To the cloud and beyond
The last couple of weeks we talked about the cloud and the software defined data center, and how it all comes into your it infrastructures. To be honest I understand a lot of you have doubts when talking and discussing cloud and SDDC. I know the buzzword lingo is strong, and it seems the marketing teams come up with new lingo every day. But all-in all I still believe the cloud (and with it SDDC) is a tool you can’t just reject because of looking at it as a marketing term.
One of the things mentioned was that the cloud is just someone else’s computer and that is very true, but saying that is forgetting some basic stuff. We have had a lot trouble in our datacenters, and departments sometimes needed to wait months before their application could be used, or the change they asked for was done.
Saying your own datacenter can do the same things as the AWS/AZURE/GOOGLE/IBM/ETC datacenters can do, is wishful thinking at best. Do you get your own CPU’s out of the Intel factory, do you own the microsoft kernel, and I could continue with much more you will probably never see in your DC. And don’t get me wrong, I know some of you work in some pretty amazing DC’s.
Let’s see if we can put it all together and come to a conclusion most of all can share. First I think it is of utmost importance to have your environment running at a high maturity level. Often I see the business running to the public cloud and complaining about their internal IT because of lack of resources and money to perform the same levels as in a public cloud. But throwing all your problems over the fence into the public cloud won’t fix your problem. No it will probably make it even worse.
You’ll have to make sure you’re in charge of your environment before thinking of going public, if you want to have the winning strategy. For me the Hybrid cloud or the SDDC is the only true cloud for much of my customers, at least for the next couple of years. But most of them need to get their environments to the next level, and there is only one way to do that.
Know thy environment….
We’ve seen it with outsourcing, and in some cases we are already seeing it in Public Cloud, we want to go in but we also need the opportunity to go out. Let’s start with going in:
Before we can move certain workloads to the cloud we need a to know our environment from top to bottom. There is no environment where nothing goes wrong, but environments where monitoring, alerting, remediation and troubleshooting is done at every level of the infrastructure and where money is invested to keep a healthy environment, normally tend to have a much smoother walk towards the next generation IT environments.
The DART framework can be used to get the level needed for the step towards SDDC/Hybrid Cloud.
We also talked about getting SOAP, Security, Optimization, Automation and Reporting to make sure we get to the next level of infrastructure, and it is as much importance as the DART framework. If you want to create the level IT environment you need to be in charge of all these bulletpoints. If you are able to create a stable environment, on all these points, you’re able to move the right workloads to environments outside your own.
I’ve been asked to take a look at Solarwinds Server and Application Monitor (SAM) 6.3 and tell something about it. For me it is just one of the tools you need in place to secure, optimze and automate your environment and show and tell your leadership what your doing and what is needed.
I’ll dive into SAM 6.3 a bit deeper when I had the time to evaluate the product a little further. Thanks for hanging in there, and giving all those awesome comments. There are many great things about Solarwinds:
- 1. They have a tool for all the things needed to get to the next generation datacenter
- 2. They know having a great community helps them to become even better
So Solarwinds congrats on that, and keep the good stuff coming. For the community, thanks for being there and helping us all get better at what we do.