IT infrastructure: DIY, templates or vendor ecosystem?

Longform
(Image: StockFresh)

11 April 2016

Arkphire is an EMC partner and offers VCE’s converged infrastructure. VCE came about when VMware, Cisco and EMC jointly formed a new company to produce VBlocks, a factory-built integrated infrastructure.

There are reference architectures out there, and pretty much every major vendor is using those to try to standardise what they’re doing. But it’s still the responsibility of the end user to look after the component parts, whether they come from one vendor or not. But this is changing. The tipping point on this came when VCE decided the responsibility would be with the vendor to make certain that the interoperability of all components was a factory matter and not an end user matter. That’s changed things around quite a bit, Howard Roberts, Arkphire

There are reference architectures out there, and pretty much every major vendor is using those to try to standardise what they’re doing. But it’s still the responsibility of the end user to look after the component parts, whether they come from one vendor or not. But this is changing. The tipping point on this came when VCE decided the responsibility would be with the vendor to make certain that the interoperability of all components was a factory matter and not an end user matter. That’s changed things around quite a bit, Howard Roberts, Arkphire

“There are reference architectures out there, and pretty much every major vendor is using those to try to standardise what they’re doing. But it’s still the responsibility of the end user to look after the component parts, whether they come from one vendor or not,” said Roberts.

He went to point out that the interoperability of components is the responsibility of the end user and not the manufacturer.

“But this is changing. The tipping point on this came when VCE decided the responsibility would be with the vendor to make certain that the interoperability of all components was a factory matter and not an end user matter. That’s changed things around quite a bit,” he said.

One size fits none
The view taken by Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s head of enterprise group hardware Declan Hogan is that when it comes to infrastructure there is no one size fits all approach, because different companies have different needs.

“What we’re seeing generally is that people are looking at a hybrid model. They’re looking to build their own infrastructure when required and then also have the capability to either burst out into a public cloud type environment or use public cloud where required,” he said.

“There will always be small companies that will put everything into Azure or Amazon, or into Office 365 if that can meet all of their requirements. Typically, as you move up the scale of enterprise, what you discover is that companies have custom applications with dependencies on back-end systems and so on that may not transfer into, say, a vendor cloud or into an Amazon or Azure deployment. So it’s not a one size fits all situation — it needs to be looked at individually from a company basis.”

According to Hogan, Irish companies are still building significant amounts of their own infrastructure for a variety of reasons. The first and most significant is control, but there are others.

Retaining control
“If you put everything out into a third party infrastructure, obviously you lose control. There can also be custom environments that people have that don’t lend themselves well to being put into off-premises, and then sometimes when you look at the costs of some of these services, they’re not necessarily that cost effective,” he said.

“They may look inexpensive from a capital expenditure point of view because you don’t invest, but you find that the operating expenditure can be pretty heavy. So it can actually be more expensive sometimes to do it externally than to do it internally.”

In addition, there are other issues to consider, such as service level agreements (SLAs).

“That’s a big one for a lot of people, because obviously a lot of companies nowadays rely hugely on IT. If they decide to not build it and give it to somebody else to run, is that provider prepared to deliver you the kind of SLA that you’d be happy with if you had it onsite? That’s important,” said Hogan. “Unless you are a massive company, you’re also going to be stuck with what’s on offer. The larger vendors aren’t going to be interested in varying their offerings just for you.”

Hybrid reality
Hogan reiterated that the hybrid approach is going to be best for most companies, leaving some aspects of the company’s infrastructure on site and outsourcing other parts.

“Most mid-sized companies are running a lot of different types of systems that have interdependencies on each other. You find the invoicing system has a dependency on the customer relationship management or the shipping system, or be linked into both, but could be in a different platform. If you start to move something out you break those interdependencies and then you have some issues,” he said.

The challenge that customers have to face is that if you are engineering a solution that is today giving you innovation but which tomorrow needs to give you performance and scalability, you will generally pick a technology that is in the public cloud. The cost of entry is a lot lower and you don’t need a lot of infrastructure to get up and running, John Abel, Oracle

The challenge that customers have to face is that if you are engineering a solution that is today giving you innovation but which tomorrow needs to give you performance and scalability, you will generally pick a technology that is in the public cloud. The cost of entry is a lot lower and you don’t need a lot of infrastructure to get up and running, John Abel, Oracle

“It’s great to put everything into the cloud if you can, and there are certain things that work very well there, but there are obviously considerations so it’s not for everybody. We’re saying to people you should transform to a hybrid infrastructure because that’s really probably what’s going to deliver your requirements.”

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