devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Mike Vizard

OpsRamp Adds Recommendation Engine to AIOps Platform

OpsRamp added a recommendation engine to its artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) platform that makes use of predictive analytics to suggest potential actions to either improve performance or avert downtime.

The OpsRamp Winter 2020 Release also adds 19 cloud monitoring integrations for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), along with dynamic topology maps for Azure and GCP. OpsRamp currently provides integrations with more than 120 different cloud services.

Finally, OpsRamp has added an ability to detect seasonality patterns that would otherwise generate alerts, an Alert Stats widget that makes it easier to keep track of raw alerts, synthetic monitoring and agentless discovery and monitoring of Windows Server instances.

Bhanu Singh, senior vice president of engineering and DevOps at OpsRamp, said as IT continues to become more complex resistance to AI within the ranks of IT staffs is declining. Organizations realize that IT specialists are an expensive resource, so they need to maximize the capabilities of IT generalists as much as possible, he said. OpsQ Recommend Mode adds a predictive analytics module to the company software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing IT that provides explainable and transparent analytical recommendations to help the average IT administrator head off issues that would require a specialist to solve later, said Singh.

That visibility is critical because it still leaves the decision about what to automate in the hands of the IT administrator. However, as OpsRamp continues to learn the nuances of the IT environment, the more confidence IT administrators will have in the recommendations being surfaced, he said.

It takes about 24 to 48 hours for the OpsRamp platform to learn enough about an IT environment to start surfacing recommendations, Singh noted, adding because OpsRamp is a SaaS platform, setting up the platform requires minimal effort.

To some degree an increased reliance on AI among IT professionals is inevitable. AI may never eliminate the need for IT personnel, but many of the mind-numbing rote tasks that IT administrators perform today soon will be automated. The challenge that creates, however, is the IT staff needs to be able to manage IT at a higher level, which means many entry-level jobs in the IT sector may no longer be required. The challenge then becomes finding IT professionals who have the right level of skills, when many of the entry-level jobs for which they have been trained no longer exist.

In the meantime, a race is clearly on to infuse IT management platforms with machine learning algorithms. Startups such as OpsRamp are looking to supplant legacy IT platforms that were designed for a previous era of IT. However, the providers of those platforms are clearly investing heavily in AI as part of their ongoing modernization efforts. Each IT organization will need to decide for themselves to what degree the rise of AI warrants switching management platforms.

Regardless of the platform selected, however, the one thing IT teams can count on is that AI platforms are only going to get smarter as they continue to evolve.

— Mike Vizard

March 2, 2020
Tenable Allies With Datadog to Drive DevSecOps

Datadog and Tenable have teamed up to enable organizations to adopt best DevSecOps processes.

Tenable CTO Renaud Deraison said his company is making the cybersecurity data it gathers via its Nessus vulnerability scanning software available to the monitoring and analytics service provided by Datadog. The goal is to make it easier for DevOps teams to discover and address cybersecurity issues before an application is deployed in a production environment, he said.

Tenable has more than 30,000 customers, according to the company. Obviously, not all of them have embraced DevOps. However, unless DevOps teams can find a way to incorporate cybersecurity data, it won’t be practical for organizations to define a set of best DevSecOps practices. Even with that data available, Deraison said he expects it may be as long as five years before DevSecOps becomes broadly adopted. Many organizations are going to find a way to make cybersecurity teams part of the application development process. The challenge, of course, is finding a way to achieve that goal without unduly slowing down the application development process. In fact, Deraison said that despite all the hype surrounding DevSecOps at the moment, there still isn’t enough focus on actual workflows.

Less clear is whether security will become a distinct functional test within a DevOps process or simply be incorporated into an existing quality assurance process. Deraison noted that cybersecurity and quality assurance are really two sides of the same coin.

In the meantime, Tenable doesn’t have any plans to integrate with any other monitoring tool. The company chose to ally with Datadog because it makes available a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that are well-defined, he said.

DevOps teams going forward should expect to see a raft of integrations between providers of cybersecurity tools and various monitoring platforms. That data needs to be made available both when an application is being developed as well as after it has been deployed in a production environment to help developers prioritize bug fixes. Not all vulnerabilities are equal in severity, so it becomes important for DevOps teams to understand which are critical flaws that need to be addressed immediately versus something that can be addressed later in the application development cycle.

Naturally, the biggest challenge most organizations will face as they move to embrace DevSecOps is melding two very distinct cultures. In some cases, it may prove easier to teach developers the fundamentals of cybersecurity than it will be to teach cybersecurity how to participate in, for example, a sprint. There may not even be enough cybersecurity professionals available to participate in the application development process, given the current chronic shortage of staff. There are already millions of unfilled cybersecurity jobs.

Precisely what role artificial intelligence (AI) might play in accelerating adoption of DevSecOps has yet to be determined. However, given the chronic shortage of cybersecurity expertise, it’s apparent more organizations are going to have to rely on AI frameworks embedded in monitoring platforms to analyze massive amounts of data in a way that surfaces actionable insights before applications can truly become more secure.

— Mike Vizard

February 28, 2020
Rackn Extends Reach of IT-as-Code Framework

Rackn announced the Digital Rebar platform it created to automate the provisioning of bare-metal infrastructure now can be applied simultaneously across multiple physical sites.

Company CEO Rob Hirschfeld said Digital Rebar 4.3 makes it possible to manage IT infrastructure as code across highly distributed computing environments. Previously, IT organizations would have needed additional versions of Digital Rebar for each physical data center.

Hirschfeld also noted IT teams can also set up mirrors of data centers, now that Digital Rebar can be employed across multiple sites.

IT teams that adopt Digital Rebar can define workflows through which, for example, instances of virtual machines or Kubernetes can automatically be deployed on hundreds of thousands of servers in about an hour, said Hirschfeld.
Accomplishing that same task using manual processes would take most IT teams six months, he noted, adding IT teams can even use Digital Rebar to deploy instances Kubernetes on virtual machines at scale.

Hirschfeld noted many IT teams assume they need to have a layer of virtualization in place before they can start automating the management of their IT environment. Digital Rebar provides a framework around a common set of application programming interfaces (APIs) through which servers, storage and networking resources can be provisioned consistently. In addition, IT teams can set up a to manage IT infrastructure on an ongoing basis, including firmware and operating system updates and cluster configurations.

Digital Rebar doesn’t necessarily replace the need for frameworks such as OpenStack or VMware vSphere. However, it does provide a simpler mechanism for installing them. Alternatively, IT teams can employ Digital Rebar to deploy software such as Kubernetes on a bare-metal server.

Hirschfeld said Digital Rebar is designed to be deployed on-premises or in a public cloud rather than be accessed as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. That approach means IT teams operating in highly regulated industries can still take advantage of the framework, he said.

While the concept of IT as code has been around for a while, IT teams that are being asked to now manage IT at an unprecedented scale are turning to IT automation frameworks in larger numbers. Hirschfeld said Digital Rebar is now designed to replace other frameworks as much as it is to provide a complementary framework for specifically managing bare-metal infrastructure. In fact, Digital Rebar can be access vis Terraform or Ansible using a plug-in that Rackn makes available.

Rackn also plans to extend the reach of Digital Rebar out to edge computing platforms as well as endpoints based on, for example, Raspberry Pi platforms, he added.

Most IT teams will eventually wind up employing multiple IT automation frameworks in place of thousands of custom scripts that many IT professionals have developed themselves. The issue with most of those scripts is they don’t tend to scale especially well. In addition, they are usually poorly documented so when the author of the script leaves the organization the remaining IT staff wind up having to write another custom script because no one is quite sure how the script in place works. Whatever the path forward, the one thing that is certain is the days of being able to get by manually provisioning platforms is finally coming to a merciful end.

— Mike Vizard

February 27, 2020
JFrog Delivers on Hybrid Cloud Promise for DevOps

JFrog announced the availability of what it claims to be the first available hybrid DevOps platform capable of spanning multiple clouds.

Dror Bereznitsky, chief product officer for JFrog, said the JFrog Platform integrates a range of DevOps tools within the context of the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform that the company previously developed, with the goal of making it possible to continuously release software originating from any source on to any platform.

Announced late last year, the JFrog Platform also provides DevOps teams with the first universal package manager with JFrog Artifactory along with support for both REST application programming interfaces (APIs) and a command line interface (CLI), he said.

In addition, the JFrog Platform provides a common integrated user interface to access all capabilities and has been integrated with JFrog Pipelines for CI/CD, which is based on code JFrog gained via its acquisition of Shippable last year. The JFrog platform also enables DevOps teams to now also deploy applications on Kubernetes clusters.

Finally, because the platform is managed by JFrog, DevOps teams can count on high availability and cybersecurity updates that are automatically delivered, said Bereznitsky.

Bereznitsky said thanks to the rise of microservices based on containers and other cloud-native technologies, organizations are reaching a tipping point in terms of the amount of complexity their existing DevOps platforms can absorb. As such, many organizations that have already adopted a DevOps platform will be re-evaluating them. JFrog is betting that rather than spending more time on managing their underlying DevOps platform, more organizations will prefer to divert more resources to application development.

It’s too early to say precisely how application development will evolve going forward. There is certainly an opportunity to centralize DevOps processes in a way that will make organizations more efficient. Most organizations today employ multiple platforms for building and deploying applications that often conspire to increase total costs unnecessarily. The challenge those organizations will face is overcoming the cultural issues it is likely to create within their organization.

In the meantime, JFrog rivals clearly see the same opportunity. The race to become a de facto standard for building and deploying a new generation of highly portable applications is now on, at a time when many of the providers of DevOps tools are starting to consolidate. At the same time, the number of applications that will be deployed across an extended enterprise that now spans everything from public clouds to edge computing platforms soon will dramatically increase. As the volume of applications increases, the level of friction associated with building and deploying applications will ultimately determine the DevOps platform any organization is going to be inclined to standardize on.

— Mike Vizard

February 27, 2020
HashiCorp Updates Terraform Tool for Azure Cloud

HashiCorp today announced it has updated the instance of Terraform it created to automate the configuration of virtual machines on the Microsoft Azure cloud to give IT teams more granular control.

Version 2.0. of Terraform (TF) AzureRM Provider will allow IT teams to separately configure virtual machines by type for instance of both Windows and Linux.

In addition, version 2.0 of TF AzureRM Provider will allow users to specify custom timeouts for resources. Previously, timeouts were set for one hour by default.

Finally, TF AzureRM Provider 2.0 removes resources, data sources and fields that have been deprecated. TF AzureRM Provider currently provides access to 374 resources and 119 data sources.

Amith Nair, vice president of product marketing for HashiCorp, said the goal is to provide IT teams with a set of tools for automating the configuration of virtual machines on Azure that is more accessible than the tools currently provided by Microsoft.

Nair said HashiCorp is seeing increased adoption of Microsoft Azure, which in turn creates demand for tools that make it easier to deploy virtual machines at scale. In fact, Nair notes that as more workloads move into the public cloud the less resistance there is to IT automation as administrators look for ways to manage IT at what is now unprecedented scale. Of course, many organizations gain their first experience with tools such as Terraform when they first embrace a set of best DevOps practices.

Less clear is how many virtual machines are being configured on top of instances of Windows versus Linux. There is no doubt Microsoft has emerged as the strongest challenger to the dominance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the public cloud. Much of that success, however, comes from the fact that Microsoft supports distributions of Linux alongside Windows Server on the Azure cloud. There are, of course, many organizations, such as Walmart, that prefer to standardize on Azure simply because they view Amazon to be a competitor. At the same time, however, there are many companies that employ both AWS and Azure.

Nair said most organizations that have adopted more than one cloud tend to manage them in isolation from one another. However, it is expected that one day more organizations will seek to unify the management of multiple clouds within the context of a truly hybrid cloud computing environment as the total cost of cloud computing continues to rise with each additional workload deployed. Naturally, many of those organizations eventually will gravitate toward tools that can be employed across multiple clouds.

In the meantime, whether it’s IT administrators or developers themselves configuring virtual machines in the cloud, it’s thanks to tools such as Terraform that the amount of time and effort required to set up virtual machines in the cloud is now as negligible as it is. The challenge now is not so much finding tools to automate IT as much as it is navigating all the cultural changes that naturally ensue.

— Mike Vizard

February 24, 2020
Instana Expands Scope of APM Ambitions

Instana has launched a series of additions to its application performance management (APM) platform that reach into the realm of IT infrastructure as well as mobile and Java applications.

Chris Farrell, technical director and APM strategist for Instana, said the company is adding support for VMware vSphere because more customers are converging their management of applications and IT infrastructure, thanks in part to the rise of DevOps practices. Many IT organizations are also simultaneously embracing emerging platforms such as Kubernetes to run microservices-based applications on top of VMware vSphere, he noted.

Instana also recently added support for the Container Runtime Interface based on the Open Container Initiative specification, otherwise known as CRI-O, alongside existing support for Docker containers.

At the same time, usage of Instana, which was created to focus mainly on emerging microservices-based applications, is expanding to include monolithic applications. As a result, Instana has added a free AutoProfile feature for Java applications based on tools it gained by acquiring StackImpact.

Available in beta, AutoProfile attaches itself to the running process automatically with no restarts or reconfiguration required, to surface how specific pieces of code and associated bottleneck impact overall performance.

Finally, Instana has also made available in beta an End User Monitoring of Mobile Applications module. That capability is also being made available at no additional charge. Troubleshooting mobile applications should become easier because Instana captures every single request made at the client by both the browser and the application.

While adoption of APM platforms relative to the size of the IT market remains slight, Instana as a startup has been gaining traction at the expense of incumbent rivals. Instana claims it is now monitoring more than a half a million container and program run-time processes via its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, including hosts, containers, Java Virtual Machines, NodeJS runtimes and AWS Lambda functions written in PHP or Ruby. In total, Instana claims to also be gathering 1.5 billion metrics per minute, with more than a million application request traces being captured every second. New customers acquired in 2019 include Vivy, MacMillan Learning, TIpico, ExaVault and Avoris. Overall, Instana reports that its base of customers grew 150% in the last year.

The Instana APM platform is designed from the ground up to automate application monitoring, including application discovery and mapping, monitoring sensor and agent deployment, and application infrastructure health monitoring. Instana is betting that the rise of microservices will not only require more organizations to rely on an APM platform to manage an increasingly complex application environment in real-time but also force many organizations that have APM platforms to reconsider their options when they discover how limited the visibility into containerized applications those platforms provide. At the same time, by adding support for VMware vSphere and making additional capabilities available for free, Instana is ratcheting up the pressure on rivals in 2020 further.

Of course, it’s not clear there is anything approaching general dissatisfaction with existing APM platforms, so Instana may have its work cut out. Nevertheless, competition among providers of APM platforms has never been fiercer.

— Mike Vizard

February 21, 2020
Survey Sees Open Source Adoption, Quality Gains

A survey of 959 IT leaders published this week by Red Hat finds increased reliance on and adoption of open source software is now being driven by perceived higher quality as much as it is cost concerns.

The survey finds higher quality of software (33%) was the top reason they chose open source, followed by lower total costs of ownership (30%) and better security (29%).

Gordon Haff, a technology evangelist for Red Hat, said the survey makes it clear that open source adoption is now being driven from the top-down as well as the bottom-up in most organizations. What’s changed is that open source software is now being used more broadly as more organizations appreciate how open source approaches to building software not only lower costs but also improve overall quality.

The survey identifies the top three use cases for employing open source software to be IT infrastructure modernization (60%), application development (53%) and DevOps (52%).

As part of that shift, 56% of respondents said they plan to increase usage of containers over the next 12 months. In fact, on average respondents said cloud-native applications already make up 25% of their portfolio, compared to an average of 36% for cloud-enabled applications and 39% for legacy applications. The combination of cloud-native and cloud-enabled applications (61%) already outnumber legacy applications (39%).

Over the next two years, 47% of respondents plan to either modernize (17%), rearchitect as cloud-enabled (16%) or rearchitect as cloud-native (14%) their legacy applications. Another 16% said they would sunset or decommission those applications.

Overall, the survey finds there has been a marked shift away from proprietary software. Only 42% said that more than half of the software they use today is proprietary, down from 55% a year ago. Two years from now only 32% said they expect proprietary software to account for more than half their portfolio. On average, respondents said 36% of their organization’s software is open source, which in two years is expected to increase to 44% in two years. A total of 77% said they would increase usage of open source software over the next 12 months.

However, barriers to adoption of open source software remain. Security of the code (38%), level of support (37%), compatibility (34%) and lack of internal skills (33%) were all cited as ongoing issues.

The top three areas in terms of infrastructure where enterprise open source solutions are being used today are security (52%), cloud management tools (51%), database (49%) and big data analytics (47%). A total of 83% said open source has been instrumental in their organization’s ability to take advantage of cloud architectures. Almost two-thirds (63%) said they have a hybrid cloud infrastructure environment today. Among the 37% that don’t, more than half (54%) plan to have a hybrid cloud infrastructure environment within the next 24 months.

It’s apparent that open source software is now everywhere. The real challenge now is finding a way to manage it all.

— Mike Vizard

February 21, 2020
Cybersecurity Fears May Drive Shift to Managed DevOps

Should organizations consider using a managed service for DevOps to keep their platforms up to date and secure?

The recent disclosure of a vulnerability that would allow open source Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms to be employed to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack highlights how challenging it is to secure the platforms on which many organizations now depend to build their most critical applications.

The CVE-2020-2100 bug theoretically would have allowed cybercriminals to employ the Jenkins UDP discovery protocol to bounce traffic between servers until they could no longer respond. That same flaw also could be employed to launch DDoS amplification attacks against platforms connected to the internet. Those attacks can’t be stopped unless one of the servers is rebooted or its Jenkins service is restarted. The specific vulnerability discovered was fixed last month in Jenkins v2.219. IT organizations can either upgrade their Jenkins servers, disable the UDP discovery protocol or block the UDP port 33848.

Tracy Miranda, director of open source community for CloudBees and member of the governing board for the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), which oversees the development of Jenkins, said the bug itself is at best of medium severity. However, now that it’s been disclosed, the race is on to patch Jenkins servers or block UDP port 33848 before cybercriminals exploit the vulnerability on any public-facing instance of a Jenkins server.

Given the fact that most IT organizations may not have resources at hand to patch their Jenkins servers quickly, Miranda said these and other potential future cybersecurity issues are a testament to why more organizations should rely on instances of Jenkins that are managed by third-party providers on their behalf. Organizations are spinning up more Jenkins servers than ever as they move to accelerate application development, and by relying on a managed service provider (MSP) to manage Jenkins, IT teams can focus more of their efforts on building and deploying applications rather than on managing CI/CD platforms.

These days, more organizations are looking at DevSecOps as a best practice. Much of that focus, however, is on securing the applications that DevOps teams create; not nearly as much attention is being paid to securing the underlying platforms on which those applications are being built and deployed.

It’s too early to say to what degree cybersecurity concerns might push IT organizations toward managed DevOps platforms. However, the more that cybersecurity teams participate in the DevOps process, the more they will ask questions about the fundamental security of the underlying platform.

Of course, many IT teams often view managed services provided by third-party vendors as a threat to their existence. Nevertheless, DevOps platforms are among the most complex and expensive platforms to manage. In fact, that complexity is one of the main reasons so many organizations have hired site reliability engineers rather than relied on traditional IT administrators to manage DevOps platforms such as Jenkins. The issue that often comes up is just how many SREs an organization needs to hire before the cost of a managed DevOps platform becomes economically more appealing.

— Mike Vizard

February 20, 2020
Red Hat Updates OpenStack Platform

Red Hat today made available an update to its distribution of OpenStack that enables it to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 operating system.

Sean Cohen, senior manager for product management at Red Hat, said Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16 combines three releases of OpenStack, known as “Rocky,” “Stein” and “Train” into a single update that the company plans to update on a streaming basis. In addition, future updates to Red Hat OpenStack Platform will be aligned with updates to RHEL 8, said Cohen.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16 is also now being made available under a long-term support subscription as well.

Cohen said Red Hat continues to see continued growth in terms of customers adopting OpenStack to build their own cloud computing platforms. Telecommunications companies have already made major investments in cloud frameworks that are now being extended to the network edge. Earlier this week, Orange Egypt announced it will be using Red Hat OpenStack Platform to deploy virtual network functions (VNFs) to manage network traffic. Enterprise IT organizations, meanwhile, are building their own private clouds on top of an open source platform.

In some cases, enterprise IT organizations are relying on OpenStack to provide the foundation on which cloud-native applications based on Kubernetes are deployed, added Cohen. The goal is to take advantage of the virtual machines on which OpenStack is deployed to ensure isolation between instances of containerized applications running on top of Kubernetes. In other cases, IT organizations are taking advantage of tools such as Ironic to automate the deployment of Kubernetes cluster on bare metal machines, said Cohen.

The relationship between OpenStack and Kubernetes, however, remains complicated because there are those organizations that are deploying Kubernetes clusters in on-premises IT environments without relying on any legacy infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms such as OpenStack or VMware vSphere. Nevertheless, Cohen said Red Hat expects to see wider adoption of the Red Hat OpenShift application development and deployment platform, which is based on Kubernetes, on top of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.

Cohen said there is a high correlation between organizations that have embraced best DevOps practices and usage of OpenStack as IT organizations move to automate the management of IT infrastructure at scale. The challenge organizations face is determining which modules of a very comprehensive OpenStack framework to employ. In fact, that challenge is why organizations rely on Red Hat to curate OpenStack on their behalf. In terms of adoption, Red Hat has the largest market share of any OpenStack distribution, said Cohen.

It’s not clear to what degree the shift toward cloud-native applications based on Kubernetes might result in increased adoption of OpenStack. As organizations look to build hybrid cloud computing environments, the ability to deploy a common framework on-premises and in the public cloud has a certain appeal. However, public cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) already make available a proprietary platform for managing their IaaS environment. Many IT teams would naturally prefer to integrate with that AWS platform rather than replace it. Regardless of the approach to hybrid cloud computing, however, chances are high OpenStack will be in the mix in one form or another.

— Mike Vizard

February 20, 2020
Cohesity, HPE, Cisco Create ROBO Platform

Cohesity, in tandem with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Cisco Systems, today announced an integrated server and storage platform for remote office/branch offices (ROBOs) designed to be installed in a turnkey fashion.

Rather than requiring IT staff to be present in a ROBO, the platforms are designed to be installed by a local office manager and then centrally managed using the Helios management platform developed by Cohesity. IT organizations will have the choice of configuring those platforms with servers from either HPE or Cisco. The platforms themselves can be ordered only directly from either HPE or Cisco. HPE is also an investor in Cohesity.

Raj Dutt, director of product marketing for Cohesity, said the ROBO platforms being offered in collaboration with both companies is an extension of a capability Cohesity already has that allows its distributed file system to be deployed on virtual machines. The ROBO platforms, which replace the need to manage local instances of Windows file servers, extend that capability to a set of turnkey physical appliances that can be managed either via APIs provided by Cohesity or through the graphical user interface (GUI) the company makes available as part of Helios, said Dutt.

At the core of the ROBO platforms is a multiprotocol storage system capable of storing files locally or accessing data stored in object-based storage systems that support the S3 application programming interface (API) defined by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cohesity claims this is the first platform to combine file and object services with backup and recovery and archival services in the cloud in a turnkey platform designed specifically for ROBO environments. That capability also enables Cohesity to store an immutable copy of data that can be recovered in the event of a ransomware attack, noted Dutt.

Dutt, citing data from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), said more than half of enterprise data will be created and processed outside the data center or a public cloud by 2022. Much of that data will be created and processed in real-time on a wide variety of edge computing platforms. The goal now is to reduce the amount of data any edge computing platform needs to access over a wide area network (WAN), he said. The Cohesity platform also employs global variable-length sliding window deduplication and compression to optimize both storage efficiency and bandwidth utilization. All data at rest and in-flight is also encrypted.

It’s unclear to what degree organizations will be modernizing the management of IT in ROBO environments. What is clear is the need to have local IT administrators or dispatch IT teams to set up systems in ROBO environments is coming to an end, as IT infrastructure deployments and ongoing management become more automated. In the event of platform failure, it would even be less expensive to simply make a second appliance available locally or use an overnight delivery service to send a replacement. Of course, that may mean fewer road trips for the IT staff. However, most IT organizations have plenty of other tasks in the data center to keep most of their IT staff fully engaged.

— Mike Vizard

February 19, 2020