps still remain between IT and the business units. Then, develop the strategy for how to best fill these gaps and build bridges to the future state. Lastly, it is important to understand what the urgency, risk and effort for each initiative is. To drive toward these desired results, we developed three tools to adapt to the new paradigm:

Technical flexibility and workforce agility have never been more important than in 2020. As data requirements and basic routines of work and productivity have evolved, so must the solutions. One of the biggest steps forward a company can take today in their transformation journey is actually nothing new at all – it’s the software defined wide area network, or SD-WAN. Move faster, save money At the core, SD-WAN is all about cost savings and speed. Immediate ROI is not something you usually see in IT. But that’s one of the many benefits SD-WAN brings. In fact, some StrataFusion clients have seen year-over-year cost reductions of more than 80 percent when looking at infrastructure costs over network, while improving capacity by 600 percent. Just think of significantly reducing telecommunication circuit costs and the ability to manage your network in the Cloud, versus on-premises equipment and the onboarding of new site locations. SD-WAN opens the door to automation for routine and ever-increasing tasks, policy control, as well as improved management to scale, simplify and keep things moving in an “always on” and increasingly remote network environment. Especially during a pandemic lockdown! The compelling business case SD-WAN enables a business to be more flexible with its underlying network technology. It’s also helpful in assisting businesses that are more ready to embark, which means quantifying the ROI, not just pure dollar payback but the progress with reliability, speed, cloud deployments, integrations, and even M&A activities. Real-time analytics are another upside. Network World recently reported that “analytics have moved from a nice-to-have feature to a must-have, particularly in the growing land of SD-WAN where it’s increasingly important to digest large volumes of data quickly in order to respond to threats and changing network conditions.” Most small and mid-sized businesses will need to move forward with speed to quickly adapt to industry and social needs. It’s also an opportunity to realize cost savings, digital readiness and increased network performance, says StrataFusion Partner Mark Egan . The bottom line is that while many have been transitioning successfully to this solution for some time, some are still reluctant. But fear not! All you need is fractional strategists, architects and implementers to frame the business case. We’ve done it before – successfully – and we are ready to help your team. Contact us today and let’s get started!

The data landscape continues to change as technology evolves, which is bringing new challenges for IT leaders to manage growing data needs. In our increasingly digitized world, there is a fast-growing disconnect between data center providers and compute and storage products. CIOs, CISOs and other business leaders know not all workloads are suitable for the public clouds. Most have also come to recognize that running your own datacenter is not the best way to deliver compute and storage services to your business colleagues. As a result, we are seeing a boom in the use of datacenter services to house highly converged compute and storage systems. When we look at Datacenter services, two key metrics stand out that consumers should care about -- cost per kilowatt (kW) per month, representing the impact on the budget, and kilowatt per square foot, representing how much compute and storage capacity fits the space rented. Both of these metrics are primarily influenced by the robustness of the datacenter build, specifically how efficient power (and thus heat) can be cooled. This is where the divide manifests itself. Most established datacenter providers are really managed as a real estate business like a shopping mall -- getting marquee tenants to drive the future sale of the building. Delivering efficient power, cooling and space services is only a means to an end. As a result, spaces can typically cool about 400W per square foot[1], or about 10kW per rack. Older datacenters support half of that. This has not changed much during the last decade as reliance has been on the equipment and rack vendors to solve local cooling challenges. On the other hand, compute and storage vendors are creating more and more dense systems that require more power. Think about needing 1,200W per square foot, or even dramatically more when you look at solutions that cram 20kW in a third of a typical rack. In order to cool that much power, you need water cooling and specialized racks, which is a very intrusive, complex and expensive retrofit from the existing air-cooling systems. While this will not happen overnight, there are a few smaller and newer datacenter providers that have the capability. I predict they will be busy the next five years as the low-density space providers try to catch up to the compute and storage vendors’ power demands. CIOs have more responsibility than even before, and a solid compute and storage infrastructure is crucial. So be mindful of the divide between what your favorite hardware vendor sells you and what your neighborhood datacenter provider can support.

We are living in a new age of sustainable thinking. Individuals and businesses are becoming more focused on controlling waste – of all kinds — and working to reduce impact. Whether recycling at home, driving a more efficient car, or working to evolve the process in a company’s supply chain, reducing waste comes in many forms. When deciding on the right cloud strategy for your business, I hope this point of view on Economic Waste Factors will be helpful as you weigh options. Waste of Money Most organizations compare hardware quotes to the monthly cost of a cloud service and try to justify it in the context of a single project and purely based on the cost of a set consumption, maybe including a growth factor but rarely includes a projected decrease over time. However, planning and deploying yourself creates waste. To illustrate this, the below graph shows a common Compute and Storage consumption scenario and its impact of having to buy ahead.