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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. 

CIO Transformation Live gets Disruptive in Manchester

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CIO Transformation Live gets Disruptive in Manchester

You may know that I’ve been a regular contributor to Trafford Associates CIO events over the last couple of years. I chaired and opened their CIO Transformation Live conference near Silverstone on March 20th this year, and with Andy McLean and the team from Disruptive.Live we amplified the event on the day by live streaming interviews of a dozen of the speakers, sponsors and delegates. It was so successful, we’ve formalised our partnership, and on top of that Trafford and Compare the Cloud/Disruptive.Live have also entered in to a media partnership going forward.

That means the next one at the Manchester Central event space, starting the evening of 17th June, with a full conference day on the 18th will be even more “disruptive”. Andy and I with the Disruptive team will be back live streaming interviews from the evening and the day like before. The agenda aims to bring together CIO’s, IT Directors, CTO’s, CISO’s and IT practitioners for a day full of peer to peer learning, providing the platform to share thought leadership. All of the agenda ideas are generated from the dialogue they have with the delegates as they sign up. They will have some great presentations, panel session and workshops, and the networking breaks are just as important as the content, so delegates will get time to talk and share their ideas. For delegates the conference is free and includes complimentary accommodation on the evening of the 17th.

The content covers the issues you’d expect in terms of the practical application of Digital Transformation, Security, Data & Analytics, Public, Private and Multi-Cloud as well as IoT and AI. However we’ll also be covering the importance of story telling, the need for a start-up mentality and the importance of social collaboration across your organisation.

Additionally, integrating platforms like Practice Path can significantly enhance the capabilities of AdvancedMD Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Practice Management Software as a Service (SaaS) for healthcare practices. Practice Path offers a range of solutions designed to automate processes, improve operational efficiency, and enhance patient experiences, making it a vital tool for modern healthcare organizations looking to stay ahead in a competitive landscape.

At the last conference Dan Brimble, Trafford Associates MD, made a personal commitment to have more diversity in the speaker line up. You’ll see the evidence of that in more women speakers and panelists this time including Sally Eaves CTO and Author at Forbes, Lesley Salmon CIO at Kellogs, and Lulu Laidlaw-Smith Managing Partner at Collaborate2 who also runs the Rip It Up network of disruptors and start-ups. Check out the line up as it comes together.

The other difference, is the newly launched CIO Transformation TV channel. See it here below with it’s rolling programme of interviews from the last event, as well as leading business book authors and motivational speakers. There will be more programming added in the coming weeks and months. It’s the start of something new, and my colleagues at Trafford will be announcing some new initiatives at the show.

If you are interested in coming along, please check out the website, and follow this link to register for a place.

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.

Taking Sustainability a step further – Marginal Gains

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Taking Sustainability a step further – Marginal Gains

I wrote about my sit down and interview with Chris Wellise, HPE’s Chief Sustainability Officer yesterday.  He was joined by his colleage Matthias Röse, HPE’s Chief Technologist for Mfg, Auto and IoT, for a round table session with me and the other influencers that were invited by HPE to #HM19 at the Hannover Messe.  

Chris Wellise explaining Circular Economy to the HPE Influencer Group

Between Chris and Matthias they expanded on HPE’s alternative to the typical “take, make and dispose” economy to think circular and closed loop.  They talked about the amount of greenhouse gasses used in the extraction, manufacturing and production processes and how they think in terms of material resourcing designed to minimise its impact on the environment.  As explained in the last post, HPE design their products for recyclability and end of use management, with an impressive 89% remanufactured and marketed to new customers. To put some numbers against that, it equates to their renewal centres processing £58m worth of product a year consisting of 1.7m data centre products and 2.3m workplace products.  That’s a huge saving in energy and resources that don’t have to be extracted and consumed.  Apart from saving the planet, the business case for doing this balances the potential for higher commodity prices as resource scarcity and volatility hits, with the resultant supply disruptions that would cause, along with the potential for ever tightening regulation, balanced against the opportunity for reduced costs, generating new revenues, improved competitiveness and a more resilient supply chain.  

HPE’s circular economy approach to sustainability
Matthias Röse, HPE’s Chief Technologist Mfg, Auto, IoT

However, 60% of the environmental impact of technology products comes in the use phase.  HPE believes it’s critical to be designing for efficiency to have the biggest impact.  That means thinking in terms of materials innovation.  It means products like HPE’s Synergy providing software defined storage, network and compute in one block instead of a standard rack mounted server, and that means less impact and a better utilisation rate.  Sadly most data centres are often over provisioned with server set ups 80% under-utilised – Matthias talked about zombie servers idling away, and I rather like that  term.  HPE are on a mission to share applications on a block, and provide a better utilisation rate.  Virtualisation and containerisation is the first step, but they talked in terms of using the whole chain of IT as a process with software defined architecture.  You should be paying only for what you use, what you need.  Interestingly, with their Greenlake product, that extends the OpEx pay-as-you-go consumption-based approach to on-premise hardware.  That, in turn, extends HPE’s hybrid-cloud credentials and means  better cashflow for their customers, and the ability to manage the peaks more easily.  Capacity on demand in your data centre, as well as the public cloud.  

This approach to infrastructure goes hand in hand with the shift in focus of data and processing moving to the edge, where we need solutions that provide compute power at or near the source of where the data is generated by a mobile device, a machine on the shop floor or a sensor.  This is vital for supporting IoT, for the requirements of autonomous vehicles in the field, or the needs of the smart city.  Gartner predicts that 75% of data will computed at the edge rather than in the data centre by 2025, and maybe it’s coming even sooner than that!  

Matthias was talking in terms of extending the sustainability arguments to closed loop manufacturing, taking the data from manufacturing shop floor systems, apply data analytics and AI to identify resource leakage.  Using predictive maintenance for identifying and preventing failures means the firm doesn’t need to build new, replacement product.  He told us about an undisclosed car manufacturer that he is currently working with.  For a luxury model with an automatic close function for the boot they are tracking usage, how often is that close button actually pressed.  How robust do the mechanisms and the motors driving the boot door actually need to be?  That may sound trivial, but I liken it to Sir Dave Brailsford’s sports science of marginal gains.  He transformed UK cycling by focusing on every element of the process from the cyclist, to her clothing, to the bike, to the track and looking for 1% gains in each piece of equipment used, each process step, and particularly looking for undiscovered areas to make a small difference.  All those tiny gains eventually add up to significant change, and the increase in effectiveness gave the team a large haul of Olympic and World Championship Gold medals.  That’s exactly the way those marginal gains for the automotive manufacturer will add up to significant efficiencies and sustainability, and a more successful HPE customer. 

They talked about how the repair shops generally not owned by manufacturers, but can be connected better.  They mentioned Daimler and their leadership 2020 programme helping them become agile.  They mentioned blockchain implementations in the context of making data more secure, and the idea of sharing more data from the car.  That could mean monetisation opportunities, but more likely it will be providing inputs to applications like Google Maps or Waze for traffic patterns, or route planning or emergencies.

The Enterprise of the future – edge to cloud, IT with OT, AI and IoT

There is a change in approach in the company from 3 years ago where within IoT they were trying to do everything.  Today their strategy is an open ecosystem approach with more choice, and a range of the right partners for specific parts of the processes.  They are bringing IT and OT (Operational Technology) together.  Matthias has a background in Siemens before HPE, and they could argue that they had IoT 25 years ago.  Except it just wasn’t as open to the outside as Industrial IoT is today.  They are building in safety and security, gathering more data, more knowledge, applying AI to detect issues, deviate the data flows, eliminate challenges, increase the uptime – they bring a lot to the table. It’s a totally different mindset that combines lean manufacturing, and what I suggested as “marginal gains” in to OEE or Overall Equipment Effectiveness.  It’s taking sustainability a step further.  

Check back here for more content like this, and contact us if you want to find out more about digital manufacturing.

Disclosure: HPE paid my expenses for the trip to HMI 2019 as part of their influencer programme.

Sustainability might not be sexy, but life depends on it

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Sustainability might not be sexy, but life depends on it

I’m at Hannover Messe 2019 for the first time, courtesy of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.  It’s not as big as CeBIT was, but it is still a huge conference with over 20 halls of exhibitors, covering everything from Industry 4.0, integrated automation, the digital factory, industrial supply, research & technology to the digital workplace.  HPE are in hall 6, the home of digital manufacturing.  I’ll be telling more stories from here around AI, automation, IoT, edge computing and a whole lot more, but on the first day I met with Chris Wellise HPE’s Chief Sustainability Officer.  

Chris Wellise, HPE’s Chief Sustainability Officer

When I’m speaking at events I’ll often ask the audience who amongst them was born on or before 1974, because those of us that were have been alive while the population of the planet has doubled, and as humans have been around for 200,000 years, that rate of change is staggering.  We live in exponential times, and Chris is full of eye-watering quotes and statistics on a topic that ins’t particularly sexy, but our lives and the future depends on it.  Chris says that as a large scale manufacturer:

“HPE produces 7 servers, 13 networking devices and 80 TB of storage every 60 seconds!”  

That’s 5 million units a year, all which generate data, and all of which need energy and resources in their creation.  Chris suggests that by 2030 most people will have 15 devices, all generating data because “everything computes at the edge and everywhere”.   He’s seen research that suggests we will run out of gold by 2030.  Yikes!  

You don’t have to have watched The Blue Planet to recognise the effect of what we are creating and then throwing away is doing for all of our futures.  Chris believes that sustainability is key.  We have to power the digital economy in a new way, and recognise the energy and resource constraints we need to work around.  Chris believes we have to move towards the circular economy.  To be able to do more with less.  We have to think in terms of applying our technology to disrupt the status quo.  We need smart manufacturing approaches to remove resource leakages.  

HPE have been rethinking design for environment since late 80s and they are one of only a few tech companies who regularly talk about what they are doing and why, rather than it just being a topic in the corporate social responsibility section of the website.  This thinking is necessary as the numbers are so big.  There will be 8.5 billion of us by 2030.  We’ll have 21 billion devices connected and sharing data by 2020.  By 2060 we will be need to be extracting twice the raw material that we do today, unless we can think differently.  We are running out of our planet at the same time that some people don’t even accept that global warming is real.

The HPE approach is to think through every product and design for its end of use.  They can “upcycle” and reconfigure equipment for a new customer within 48 hours at their renewable technology centres in Erskine, Scotland, and Andover, Massachusetts.  The products are, on average, 89% remanufactured to be sent on to a new customer with the remaining 11% responsibly recycled.  HPE have a vast shared supply chain servicing more than 150,000 customers, helped by over 170 suppliers, and then delivering products to 140 countries.  Chris says that they think about how they can have a sustainable influence on that massive supply chain in terms of greenhouse gas targets connected to the science of what they are doing, all in line with the Paris Accord on climate change.  It’s a call to action for our industry.  The current trajectory we are on is not sustainable.  

The other concept Chris talks about is “data landfill”.  He suggest that only 6% of data we generate is actually being used, and so the other 94% is wasted data that we have used energy, raw materials and production capacity to generate (for no added value).  How do we close that gap?  

Here’s Chris at the show following our sit down, talking with me some more around the sustainability topic:

Chris Wellise talking HPE’s approach sustainability with David Terrar for IT2

I’ll carry on the discussion in a follow on post, taking the sustainability thinking through to HPE’s customers using IoT, AI and data analytics technology to change the dynamic and reduce the waste.  Like I said at the start, sustainability might not be a sexy topic, but our future depends on it! 

Check back here for more content like this, and contact us if you want to find out more.

Disclosure: HPE paid my expenses for the trip to HMI 2019 as part of their influencer programme.

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