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HPE have a new angle on managing today’s Hybrid Multicloud World

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HPE have a new angle on managing today’s Hybrid Multicloud World

Everyone’s talking digital transformation in today’s volatile, uncertain. complex and ambiguous business landscape.   We all want our organisations to keep relevant, reinvent themselves and avoid going the way of a Thomas Cook or a Kodak.  To support the transformational change that’s required enterprises have been talking app modernisation for a while, and moving business processes to the Cloud, sometimes “as is” and sometimes by redeveloping them from scratch.  Today, both in terms of cost and agility, using Cloud technology for new developments is a given, but for most organisations there is no one right Cloud.  We live in a Hybrid Cloud World whether we like it or not.  Depending on the size of your organisation, from medium to large, according to the Rightscale State of the Cloud survey, you might be dealing with 5 different Clouds, along with the business critical systems you are, most likely, still running in your data centre.  Even a born in the Cloud start up usually has more than just one Cloud/SaaS platform to drive their business.  There is no single Cloud platform that has all the answers, and the three major Public Cloud providers are adding features and functions to their platforms continuously.  How do we manage that Multicloud challenge?  There is no one answer to that either, but a few days ago I heard HPE’s new angle on looking at the problem from the data layer, which ought to be the starting point for thinking about business solutions in any case.  

The ingredients of their solution, in my mind, involve a combination of data abstraction and 3 Cs – Cloud, Containers and Choice.  Let me explain their product and what I mean in a little more detail.

HPE Cloud Volumes

HPE explained their new Cloud Volumes series of data and management services at a workshop run by Nick Dyer, their Field CTO for Nimble and Intelligent Storage, and Tony Stranack, their EMEA Head of Information and Data Strategies.  The problems they are trying to address are common across the Multicloud enterprise. They want to allow portability between the various Public Cloud options and/or on premises hardware so customers can choose the right tool for the job both now, and over time as platforms, circumstances and costs change.  They want to provide those services with enterprise grade resilience and availability.  They want to make the data repository itself easy to manage and in a unified way across the options.  Above all they want to give customers choice and flexibility, whether you are working on existing mission critical apps, or developing new apps with an agile and DevOps mode of develop and deployment.    

Nick asked the question “where is the right place for my data” and then went on to explain that data always has “gravity”.  By that he means that data is bound by the constraints of where and how it was created, and how it is being stored.  Depending on that context, there are various factors “pulling” at that data if and when you want to move it and use it.  

Ingress and Egress  

The biggest pull is Ingress and Egress, now a normal part of our cloud terminology, but why don’t we just say in and out?  Putting my quibble about words aside, we are talking about the costs of getting your data in to and out of the major Cloud provider’s platforms.  For Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform moving your data in to their platform doesn’t cost a thing.  Of course, they charge you for the storage you use, and they hope you stay a long time, but then they charge you when you want to move that data out of their platform, back on premise or to some other destination.  The costs can be significant.

Data Abstraction

With the Cloud Volumes service your data is held in a single repository that is logically connected to your on-premise compute, or to any of the 3 Public Cloud Services.  This brings significant benefits in both time and cost.  Because the data isn’t being physically moved, there are no egress charges and no elapsed time for the data to move.  This gives you all the flexibility and portability between platforms that you need, with the advantage that HPE only bills you for exactly the amount of storage and management services you consume.  

Enterprise Grade Availability

You need enterprise grade security, resilience and availability.  The service uses HPE’s Nimble storage, designed for low latency with 256-bit AES encryption and 99.9999% availability.  

Potential Solutions

The key benefits the approach drives are choice and flexibility.  Cloud Volumes allows you to move workloads and data from on-premises to any cloud (and back) simply and efficiently, helping you avoid being locked in to the first Public Cloud you chose.  It allows you to develop natively in Cloud and deploy on-premises or vice versa.  You could run production on-premises but apply AI and analytics logic in the Cloud adding the ability to scale capacity up and down as necessary.  The service allows you to run multiple instances across several Clouds and on-premises simultaneously.  You could run production on-premises but recover in the Cloud.  It allows you to spin up a new instance to try something in seconds.  

Data Management

Cloud Volumes allows choice on management of the data service too, as well as providing a consistent approach across Cloud and on-premises.  You can use their portal, a Software as a Service based data management approach, as well as command line or cloud first APIs.  The service embraces Docker and Kubernetes to support the kind of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery approach to allow you to release more, faster and better – to develop once and deploy anywhere.  

Underpinning the service is HPE’s InfoSight.  This is an AI based tool that analyses and correlates millions of sensors from all of their globally deployed systems.  It constantly watches over your particular environment but has learned from managing the entire HPE customer hardware estate to predict problems.  If it uncovers an issue, it resolves the issue and prevents other systems from experiencing the same problem.  It continuously learns so it gets better and more reliable over time.  It takes the guesswork out of managing infrastructure and simplifies planning by accurately predicting capacity, performance, and bandwidth needs.  Pretty smart. 

Conclusion

Cloud Volumes provides a new angle on the Multicloud management problem that every enterprise faces.  By separating out the data it addresses a key cost and time issue as you are moving your data between platforms logically, not physically.  It simplifies the options for developing new cloud first apps, dealing with mission critical systems, disaster recovery, fail over and more.  It’s a set of tools that helps you choose the right Cloud, use a modern containerised approach, and allow you to change your Cloud or on-premises choice as the cost equation or other factors change.  From what I saw at the workshop it’s well worth exploring, and we hear there will be more announcements around the service coming very soon.  

Check back here once we’ve had that briefing, or contact me if you want more detailed advice now.  

Views from my colleagues who also attended the Cloud Volumes workshop:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a customer and includes me in their global influencer programme. 

Every cloud has a shadow hiding!

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Every cloud has a shadow hiding!

Apologies for the play on words – couldn’t resist it!

This is our third blog, continuing the series of “where we’re going we don’t need roads” #dontneedroads, and for those of you wanting the throwback link how about Cliff Richard and the Shadows (cue Apache or Summer Holiday for those of a certain age!)

So buckle up as we get the De Lorean started for a Shadow IT blog. But hey! I hear you say, isn’t cloud supposed to have removed shadow IT? Well yes and no!

First there was on premise shadow IT, servers under desks, discretely hidden in broom cupboards far away from the IT department and in some cases serving business critical applications and services.

Then came along cloud, public cloud, we retain some on premise for regulatory or security reasons so we move/morph to hybrid cloud. Shadow IT gone? No!

Now we have the opportunity to have hybrid/multicloud shadow IT care of a smart device and a credit card, and the IT department have no idea of what’s happening!

So why is shadow IT still so prolific in organisations? I believe it’s down to several factors:

  1. Convenience
  2. Speed
  3. Money talks

Let’s have a look at each one in more detail.

  1. Convenience – I want a service or an application, its hosted on a public cloud, all I do is present my credit card details and within a couple of minutes boom! Got my service and good to go, I have flexible consumption models and no need to worry about availability, performance, security etc because my cloud provider does all that! (or do they?)
  2. Speed – very similar to convenience but a direct pointy finger at the IT department, jeez you guys are slow, I want this and I want it now (see above!) I haven’t time for forms, I can’t wait for the long winded process you guys have, I want it now!
  3. Money talks – that credit card in paragraph 1, well it’s just not credit cards, various studies show that although the IT department have a greater say at the beginning of a project/request by the end the business has the biggest say as they hold the purse strings. If a line of business executive has a budget then why bother with those IT guys, let’s just go out and buy what we need.

So with cloud based whatever you want as a service, for example SaaS (software as a service) the poor old IT department is well and truly in the dark, and there are more dark forces coming into play.

As an IT Service Management consultant in previous roles, Shadow IT has been the bane of my life – why? Where do you want to start?

Security, change and configuration management, data integrity, business resiliency, regulatory compliance I could go on but these are crucial aspects of keeping the business running regardless of which cloud or infrastructure you’re using, and Shadow IT bypasses most of these and more that are mentioned above.

So what’s the compromise – if any? Well how about:

  1. A more responsive, faster, seamless change process, one which the user/requester can initiate, track and control? Today most new or updated service requests can be automated to the point of a button is pressed and voila! This is really the easiest way of combatting shadow IT as most organisations have it in place in one form or another.
  2. A centralised, policy driven security and governance process, that the users are part of, it has worked for BYOD (bring your own device) so why shouldn’t it work for hybrid/multicloud?
  3. Business and IT work together – yes together! How? Well compromise might be a good starting point but how about choice!

Let’s go a bit deeper into choice, with all the open source solutions available today many organisations are building or buying a platform. These platforms are part of their journey to cloud. This journey is more than likely a hybrid journey and probably involves multiple clouds and cloud providers, we now have a hybrid multicloud environment, ideal for Shadow IT!

However these platforms can provide choice across multiple disciplines – cloud native application development, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), a choice of runtimes, different deployment options and more! Great choices that can nullify Shadow IT.

By providing a centralised policy driven governance/security posture which encompasses all of the business (on premise or on public cloud) business can be reassured that brand damage, data loss etc are prevented but their choices remain.

IBM has recognised that most businesses are in, or moving towards a hybrid multicloud world, and recently released their, Multi Cloud Management solution which provides Visibility, Governance and Automation across this new world. Business and IT can collaborate on what runs where, who can access it, which cloud/infrastructure it can run on.

This provides the speed that business needs but with the guard rails that ensures IT has control thereby reducing the need for Shadow IT!

See a happy ending! So all your clouds can have a silver lining instead of a shadow hiding!

The “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads” series of posts to help reframe how you think about what’s next in enterprise technology is co-authored by Dave Metcalfe of IBM and David Terrar of Agile Elephant.

Cloudy with some fog on the edge

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Cloudy with some fog on the edge

To quote Monty Python “what have the Romans ever done for us”?

The same question in the future may well be asked of cloud computing, and how it has changed the face of computing, driven a new wave of technology and enables business/digital transformation.

So what has cloud computing done for us?

Most people think that cloud computing was invented back in 2006, but we must go back in time and travel to the 1900’s when cloud was first thought of.

So strap into your time machine (our favourite is a De Lorean!) and get ready for a brief history lesson of the origins of cloud computing, and why it underpins the major business/technical advances of this century to date.

1950’s,mainframe computers came into existence, several users accessed the central computer via dumb (green screen) terminals. The prohibitive costs of this did not make them economically viable for organisations to buy them. So the idea to share access to a single computer was born, primarily to save costs (sound familiar?).

In 1960s,IBM developed an operating system (OS) named Virtual Machine (VM). This allowed for simultaneous operation of more than one OS. Guest OS could be run on every VM, with their own memory and other infrastructure, making it possible to share these resources. This created the concept of virtualisation which is still prevalent today.

1980s,Open Source software starts to be created and donated by Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds leading the way, a more concise history of Open Source software is here.

The 1990’ssaw the advent of virtual private networks (VPN) primarily provided by the Telecoms industry, but invented by Gurdeep Singh-Pall a Microsoft employee. A VPN allows many users shared access to a single physical or virtual network infrastructure. We also saw the first mobile devices – more on these later!

Things were really hotting up in the cloud world although the word “cloud” was not as common as it is today.

Into the new millennium (hopefully no bugs follow us!) and we must mention other computing models and approaches which have contributed to the development of cloud computing.

  • Grid computing which allows for parallel computing.
  • Utility computing facilitates computing resources to be offered as a payed for service (yes we are close to the cloud word now!)
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) brought us subscription based usage of applications and so “as a Service” models were born. 

Back to those mobile devices mentioned earlier, so today we now have more computing power in our pockets than I had in 1998 for my Windows NT 4 Microsoft Exchange Server!

Mobile computing is arguably one of the major driving forces of the rise, dependency and capability of cloud computing today. Business is now not 9 to 5 – it’s always on! Which brings challenges around:

  • Availability
  • Performance
  • Customer experience
  • Quicker, faster to market applications and services (competitive edge)
  • Connectivity (Wi-Fi, 4G and soon 5G)

The cost of doing this on premise is as restrictive and expensive as the early 1950’s when the mainframe came along so alternatives were needed. 

Enter cloud computing, providing all of the above and more from a variety of cloud computing models, the most popular being public cloud. And from inception to around early 2018 public was seen as “the place to be” with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, and IBM leading the way. Other clouds are available!

But hey wait we have some compelling arguments for not being all in on public cloud! Primarily around:

  • Regulatory compliance
  • Security
  • Auditability
  • Latency (bandwidth) challenges

My favourite quote at the moment is:

“The old idea that everything would move to the public cloud never happened. Instead, the cloud market evolved to meet the needs of clients who want to maintain on-premises systems while tapping a multitude of cloud platforms and vendors.” 

Stephen Elliot, Program Vice President, IDC

So Hybrid Cloud is now recognised as the way forward for the majority of businesses on their journey to cloud (regardless of which flavour of cloud we are talking about). Why?

Well we have read the quote and seen some of the reasons for a multicloud environment which comprises public, private and hybrid cloud environments

Why are these important to business today and going forward?

Well cloud allows business to:

  • Migrate – or lift and shift workloads to the public cloud, normally non business critical and/or test and dev environments.
  • Modernise – examine legacy applications and modernise accordingly (Gartner’s 7 options to modernise legacy systems). Creating containers and microservices.
  • Innovate – explore new technologies such as Blockchain, Internet of Things, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.
  • Optimise – understand the cost, performance and availability of their multicloud environments.

But early cloud computing really was only focussed on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the aforementioned players were really in a race concerned primarily on how fast, how quick and how often they could spin up infrastructure and compute, I can create 50 virtual machines in a minute, WOW! 

But so what? It was only later that cloud stamped its mark on the business, providing a platform for business transformation, innovation and modernisation.

Which is important because as business and technology has evolved so has cloud computing, and it continues to do so. We are now exploring Edge computing and the impact that 5G will have on our world.

So having looked back a little we now can understand where we are going (and why) people of a certain age say there is little or nothing new in computing – rather its cyclic. I believe that cloud computing will be different – why? Because it enables transformation and innovation as well as being intrinsically linked to business, because where we are going we don’t need roads – just the right cloud!

If you want to learn more about the Journey to Cloud and how it can help your business I will be on the IBM stand at the TECHXLR8 @Excel 12-13 June, it would be good to have a chat! We will also be discussing multicloud management on a webinar on 5thJune, 11am. You can register here.

Finally please check out our series of where we are going we don’t need roadsblog and more on cloud and business transformation here.

The “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads” series of posts to help reframe how you think about what’s next in enterprise technology is co-authored by Dave Metcalfe of IBM and David Terrar of Agile Elephant.

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!

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Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!

There is a Danish saying you may have heard that “it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”.  That’s never been truer than in today’s challenging business landscape.  The rate of change is increasing exponentially.  New technologies, new ways of working and new business models are emerging.  How do you make sense of it all and set your strategy?  This is the first of a sequence of posts to help you reframe how you think about what’s next in enterprise technology, and how it can create value for your business.  

Back to the Future

© Universal Studios.

Let’s start by going back to a simpler time and reference the iconic 1985 science fiction movie “Back to the Future”.  You’ll remember (or have been told by your parents) that the movie’s time machine is made from a converted De Lorean car that needs to get up to 88 mph to jump in time. You can click here to read about the modifications made in this car that makes it look special from others. For most of the story they jump back 30 years to 1955.  Then, in the coda to the movie Doc Brown comes back to take Marty McFly and his girlfriend Jenifer 30 years in to the future to 2015.  When Marty says they haven’t got room to get to 88, Doc says “where we’re going, we don’t need roads” and the De Lorean promptly takes off and flies to get up to speed.  That phrase was even good enough for President Ronald Reagan to use it about the future in his 1986 State of the Union address.  We’ve decided to use it for our collection of articles offering you a map of where you should be heading.  We’ll even be using the hashtag #dontneedroads when we share them on social media.  

Now that movie demonstrates part of the problem with trying to be a futurist.   Some things develop much slower than you might expect, but others start to happen much faster.  We don’t have many flying cars on our roads in 2019, but they do exist.  You just have to look at the several different makes of autonomous drone copter taxis being tested in Dubai to see that they might finally happen soon.  What has happened faster is the explosion of global connectivity, data and very personal computing in the palms of our hands, that hardly anyone was predicting from the vantage of 1985, except on Star Trek and then centuries in the future.  With today’s rate of change making predictions even 5 years out is incredibly difficult, but the planners, strategists and every level in our organisations need to be thinking in terms of rapid change and continuous improvement to survive.  

Learn from the past

To think about the future, it’s always valuable to look back at what has worked in the past and why. We’d like to pick out a couple of scenarios.  First, the expansion and consolidation of the Roman Empire.  The cornerstone of the expansion, from about 300 BC onwards was their road system, remnants of which we still see today thousands of years later.  They applied new technology to create a network of high quality, long distance highways and local roads that were vital for communication, for the movement and resupply of their armies as they expanded their territories, and then to support the populations they had conquered with trade routes.  It was so successful that it supported the growing empire for the next 800 years.

The next is Genghis Khan, founder and first Great Khan of the Mongol Empire in the 12th and 13th century, who Dave Metcalfe has written about before.  He was known for his brutality, but also practiced meritocracy and encouraged religious tolerance.  One of the fundamental tools he put in place for managing the empire was the Yam riders and their way stations.  They created a chain of relay stations, usually around 20 miles to 40 miles apart. A messenger would arrive at a station and give his information to another messenger, and meanwhile they and their horse would rest and let the other messenger go on to the next station.  A communication system that both underpinned the empire, and incidentally brought the Silk Road under one cohesive political environment.  

The common threads here are the importance of networks and connectivity to moving information, and that intelligence is what supports the expansion of power, trade and globalisation.  In today’s environment instead of roads and horses and the written word, it’s silicon, optical fibre, radio waves, and bits and bytes of data supporting our new expansion.  It’s exciting!  In the 21st century the fabric of computing has never been more distributed and more ubiquitous.  

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads

The challenge for our organisations is that they don’t have to have been around for very long before they’ve become quite complex and grown a collection of applications and systems sitting on a multitude of technologies from the edge to the cloud to the data centre.  We’ll be talking more about the Edge very soon.  But even for a mid-sized business, and certainly for a larger Enterprise, the transformation they need to face is like trying to reimagine the London Underground at the same time as keeping the trains running.  

That conundrum is what we’ll be talking about in the “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads” series.  With computing becoming ubiquitous, it means that every business (and individual) is generating large amounts of data.  To make sense of that data you need a different approach than the business intelligence and processes of the past.  That’s where Artificial Intelligence comes in.  With access to processing power in the right place, and data stored in the right way, we can apply AIs and Robotic Process Automation and machine learning, and all of the other techniques and algorithms in to an app that can give you the predictive and analytic power to automate things.  In this next phase every business needs to think about AI and automation.  

What’s next?

In our posts we will be talking about enterprise cloud technology and managing multiple clouds.   We’ll explain our framework approach to managing technology summarised as discover, transform and operate.  We’ll bring in more military thinking and talk about the breakdown of command and control to asymmetric warfare and how that applies to business. We’ll tell more stories about the rate of change of technology, and the need to think in terms of permanent reinvention of your business, but at its heart our job as technologists is to help you get more out of your data. 

So please check Twitter and LinkedIn and the IBM Blog for more content on the #dontneedroads topic, as well as more articles on cloud and business transformation here.

The “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads” series of posts to help reframe how you think about what’s next in enterprise technology is co-authored by Dave Metcalfe of IBM and David Terrar of Agile Elephant.

Big Brands talking Enterprise Cloud Computing on 8 May

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Big Brands talking Enterprise Cloud Computing on 8 May

I’m looking forward to working for Whitehall Media chairing their Enterprise Cloud Computing Conference next Wednesday 8 May. This is the second time I’ve chaired the London event, which is focused on helping senior IT people set a strategy for DevOps, Cloud and the Data Centre. The event covers an interesting range of topics that are top of mind for today’s CIO, from organisational change required to unite DevOps and Security, to the issue around implementing a cloud platform, to managing the journey from a data centre with monolithic legacy applications to a cloud hosted collection of microservices.

The speakers telling the stories are from Paddy Power Betfair, Debenhams, Royal Mail, Capital One, HSBC Global Banking and Markets, the National Theatre, Vodafone, the Nationwide Building Society and more. They’ll be talking about how to build a business-centric IT department, fast iterative development of applications, and, importantly, how to approach scaling your digital transformation. I’m opening the day with my Director and Deputy Chair of the Cloud Industry Forum hat on, but the closing keynote is from my colleague Alex Hilton, the CIF CEO.

Follow the event on twitter with @WhitehallMedia, and I tweet as @DT, but we’ll be using the event hashtag #wmecc

Here’s are my thoughts on the previous edition:

Hopefully, in between being MC, I can take some notes and write a little that I’ll publish here for those of you that can’t make it. If you are interested in attending or speaking at this kind of event, please get in touch.

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Agile Elephant is a new kind of consultancy designed to help companies embrace the new digital culture of social collaboration, sharing and openness that is changing business models and the world of work.

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