CLOUD INTEGRATED STORAGE (CIS) THAT PROVIDE CREATIVE PURCHASING OPPORTUNITIES FOR CUSTOMERS

Enterprises are transitioning mission-critical workloads to public cloud storage as the cloud storage industry consolidates in the backdrop. Several recommendations are outlined for CIOs to ensure business continuity and lower total cost of ownership.

IMPACTS:

•           The cloud storage industry is failing to provide large-scale implementations to meet the increasingly sophisticated demand from customers.

• Service providers are experimenting with pricing strategies for cloud integrated storage (CIS) that provide creative purchasing opportunities for customers.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

• Align around a single cloud storage vendor whenever practical to simplify vendor engagements and CIS infrastructure customization.

• Compare CIS pricing with on-premises storage pricing by comparing usage charges and infrastructure savings. For example, when replacing existing on-premises storage with CIS, savings will be realized by the elimination of backup and disaster recovery applications meant for data protection.

• Work with CIS infrastructure vendors that have a clear service and support methodology spanning the gateway vendor, intervening networks and cloud provider. Several loose partnership relationships exist today that leave uncertainty as to who is the lead vendor.

• Define data management policies and enforcement techniques to minimize data leakage into unregulated or public domains.

ANALYSIS:

Technologies such as cloud storage gateways, WAN optimization and caching algorithms, along with pricing policies and services offered by public cloud storage providers, are all vital elements for CIS. All of these technologies and approaches are rapidly evolving and thus require due diligence by organizations intent on moving into the cloud storage arena. In addition, assembling these elements requires IT organizations to engage with a vendor community that has an uneven or developing competence. Most IT organizations are accustomed to working with a storage community largely composed of established and experienced enterprise-scale vendors such as EMC, HP and IBM. This is not currently the case for public cloud storage. Instead, as organizations move to cloud storage, they must deal with little-known startup companies or large, but new, public cloud vendors. These vendors are refining their business models, customer engagement approaches and product offerings. Given this backdrop and to mitigate implementation risk, as IT organizations consider CIS, they must pay attention to trends in the cloud storage industry and their impact on the successful addition of CIS to new or existing data center environments.

Although there are many developing situations in the cloud storage market, this research examines four impacts that affect the vendor and technology selections in this vibrant industry.

Run proofs of concept. This advice may seem obvious, but because of the newness of the CIS industry, organizations should confirm acceptable system operation by at least simulating use cases in an actual CIS environment. Cloud and gateway vendors should fully support this activity and work together to prove acceptability. Customers should avoid vendors that cannot meet this requirement.

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CIOs need to decide how they will position the IT organization in relation to emerging digital business technologies, such as the Internet of Things, 3D printing, wearable technology, robotics and cognitive systems.

Regardless of your industry, every CIO will need to prepare for the upcoming digital business technologies and the impacts it will have on the enterprise.

CIOs should use this research to start forming their positions on digital business technologies, and to prepare their IT organizations with the right resources and skill sets.

Two key attributes will cause some CIOs to hesitate in making digital business technologies part of the IT organization's responsibilities:

1. Digital business technologies are operational in nature. The IT organization is used to owning and supporting "back office" and infrastructure technologies. Digital business technologies are aimed at supporting "front office" and operations.
2. Digital business technologies are emerging technologies. Drones, the IoT and cognitive systems are not commonly part of the IT agenda.

However, we encourage CIOs to understand how relevant these technologies are, and will be, in their industries, and to give them a fair assessment. There is much at stake — in both business value and technology investment.

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Digital innovations are now shaking up every industry: There's a much greater sense of urgency among the mainstream players to reorganize themselves as digital businesses.

Regardless of how you view "digital disruption" -- angst-inducing threat or energizing opportunity -- it's no longer a theoretical proposition. Digital innovations are now shaking up every industry -- the result of a confluence of three main trends.

The first is a technological one. Advances in cloud computing, data analytics, video, social networking, and, most important, the consumer-funded infrastructure of mobile devices and connectivity have laid the groundwork for business as unusual.

The second trend is a more social one. The broad consumerization of IT not only has made the unwashed masses comfortable with all manner of apps and devices, turning them into ready customers of innovative digital products, services, and features, but it also has made CXOs and line-of-business execs more keenly aware of what digital innovation can potentially do to transform their companies and industries. So they're leading the charge. Whether you like it or not, CEOs, CMOs, sales executives, HR leaders, and other "non-IT" types are involved directly in setting digital strategy and making the requisite technology purchases.

The third is a commercial trend, an offshoot of the first two. The biggest digital natives are getting restless to move into new markets -- for example, the search giant Google into financial, telecom, home automation, and package delivery; the social networker LinkedIn into media and content. They now have market caps to grow and shareholders to please. They're upping their game.

As a result, there's a much greater sense of urgency among the mainstream players to reorganize themselves as digital businesses. 

Whether you're the digital hunter or the hunted, all this digital disruption requires a new brand of leadership. "Becoming a digital business isn't an 'IT project.' It requires change across the organization, from sales and customer support to purchasing and product development."

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Transforming Business Performance: As important as the network is, the applications running atop that network are even more important

Businesses are rapidly adopting virtualization, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS applications broadly across the enterprise to minimize costs and enable seamless collaboration and communication. This is significantly straining the traditional network paradigm. IT organizations globally are faced with the challenge to transform network architectures to deliver the right performance and reliability cost-effectively while retaining control.

Market forces driving change include:

• Decreasing cost and increasing reliability of Internet infrastructure 

• Growing diversity of applications, data, and devices across all networks

• Accelerated adoption of private and public cloud computing infrastructure

In a world combining public and private resources, the network itself needs to get hybrid, combining the strengths of the highly reliable Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks with the ubiquity and lower cost of Internet infrastructure. However, change towards more complex network architectures requires planning.

Top 3 IT considerations:

• Identify and Prioritize Applications: Identify, prioritize, and optimize applications to deliver the best performance. Understand application criticality by business, usage patterns and trends, and bandwidth consumption. Understand the current network delivery path and define the optimal delivery path in a Hybrid Network architecture — whether the internal Ethernet network, the wide- area MPLS network, a virtual private network or a hybrid cloud network.

• Define and Establish SLAs for Users and Businesses: Collaborate with line of business owners to identify, define, and establish right application-level Quality of Service (QoS) to ensure the right performance, reliability, and disaster recovery required for the target end users and business processes. This will influence network policies, network architecture design, and network capacity planning in relation to the cost.

• Real-Time Monitoring and Performance Management: Implement new or augment existing tools to gain application level and network visibility for real time performance monitoring to aid in troubleshooting and maintaining service level agreements (SLAs).

In aggregate, the network is more complex than ever before with the addition of hybrid networks that

incorporate the public Internet infrastructure as a way to scale corporate bandwidth cost-effectively. Supporting this architectural transformation requires IT to not only adopt new capabilities but to also

re-evaluate the existing infrastructure design, deployment, and management to maximize the utilization of hybrid resources. This perspective focuses primarily on the results of the technology like performance, reliability, and user productivity. As important as the network is, even more important are the applications running atop that network.

URS Systems also helps IT analyze the enterprise ecosystem across all network links and applications, whether extending to cloud systems or branch offices. It can analyze the most important applications affecting users and IT, from Microsoft productivity applications to accelerating applications in virtualized data centers running on VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.

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How Data Center Infrastructure Management Software Improves Planning and Cuts Operational Costs

Business executives are challenging their IT staffs to convert data centers from cost centers into producers of business value. Data centers can make a significant impact to the bottom line by enabling the business to respond more quickly to market demands. This paper demonstrates, through a series of examples, how data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software tools can simplify operational processes, cut costs, and speed up information delivery.

According to the Uptime Institute (a division of the 451 Group) the market for data center infrastructure management systems will grow from $500 Million in 2010 to $7.5 Billion by 2020. IT and business executives have realized that hundreds of thousands of dollars in
energy and operational costs can be saved by improved physical infrastructure planning, by minor system reconfiguration, and by small process changes. The systems which allow management to leverage these savings consist of modern data center physical infrastructure (i.e., power and cooling) management software tools. Legacy reporting systems, designed to support traditional data centers, are no longer adequate for new “agile” data centers that need to manage constant capacity changes and dynamic loads.

Some data center operators do not use any physical infrastructure management tools. This can be risky. One operator who only managed 15 racks at a small manufacturing firm, for example, felt that the data center operations “tribal knowledge” he had acquired over the years could help him handle any threatening situation. However, over time, his 15 racks became much denser. His energy bills went up and his cooling and power systems drifted out of balance. At one point, when he added a new server, he overloaded a branch circuit
and took down an entire rack.

New management software Planning & Implementation tools improve IT room allocation of power and cooling (planning), provide rapid impact analysis when a portion of the IT room fails (operations), and leverage historical data to improve future IT room performance
(analysis). These three types of Planning & Implementation tools–planning, operations, and analysis–are each explained in the following sections this paper. Data center facility software tools (e.g., building management systems) are not discussed.

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India is fast emerging as a high-growth market for Cloud Services:

Current Analysis has released its study titled “Enterprise ICT Investment Insights Study 2014” which indicates that cloud computing is the top priority among Indian enterprises. According to the study, a significant 68 per cent of enterprises in India, with 100-plus employees, are using cloud-based services, while the remaining 32 per cent plan to do so over the next 24 months. This is in line with trends in the larger Asia-Pacific market, where the adoption of cloud-based services is as high as 65 per cent. This study spans 19 countries across four key regions.

The study also finds that the scale of cloud services adoption easily surpasses those of other new-generation ICT services, including Big Data and Enterprise Mobility. While 39 per cent of the respondents ranked Cloud as their top investment priority in India, 16 per cent said it would be Big Data while 12 per cent favoured Enterprise Mobility. Network Security jointly ranked as second highest investment priority, along with Big Data.

“India is fast emerging as a high-growth market for cloud services, led thus far by the private cloud segment. “It is highly notable that cloud has emerged as a leading investment priority for Indian enterprises, surpassing even Network Security investments. However, this certainly doesn’t amount to the ICT decision makers lowering their guards when it comes to the all-vital area of IT security.

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