HP Trends Series - Hybrid Cloud Done Right! Part 2

In earlier parts of the Hybrid Platforms Trends Series, we delved into our Platform of the Future vision. We touched on the three foundational components of Hybrid Cloud: Secure Networking and Data Protection. In Part 1 of this article, we uncovered the challenges and demands impacting decision makers. Now, in Part 2, we will explore the building blocks we use to meet these challenges.  

The Hybrid Cloud Building Blocks  

To allow focus on the correct elements of your current journey to Hybrid Cloud, we have broken the conversation down into three core elements: 

• Next-Gen Data Centre: Virtual Machine, Data and AI Inferencing optimised platforms.  

• Cloud Platforms: Modern Applications and anywhere scale optimised platforms. 

• Intelligent Edge: Collect and process data at source to drive decision making, safety and real-time analytics. 

Each element has its own set of requirements, outcomes, and architectures, but they can ultimately be combined to tackle your core challenges.  

Cloud Platforms:    

Our Cloud Platforms enable services on demand, anywhere, while being optimised for modern application operations. We aim to develop a cloud operating model that is self-service capable, developer-ready, scalable, and on-demand anywhere in the world. We look to combine the smallest number of cloud platforms to deliver the required scale, function, and flexibility.  

Cloud as a vehicle to enable and drive transformation of business operations is where we see the most value for our customers. Getting away from Lift & Shift and to modernisation is key to ensuring your cloud journey offers long-term sustainable value.  

Three core elements of our Cloud approach are: 

Consistent Operating Model: As we move into a more Hybrid world, providing consistent operations across multiple cloud providers is critical. Storage is the easiest example where siloed operating models can cause significant complexity, cost and risk. Each cloud provider has different technical capabilities, differing policy enforcement and skill demands.  

Developer Ready: Building Independent Developer Platforms (sometimes called platform engineering) over the top of the IaaS and PaaS services to remove developer friction and increase release quality and velocity. 

Unified Operations: Bringing a unified operations concept helps align technical skills, ensure adherence to policy and legislation, and manage complexity. We consider things like network operations, storage and data management, cloud management, finops, and developer experience. Doing these things in silos per cloud platform is a significant challenge to costs, security and skills availability.  

One thing we must remember is that these requirements can be met in both the public and private cloud technology landscape. In the last few years, we have seen significant technological advancements to offer developer-ready environments in private clouds. Ultimately, it will come down to workload demand and how stable and predictable it is. New applications, projects, and business lines will certainly be the best places in the public cloud.  

The final goal for our cloud team is to help you find the optimal operating maturity level. Not every organisation needs to hit the top of the pyramid below. Understanding when the value returned is outweighed by the cost of change is critical to ensuring maximum value.  

Next-Gen Data Centre:  

Traditional IT on-premises technology stacks should be a thing of the past; I think we all will agree on that. Manual operations, siloed teams, over-provisioning and a general lack of agility hampered the ability to meet changing business demands. For good reason (10 years ago), this drove a wave of lift and shift IaaS-based public cloud migrations. Fast forward a decade, and we have a very different technology stack, and our workload demands have changed.  

We now understand the steady-state consumption of workloads, have accepted that some workloads will remain in VMs for a long time, and that active data can be expensive to host in the public cloud. Combine this with the AI demands on data and inferencing costs in the cloud, and we have some compelling reasons to consider the role of the next-gen DC.  

• Traditional VM Workloads running 24x7: Ideal workloads to repatriate to a Private Cloud platform to reduce costs and provide long-term commercial stability. 

• Large, active data sets: Placing PBs of active data in the public cloud can pose multiple challenges. Leveraging cloud-connected storage can balance enterprise features, performance, and flexibility.  

• Steady state: Any workloads that have moved to a constant state of consumption could be executed on a private cloud at a lower operating cost.  

The modern, automated private cloud can provide an experience that feels nothing like the old technology stacks. We create a platform that operates with minimal friction, delivering simple operations, optimised performance and predictable costs. We see this as an evolution of technology rather than a revolution. The overview below provides a view of the components that form our design process. The outcomes on the right highlight the objectives, simple operations, automation to allow anytime updates and management without service impact.  

For those thinking, but I don’t want to be in the DC business again, I got out for a reason. I fully agree, which is why we continue innovating on our ServiceWorks Cloud Platform. A fully functional private cloud ready for you to consume for your steady state workloads, typically up to 30% cheaper than alternative locations. So now you have complete choice, build and operate internally or consume and offload the day-to-day to our teams.  

A final thought: connectivity has also improved in the last decade. Now, we can easily connect a private cloud at near LAN speed to all the public cloud providers, driving the ability to create applications that are truly hybrid in nature. Data and Static runtimes in the Private Cloud connect to burstable resources and innovative services in the public cloud, the best of both worlds.  

Intelligent Edge:

The final part of the puzzle is the Edge conversation. For us, this is a combination of IoT, Automation, and AI delivered at the point of interaction with the data or environment. Our edge ecosystem has five stages that are worth exploring.  

Use Cases 

First are the use cases that drive the investment case for edge technologies. The list below is not exhaustive but gives a flavour of the challenges we are addressing in this space.  

• Smart Buildings & Cities 

• Augmented Visual Inspection 

• Enhanced employee safety 

• Asset Tracking and Management 

• Automated Quality Inspection 

• Predictive Maintenance 

Sensors  

Next, we need to collect the data to drive the use case and allow the system to provide the desired automation and decision-making. Sometimes, just considering a list of possible sensors can help define use cases. We often combine data from multiple sensors to deliver a more accurate outcome.  

• Temp 

• Motion 

• Tags 

• Vibration 

• Occupancy 

• Pressure 

• Air quality 

• Camera 

• Audio Sensors 

• Force Sensors 

• Photodetectors 

• RFID 

• Gas 

• Humidity 

• Proximity 

Connectivity  

All these sensors are useless if we cannot connect them back to the compute resources that will process the data. This could involve Wi-Fi upgrades, LoRaWAN-type solutions, or gateway appliances that drive into the IT/OT integration requirements.  

Real Time Processing 

Many Edge solutions will require real-time processing to provide maximum value. This requires adopting edge-grade hardware that can deliver in constrained or harsh environments. Deploying and delivering day 2 operations on a large-scale distributed compute poses challenges that a normal data centre does not have to deal with. Environmental conditions will vary, power stability, connectivity, cooling, noise, etc, are all primary considerations for this phase of the project.  

Aggregation and Insights  

Finally, we need to aggregate the metadata and ship it to a central location, where it can be used for advanced analytics and additional insights. This is usually a strong play for a Public Cloud platform, but depending on the providers, it can be SaaS based. 

Optimised Workload Mobility  

Adopting our Right Workload | Right Platform mantra enables organisations to blend the benefits of public and private cloud. We enable new workloads to be deployed into public cloud environments, taking advantage of the scale, innovative services, and agility that it is best placed to serve. This is like staying in a hotel; it may cost a little more than a night at home, but you benefit from on-demand services and the agility to meet changing demands.  

We can enable workload mobility to a private or vendor cloud environment for traditional workloads or those that have reached a steady state of consumption. Like your own home or renting an apartment, these environments may demand a little more responsibility (you can always pass that to CDW), but they can offer long-term cost savings and predictable bills.  

Of course, sometimes neither the hotel nor your home is in the correct location, and that’s when you need to take the camper van and deliver the outcome at the edge. This fun holiday analogy captures the essence of what our Hybrid Cloud teams are focused on solving for all our customers. 

Our approach has different technical outcomes based on three key workloads we see our customers deploying: Virtual Machines, Containers, and Data. There is no one-size-fits-all outcome; it's about blending the right technologies to drive the agility and innovation your organisation needs to thrive.  

The Hybrid Architecture 

All these components combine to build a Cloud Operating Model that can deliver any workload, in any location and at the most optimal running cost. Not everyone will need every element, but I believe that every organisation should have a modular architecture that can accommodate all aspects when required. We don’t know what the future holds, macro factors combined with new market innovation (think AI inferencing) can lead to a need to change direction at pace. Building a Hybrid Strategy can ensure long-term confidence is built at the board level, avoiding the need to reverse a strategy due to unexpected circumstances.  

The image below represents this architecture at a conceptual level. We understand this is not as simple as a few boxes on a page, but sometimes, a simple vision can help everyone align. For those who want to understand the details below, drop me a line, and we can schedule a time with our specialists.  

Conclusion  

Our Hybrid Cloud Team aims to break hype cycles and preconceived norms and drive technical architectures that deliver against the Platform of the Future vision. We have a dedicated group of people who are unburned by industry bias and hype cycles and will work to build a strategy that truly delivers against your organisation’s goals.  

Two key components are missing from the conversation: how we connect all this together and how we protect it against internal and external threats. While our Hybrid Cloud team provides the platform for innovation, our Secure Networking Team binds it all together and makes it accessible. Our Data Protection team ensures you can continue operations when the worst happens. Look out for the next part of this series as we uncover our vision in these areas.