Tuesday, 23 April 2019

Comparison: Legacy Infrastructure vs Hybrid Cloud vs Public Cloud

Many enterprise customers are heading towards hybrid cloud strategy. Why? 

We hear the message of hybrid cloud from all the incumbent vendors such as IBM, HPE, Lenovo, Dell, Oracle, Cisco, Netapp, EMC,  etc, etc...all these vendors agree that the future is hybrid cloud. Yet these vendors need to ensure the enterprise customers stay with legacy infrastructure otherwise they would lose huge revenue when customer migrate to public cloud. Hence the message is hybrid cloud.

Some customers can not move to public cloud for some of the following reasons:
  • Compliance. Yet this is rarely a reason as the big three (AWS, Azure, Google) have significant regulatory and security approvals.
  • The applications do not run on x86 architecture. Lets say a customer has an application that only runs on IBM i-Series...Then cloud with the big three cloud vendors is simply not a viable choice.
If applications can be moved to cloud I would suggest public cloud is far more agile and is lower in cost:
Infrastructure ComparisonLegacy On-Premise InfrastructureHybrid CloudPublic Cloud
Data Centres (minimum 2 for DR purposes)û
Compute (minimum one cluster per data centre)û
Storage with different tiersû
SAN Fabric (two for redundancy per data centre)û
Backup (tape libraries, disk appliances)û
Routers, Switches (two for redundancy per data centre)û
Load Balancers (two for redundancy per data centre)û
Firewalls (two for redundancy per data centre)û
Infrastructure management and virtualisation softwareû
Staff
Large number of IT infrastructure staff working in isolated "IT silos":û
Staff in architecture and design of datacentre infrastructureû
Staff in facilities and server managementû
Staff in datacentre network managementû
Staff in storage managementû
Staff in backup managementû
Staff in virtualisation managementû
Staff in areas that can be replaced as a serviceû
Slow deployment of infrastructure rather than agile devopsû
Features
Completely software defined data centre - integrated APIsûû
Simple to manageûû
Rich ecosystem of services on top of IaaSû
Agile - small devops teams working together to help the business★★★★★★★★
Utility based OPEX pricing - Pay for only what you useûû
Cost
Can save costs by eliminating expensive faculties and datacentre infrastructureûû
Can save costs by reducing large number of staff in "IT silos" to small devops teamsûû
Can save costs by turning off VMs at night/weekendsûû
Can save costs by scaling on demand rather than sizing based on future peak usageûû
Can save costs by use of services rather than reinventing the wheelûû
Can save costs through heavy end to end automation (as all infrastructure is code)ûû
Can save costs as everything is agile and projects are delivered much faster (time is money)ûû
Overall Cost$$$$$$$$$
Please note that for public cloud to be lower cost than legacy IT infrastructure significant changes need to occur. All applications need to be moved public cloud or SaaS, thereby eliminating datacentre infrastructure and significant IT staff costs. If we move most applications to public cloud, say 80% to cloud, yet we have 20% still remaining on-premise then we will continue to carry very expensive datacentre infrastructure and we will need to maintain staff in legacy “IT silos” to support this infrastructure, hence we can not achieve cost savings, with hybrid cloud our infrastructure costs will increase and complexity will increase as we need to support legacy environment and public cloud.

If organisations like Apple, Pentagon and CIA are using public cloud services rather than running it on their own infrastructure.....what hope does a much, much smaller organisation have to be build their own "private cloud" and still be competitive?

Private cloud working with "IT Silos" compared to Public Cloud with agile Devops where all infrastructure and services are code:  

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