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Tag: hybrid cloud

  • Morpheus Data Extends Hybrid Cloud Reach

    Morpheus Data Extends Hybrid Cloud Reach

    Morpheus Data has updated its hybrid cloud computing platform to add support for a bare metal-as-a-service option as well as tighter integrations with VMware vCloud Director (vCD) and NSX-T, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Microsoft Azure and Veeam data protection tools.

    In addition, version 5.0 of the Morpheus IT management platform adds support for additional financial operations tools and a user interface that can be tailored to different classes of end users with varying levels of expertise.

    Finally, Morpheus has added support for the latest release of the ServiceNow platform for managing IT via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.

    Interest in employing bare-metal servers is on the rise as IT organizations look to deploy everything from platforms to build and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) to edge computing applications based on cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes.

    At the same time, many IT organizations are beginning to more aggressively reduce the total cost of IT by centralizing the management of multiple IT platforms.

    Brad Parks, chief marketing officer for Morpheus Data, said the financial operations tools added to the Morpheus platform surface more granular cost analysis for utilization of specific classes of cloud services as well as views into Amazon Web Services (AWS) Reservation Coverage and Savings Plans.

    The revamped user interface, meanwhile, makes the platform available to a wider range of end users by adding support for different types of personas within an IT team. That enhancement makes it easier for IT organizations that have adopted Morpheus to provide self-service capabilities.

    It’s not clear at what rate IT organizations will be transforming IT operations. It typically requires IT teams to spend money before they can begin to save money. However, rationalization of the many tools that IT teams rely on today may also help cost-justify the investment.

    Regardless of the motivation, the need to centralize the management of IT is becoming more acute as IT environments become more distributed. Most organizations cannot afford to hire and retain IT staff for each IT platform it uses. IT organizations also want to be able to move workloads between platforms as they best see fit, which is easier to accomplish via a central control plane. The economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is, in effect, acting like a forcing function driving IT organizations to accelerate the rate of transition to hybrid cloud computing, noted Parks.

    Over time, it will also become easier to apply AI to IT operations when the data on which AIOps platforms depend is more easily accessible.

    In the last several years IT has become much more complex. With the rise of everything from microservices based on cloud-native technologies such as containers to internet of things (IoT) applications, the IT environment has never been more diverse. The challenge now is finding the most efficient way to manage all those devices at a time when IT budgets have never been as constrained.

  • Custom Coding: An Obstacle Along the Hybrid Cloud Journey

    Custom Coding: An Obstacle Along the Hybrid Cloud Journey

    If you’re like 80% of enterprises, you’re somewhere along a hybrid cloud journey. The imperatives of digital transformation, the emergence of DevOps as the de facto enterprise development methodology and the rapidly growing demand for continuous innovation have made hybrid cloud the go-to infrastructure for competitive enterprises.

    Hybrid Cloud Governance Requires Automation

    Despite hybrid cloud becoming the new normal, there are inherent challenges to managing these infrastructures. Not only do IT departments (and those they serve) need to adapt to different processes for provisioning public and private clouds, but they also need to ensure security and compliance across an increasingly heterogeneous cloud landscape. On top of these challenges, IT departments also need to monitor and control cloud costs and manage day-2 operations while seamlessly orchestrating private, public and on-prem systems.

    To tackle these new complex challenges, you need management and automation tools, which help alleviate the security, governance, and cost-control challenges that hybrid clouds inevitably bring. But integrating them with your existing IT infrastructure (e.g., networking, security, backup, etc.) burdens your IT team with significant custom coding requirements.

    The Dreaded ‘Custom Code Tax’

    So, you have your hybrid cloud, and you have your automation tools to optimize it. But now, each one of these tools—whether it’s for simple use cases such as resource naming or complex tasks such as multi-tier workload provisioning—requires integrations with dozens of underlying networking, security and backup endpoints, typically from dozens of vendors.

    These integrations often require custom coding, which is arduous and time-consuming. Your IT people will be stuck writing and maintaining thousands of lines of custom code to integrate your automation tools with all of these endpoints. It’s also expensive. Research by the Standish Group shows that over half of custom-coded projects cost almost double their original estimate, while about one-fifth of custom-coded projects will be canceled before they are completed.

    And the tax doesn’t end there. Governance and security become increasingly complicated and expensive because the proliferation of new tools and processes prevents IT from having a unified view of integration policies, automation playbooks and role-based access. Without the end-to-end visibility necessary to manage and monitor this proliferation of tools and processes or standardized provisioning across all IT platforms and tools, costs are only going to compound over time. Since 60% of all infrastructure outages are caused by human error, end-to-end automation and visibility are now mission-critical for enterprise organizations

    But what is to be done? Organizations need hybrid cloud to meet the demands of digital transformation, and they need automation tools to effectively manage and secure hybrid clouds. Your monetary costs and governance burdens will scale along with your IT, and as your organization invests in new automation platforms, the “custom code tax” will only keep increasing. But if you want your hybrid cloud to work right, there really is no choice but to pay it.

    Hybrid Cloud Management with Codeless Integrations

    Enterprise IT departments need to implement cloud management solutions that offer an alternative to custom coding. Cloud management that takes a policy-based, codeless approach to these integrations eliminates the need to custom-code, thus repealing the custom code tax.

    Take the example of cloud management platforms (CMPs). In the past, CMPs mainly focused on management. However, the complexity of hybrid clouds now requires an equal focus on both management and integration. Software-based, low-code/no-code methods for integrating automation solutions with relevant systems not only eliminate the high costs associated with custom coding but also ensure a governed, standardized approach to integrating automation tools with networking, security and backup endpoints.

    Not only will you save valuable time and budget dollars, but when your integrations are software-based and no longer rely on custom code, you will be able to apply advanced intelligence tools more easily as your organization grows and evolves. If your company wants to integrate certain tools that utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, for example, you will run into obstacles trying to abstract data from custom-coded workflows. You can’t apply AI to a language that is unique in business logic because it has been custom-written. There could be a hundred thousand lines of custom code, so you would have to manually go through it all and try to figure out what’s there, who built it, why they built it and what the business logic behind it is.

    Codeless Will Rule the Day

    In a world where multi-tool reigns supreme, the more tools you want to use, the more custom coding you have to do. Enterprises today must be able to use their tools of choice in a best-of-breed approach while maintaining standardization through a robust integration layer. Going forward, this means that cloud management platforms will need to be built around extensibility and make integration a core capability, not an expensive afterthought.

    Forward-looking CIOs are choosing software-based solutions to enable multi-tool to work seamlessly in hybrid cloud environments. This results in lowers costs, better governance, and more robust security, especially as organizations advance their hybrid cloud journey.

  • Micro Focus Strengthens Hybrid Cloud Hand

    Micro Focus Strengthens Hybrid Cloud Hand

    Micro Focus has made available a multi-tenant cloud management platform that can be deployed in a public cloud or on-premises IT environment.

    Travis Greene, senior director for IT operations management at Micro Focus, said the Hybrid Cloud Management X (HCMX) platform makes it possible to unify the management of IT services across a hybrid cloud computing environment spanning a diverse range of platforms, including public clouds and VMware environments.

    At its core, HCMX is a unified portal and service catalog through which IT teams can find, request and consume information and enterprise services. It is built on the same framework as Service Automation Framework, X (SMAX), an IT service management (ITSM) platform also offered by Micro Focus. As such, HCMX can also leverage the same natural language engine, search and virtual agent technologies that Micro Focus makes available on SMAX.

    HCMX also provides a library of reusable workflows through which IT teams can automate processes along with a set of governance policies that automatically trigger workflows based on events or input from an IT administrator that would, for example, limit usage of a specific cloud service.

    In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is more pressure than ever to rein in IT costs. One way to reduce those costs in the multi-cloud era is to centralize the management of those environments under a common control plane. Most IT organizations today rely on separate tools and consoles to manage IT platforms in isolation from one another. Not only are licensing fees incurred for each management platform, but also IT often has to hire specialists to manage each individual platform. As hybrid cloud computing platforms continue to mature, it becomes possible to rely on a fewer number of IT generalists to centralize the management of IT.

    Of course, transitioning to a single hybrid cloud computing environment requires a significant amount of time and effort. IT organizations need to make a multiyear commitment to a single platform to reduce the total cost of IT. Many organizations simply lack the ability to enforce the adoption of a single management platform across multiple divisions within an organization regardless of potential savings. However, organizations that do make the transition should be able to not only reduce the total cost of IT but also more flexibly choose where to deploy their next generation of application workloads based on the cost and merits of one platform over another.

    In addition, at a time when the parent company of any one of the major cloud service providers might become a direct competitor overnight, many organizations now prefer to keep their IT options open. The challenge, of course, is making sure workloads deployed on any of those platforms are not dependent on a proprietary interface that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

    Micro Focus, of course, is not the only provider of IT management tools focused on hybrid cloud computing. The decision IT organizations need to come to terms with is determining which of these platforms provides the greatest amount of flexibility at a cost that organizations can absorb.

  • Considering Hybrid Cloud? Focus on the Why

    Considering Hybrid Cloud? Focus on the Why

    So much of business—and life in general—comes down to semantics. We articulate goals and measure success using a variety of terms. Some serve to clarify; others confuse. Consider the term “hybrid cloud”—a Google search yields 5.96 million results. So, yes, hybrid cloud is a hot topic, but what exactly do we mean by it?

    The (current) accepted definition of a hybrid cloud is any compute/storage environment using a combination of third-party and private (on-premises) cloud resources. Yet, this definition is somewhat misleading. It is very likely that your company has already been using third-party platforms and services—a hybrid cloud model—for many years.

    Hybrid cloud is less about the “what” than the “why.” The question isn’t, “Should I move to a hybrid cloud?” (You already have.) The better question is, “Am I using that model to my best advantage?”

    On-Premises vs. Public Cloud Capacity—Strategic vs. Non-Strategic Applications

    The number of diverse applications, systems and business requirements IT must support is growing exponentially. In response, more tools are being made available to help. Public cloud, private cloud, edge computing and PaaS/SaaS models all give CIOs and IT managers options for handling new, more complex demands. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. The challenge for IT is developing the best mix of available tools to ensure business goals are being met in the most efficient way possible.

    Source: Veritas Inc., global IT consulting

    The first step in developing a hybrid cloud strategy is understanding which functions, applications and requirements are strategic to the business. More specifically, which operations are core to the organization’s purpose or must remain in-house (i.e., private cloud) due to security, regulatory or other governance issues? These are the high-priority operations for which it makes sense to prepare highly efficient, on-premises resources and staff to support your cloud initiatives.

    In deciding whether an application or function is strategic, it is essential to separate the IT output from the hardware/software producing it. For example, you may have significant dollars invested in a legacy mainframe with the software and analytics to run mission-critical applications. But the real question is: How strategically important is the output? If it is strategic, then, by all means, keep it in-house. If not, it may make more sense to migrate applications to public cloud equivalents and use the vacated space for something more strategic.

    On the other hand, non-strategic functions represent an opportunity to increase operational efficiency and cost-savings. For example, using a SaaS or PaaS provider to host your CRM platform in a public data center provides more space, staff and resources to support the higher-priority business.

    Maximum Productivity and Value, Minimum Space

    While the functional purpose of a hybrid cloud strategy is to determine which applications remain on-site and which can go, the overall goal is improving the value and delivery of strategic and non-strategic functions. Often, the full weight of your decisions is not realized until later, when you must address the need for additional data center space.

    The cost, time and manpower needed to plan, design, build and maintain a new facility represent some of the most substantial investments a company can make. By strategically optimizing your on-premises cloud capacity—and offloading non-strategic functions to the cloud—you increase available white space. This buys you more time to figure out when you need more space and whether your current optimized facility remains competitive with other options. Additionally, your on-premises equipment (because of its strategic importance) becomes far more valuable and productive.

    In some cases, organizations will discover that, once they take their non-strategic operations to the cloud, the cost of running key applications on-site does not warrant maintaining their existing data center. At this point, it may make more sense to sell the data center and lease back the space needed or partner with a multi-tenant data center.

    Potential Pitfalls

    Of course, moving applications and business functions off-premises also has its downside. Select well. Re-locating core capabilities to the cloud compromises control and can erode your competitive edge. And, while public cloud may appear to be an especially good option for smaller organizations, it can quickly become cost-prohibitive as you scale. Should you decide to transition from a public cloud, re-locating your data to a new environment is often complex and costly, restricting future options. This is not to say that public cloud options are intrinsically high-risk; they’re not. It does, however, emphasize the need to view every decision within the context of your long-term strategy while weighing the cost and agility entailed by public cloud options.

    Business First

    The bottom line is that developing a hybrid cloud strategy is first a business decision. When done well, it is based on the vision and trajectory of the company and implemented using the best combination of all available options—XaaS partners, private cloud, public cloud, hosted providers, captive resources and edge computing.

    Before you start trying to figure out details such as architecture and security, you’ve got to nail the strategy. For more common non-strategic applications, cloud-based deployments offer a degree of flexibility and cost-efficiency the data center can’t match. On the flip side, when it comes to supporting mission-critical applications, nothing beats the on-site control and dedicated resources of your data center.

    There are certainly pros and cons when deciding what stays and what goes. Your challenge is figuring out which is which—and why. Choose well.

  • VMware Brings Hybrid Cloud Computing to Virtual Desktops

    VMware Brings Hybrid Cloud Computing to Virtual Desktops

    VMware has updated its desktop and application virtualization platform to make it easier for IT teams to support end users who need to regularly shift between working in the office and from home.

    The latest version of VMware Horizon adds support for an instant clone capability that rapidly provisions personalized virtual desktops and applications enabled by the VMware vSphere platform.

    VMware Horizon is also now available on the Google Cloud VMware Engine service as well as on-premises servers from Dell EMC, a sister company of VMware. It is also committing to adding support for Microsoft Azure in addition to existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

    VMware is also adding REST application programming interfaces (APIs) to make the platform more programmatically extensible.

    The company has also optimized audio and video support for Microsoft Teams and is making it possible to publish Linux applications on the platform.

    Finally, VMware has launched a beta of VMware Workspace ONE Proximity, which leverages Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons to give employees insight into how to better maintain social distancing in the workplace. A forthcoming Workspace ONE Campus will also enable employees to leverage that same beacon infrastructure to book meeting rooms and determine how best to optimally move about a larger work environment.

    Jeff McGrath, senior director for VMware End User Computing, said interest in hybrid cloud implementations of VMware Horizon has risen sharply. IT teams want to be able to drive application traffic to on-premises servers to minimize latency whenever employees are in the office. When those same employees are at home, however, it may make more sense to drive that traffic to a cloud-based instance of VMware Horizon. As employees move between environments, McGrath said VMware Horizon makes it possible to maintain a consistent digital workspace experience for end users.

    Interest in virtual desktops has been rising since Microsoft changed Windows licensing terms in advance of launching its own Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) service. The VMware Horizon platform is significantly more robust in terms of both the hybrid cloud computing scenarios it supports and the management tools provided to IT teams, said McGrath.

    In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains to be seen how many desktops will shift into the cloud. Most IT organizations were simply content to provide access to desktops applications over a virtual private network (VPN) when the pandemic first hit. Now that it appears more employees will be working from home on a semi-permanent basis, many IT organizations are revisiting their entire IT strategies.

    Of course, there is no shortage of options when it comes to desktop and application virtualization. VMware is betting a large installed base of IT organizations that have already standardized on VMware vSphere in both on-premises and now cloud computing platforms will result in more enterprise IT organizations embracing VMware Horizon. Regardless of the outcome, the one thing that is clear is virtual desktops in the age of COVID-19 are now well on their way to becoming the preferred default option for many organizations.

  • 3 Key Issues With Hybrid Cloud Transformation

    3 Key Issues With Hybrid Cloud Transformation

    The cloud has fractured. Nowadays, it is nearly impossible to scale a cloud-agnostic digital transformation initiative. The reality is that most enterprises adopt a hybrid cloud arrangement. Whether designed strategically or throughout years of competing vendors and technology influences, hybrid cloud environments, and the problems therein, seem a mainstay for modern IT.

    Many digital transformation efforts are culminating in hybrid cloud scenarios. 451 Research recently found 72% of enterprises are already using more than one cloud vendor. As one can surmise, competing standards and inconsistencies among cloud tooling can cause headaches for developers, security teams and potentially even end users.

    3 Common Cloud Transformation Problems

    I recently met with Jeff Kukowski, CEO, and Grant Ho, CMO at CloudBolt Software, to identify issues within today’s cloud transformations. According to CloudBolt, custom coding, governance concerns and cybersecurity incompatibilities are among the top problems that hold back cloud transformation (or make it very costly). Below, we’ll see what strategies they recommend to solve these problems.

    1. Custom Coding

    In 2020, a software-defined approach seems the obvious preferred choice for most IT professionals. Yet, custom code is still a significant struggle for hybrid clouds. The Standish Group research shows 19% of projects will be canceled before they ever get completed. Further results indicate 52% of projects will cost 189% of their original estimates. Custom code decreases reusability and creates redundancy.

    2. Lack of Governance

    With many disparate cloud applications, it can be difficult to set standards. There is not much control. This free-for-all can directly impact the business. Lack of visibility into resources, a related concern, could cost a business significant expenses. Citing a recent Gartner study, ParkMyCloud estimates that companies waste $8.8 billion on idle cloud resources each year.

    3. No Role-Based Security Policies

    Gartner found that 33% of enterprise security attacks are happening from people using resources in the cloud and not necessarily putting the proper governance and security parameters in place. Without role-based access control (RBAC) and a standards-based way to apply RBAC across all your resources, hackers can more easily penetrate a hybrid cloud.

    How Hybrid Cloud Affects DevOps

    These above problems are quite broad, but they reflect a culmination of many roadblocks along the development pipeline. In terms of DevOps, juggling the ever-growing variety of hybrid cloud tools could easily stunt deployment velocity.

    Kukowski described how cloud IT faces a plethora of tooling styles. They include on-premises tooling, serverless, infrastructure as code, Terraform, Kubernetes and backup as a service. “Greater than 70% of organizations are not only multi-cloud, but they are multi-tool,” he estimated.

    Naturally, supporting nuances between them becomes tricky. Not only must you recognize governance and security inconsistencies between platforms, but you must maintain them “into Day 2,” he said.

    Solution: Policy-Based Automation

    With hybrid cloud tooling now a reality for most enterprises, managing them becomes the next logical step. Solutions primarily revolve around better automation to increase self-service capabilities. For Kukowski, the answers lie in automated governance, heightened tooling visibility and implementing enterprisewide security policy services to automate security compliance and decrease custom coding.

    One way to achieve these benefits is by utilizing a Cloud Management Platform (CMP). Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms includes CMPs from CloudBolt, Embotics, Flexera (formerly RightScale), HyperGrid, Morpheus Data, Scalr, and VMware with vRealize Automation Cloud plus CloudHealth. A CMP layer could help automate self-service IT, assisting engineers to do their work with governance and security capabilities in place.

    Using a CMP, companies could eliminate custom coding for things such as access control. Such increased visibility could, for example, significantly decrease AWS server cost by reducing unused deployments. A CMP can benefit CI/CD too. Home Depot, for example, uses a CMP to greatly improve efficiency, decreasing infrastructure deployment time from weeks to hours.

    “Who is authorized to perform that action, on that K8s container, local VM, or cloud machine? We need visibility into that,” Kukowski said. “What is it doing? When is it running? Who has visibility to shut it down?” He recognizes that deep industry expertise is required to abstract complexity and standardize governance across all these situations.

    Streamlining the Polymorphic Cloud

    Saturated within an overabundance of cloud tooling, it’s easy to lose sight of your enterprise’s IT policies. Without global DevSecOps standards, security for hybrid cloud becomes risky.

    Enterprises with multi-tool environments are also at risk of wasting development time and effort. “We want to make sure the market does not repeat the problems of the past,” Kukowski noted. “Why custom code the fundamentals that operate your business?”

    Instead, companies should seek to reduce redundancy and eliminate custom code for each point to point integration. However, abstracting such complexity involves porting governance standards across all environments—a challenging feat for internal teams.

    The solution could lie in utilizing an external CMP layer. Such a layer could offer a software-defined approach to eliminate custom coding, offering policy-based security controls that consider the organization’s needs.

  • Revisiting 2020 Cloud Predictions in Light of COVID-19

    Revisiting 2020 Cloud Predictions in Light of COVID-19

    Back when the technology industry made its cloud predictions for 2020, no one forecasted the impending impact of COVID-19. Across the board, the pandemic has changed the way consumers have digital experiences, and made businesses realize their legacy IT infrastructure may not be up to keeping pace with new demands.

    So how does that change some of the cloud predictions put forward at the end of 2019?

    Increased Importance of Hybrid Cloud

    Hybrid cloud is a critical focus area as IT organizations prepare to work and operate with clouds but many applications continue to run on-premises. While I predicted that hybrid would be a crucial area, I did not expect the actual pace, which has become much higher.

    With cloud technologies becoming part of every IT environment from operations to orchestration and beyond, its adoption, including the move to hybrid, will accelerate due to this new normal. More organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach sooner than expected, as they’ll have no other choice to keep up with technology’s aggressive evolution. They must run legacy workloads or local cloud on-premises while also deploying on public clouds and manage workloads there; this is from both a VM and Kubernetes perspective. Red Hat and VMware are going head-to-head here.

    As COVID-19 severely impacts IT teams’ time and budget, those that provide solutions that are easier to run and integrate will win this space. Simplicity, known skill sets and familiar products with shorter time to integrate will be critical.

    Containers Will Still Become the De Facto Software Packaging Model

    Container platforms have become an essential factor in the hybrid cloud landscape, accelerating multi-cloud adoption in enterprises. Gartner predicts that by 2023, 70% of organizations will be using at least three containerized applications in production. Even with the prioritization of other tasks due to COVID-19 disruption, container adoption is continuing at full speed, along with the wider implementation of Kubernetes.

    COVID-19 should not impact the adoption of containers for those already on a Kubernetes platform. Anyone who has started with Kubernetes uses containers already, and organizations understand the value of Docker-based DevOps, local PC development and CI/CD pipelines based on containers.

    2020 No Longer the Year of Serverless Computing

    I expected a move toward maturing best practices, security solutions and tooling around serverless computing as more IT organizations looked to implement the technology. I saw AWS Outposts as the likely chief disruptor here, as it blurs the lines between on-cloud and on-premises workloads and services, with Google Anthos and Microsoft Azure as its main competitors.

    However, we can now assume that COVID-19 will have impacted the adoption of new technologies. This is because many organizations are unable to deal with new technology due to the other tasks that have taken precedence for now. I also expect organizations that were experimenting with the likes of AWS Lambda or kNative may take a step back for at least three to six months.

    Service Mesh Not Yet Standard for Cloud-Native Apps, Microservices

    I expected the industry to start uniting behind a single strategy to service mesh in 2020. But as of now, the list of open source service mesh options continues to grow. This makes it one of the most interesting domains today, full of emotions, fights and changes, unaffected by COVID-19.

    As a standard continues to elude the industry, things can become highly problematic. This is because once you adopt service mesh, it becomes a critical path in your deployment and application dependency.

    A few weeks ago, I spoke with Dell’s CTO, John Roese, who said he firmly believes the industry will eventually converge. Although IBM, VMware, Red Hat, Pivotal and Google commit to Istio as their service mesh, the industry is still waiting patiently for this convergence to happen.

    While all of this infighting is happening, a new body, the Service Mesh Initiative, was set up to ensure none of the hyper-scalers could impose a lock-in on service mesh. This could begin to change things, as IT organizations can define applications that use service mesh without tightly binding to any specific implementation. Watch this space.

    While COVID-19’s impact may have thrown a few things off base at the start of 2020, it’s likely a temporary slowdown. As new demands require a more flexible IT environment to keep pace, there is no question that things will speed back up. And when it does, IT organizations must be ready to implement the latest innovations or risk being left behind.

  • Nebulon Unveils Hybrid Cloud Computing Platform

    Nebulon Unveils Hybrid Cloud Computing Platform

    Nebulon has emerged from stealth to launch a hybrid cloud computing platform that enables workloads to be processed in the cloud while data continues to be stored on a local application server.

    Company COO Craig Nunes said the Cloud-Defined Storage platform employs PCIe cards embedded with a Nebulon Services Processing Unit (SPU) based on an ASIC to connect local storage systems to a cloud-based control plane dubbed Nebulon ON that can span Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services.

    The PCIe card is installed in an application server residing in a local data center, where it connects to solid-state drives (SSDs) installed on the server. The Nebulon SPU offloads compression, encryption, deduplication, erasure coding, snapshots and data mirroring.

    The Nebulon SPU also transmits storage, server and application metrics to Nebulon ON, where machine learning algorithms are applied to surface recommendations to improve performance.

    Nunes said both Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Supermicro have already agreed to resell the Cloud-Defined Storage platform.

    At its core, the Cloud-Defined Storage platform takes hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to another level. Instead of combining compute and storage in a local data center, however, compute processing is shifted to the cloud, said Nunes. That approach, he noted, makes it possible to take advantage of inexpensive compute resources in the cloud without losing control over data.

    In addition, Nunes noted, the Cloud-Defined Storage platform ensures application service levels are maintained while reducing costs by eliminating the need to transfer massive amounts of data into and out of the public cloud.

    Organizations that work within highly regulated industries can now take advantage of cloud resources while continuing to meet compliance requirements, he added.

    Finally, the Nebulon Cloud-Defined Storage platform can support both monolithic and microservices-based applications regardless of the type of virtual machine or container employed.

    At a time when many organizations are under increased pressure to reduce the total cost of IT, there’s a lot more interest in ways to leverage cloud computing to reduce costs. However, for many organizations, moving data into the cloud is problematic for a host of performance, security and compliance issues.

    A hybrid cloud computing architecture that doesn’t require data to be stored or moved into and out of a cloud could provide a way for organizations to re-evaluate their overall cloud computing strategies. Organizations beyond those in highly regulated industries could conclude they would prefer to retain control over their data.

    Cloud service providers are, of course, banking on massive amounts of data being stored in the cloud. They have long argued that as the amount of data stored in the cloud exponentially increases, the more sense it makes to deploy applications in the cloud as close as possible to that data. Each new application deployed in the cloud then increases the amount of data gravity that cloud exerts on other application deployment decisions.

    It’s not likely hybrid cloud platforms such as the Nebulon Cloud-Defined Storage system will completely reverse that trend. However, it does signal that data gravity in the cloud may not be as inexorable a force as many cloud service providers have long assumed.

  • CloudBolt Acquires SovLabs to Advance Hybrid Cloud Strategy

    CloudBolt Acquires SovLabs to Advance Hybrid Cloud Strategy

    CloudBolt Software this week announced it has acquired SovLabs, a provider of a framework that extends the reach of automation frameworks from VMware.

    Company CEO Jeff Kukowski said that as a provider of a cloud management platform, the SovLabs framework will extend CloudBolt’s reach deeper into VMware environments that have already invested in automation tools from VMware.

    As IT environments become more widely distributed across a range of platforms, demand for a platform that enables IT teams to centralize the management of multiple cloud computing environments has increased, Kukowski said. The addition of SovLabs to the CloudBolt portfolio will make it easier to bridge the divide between cloud computing platforms and enterprise on-premises IT environments that have standardized on VMware.

    CloudBolt has been making a consistent effort to enable IT teams to invoke its cloud management framework via whichever IT automation framework they have adopted, including tools such as Terraform. The goal is to reduce the need for IT organizations to rely on their own custom-built code to achieve that goal, said Kukowski.

    In general, many IT organizations are now investing more heavily in centralizing the management of multiple IT environments as part of an effort to reduce the total cost of IT in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. That shift is accelerating a transition to hybrid cloud computing models that require increased reliance on IT automation.

    The challenge many organizations face is enterprise IT environments tend to have many islands of IT automation in place. CloudBolt is pursuing a strategy that enables IT teams to extend those islands of automation or access CloudBolt directly to manage hybrid cloud computing environments.

    The CloudBolt approach offers IT teams an alternative to relying on a single platform vendor to achieve hybrid cloud computing. VMware, for example, has been making a case for deploying VMware vSphere on multiple clouds versus relying on the virtual machines provided by a cloud service provider. Most of the large cloud service providers are simultaneously pushing to deploy instances of their platforms in on-premises IT environments that can be managed as an extension of a public cloud.

    It’s too early to say how this titanic battle for control over hybrid cloud computing will play out. CloudBolt, however, is betting that rather than getting locked into a single platform, many IT organizations will prefer to run toward some neutral ground to deploy a control plane capable of managing multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments.

    Of course, CloudBolt is not the only provider of a cloud management platform making this case. Competition between providers of hybrid cloud management platforms is heating up as interest in hybrid cloud computing starts to move beyond the theoretical. Regardless of the path forward chosen, history would suggest that most IT organizations in the months ahead will be seeking more control over their IT environments.

  • Dell Technologies Advances Hybrid Cloud Strategy

    Dell Technologies, in collaboration with VMware and Google, today advanced its hybrid cloud strategy by making its CloudFS storage system available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and adding support for VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and VMware Cloud Foundation 4 to its VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms for on-premises IT environments.

    Varun Chhabra, vice president of product marketing for Dell Technologies, said both moves are part of Dell’s ongoing effort to provide IT organizations with a consistent cloud operating model spanning both on-premises IT environments and public clouds.

    In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Dell is more aggressively making a case for reducing IT costs by consolidating the management of multiple clouds.

    Kit Colbert, vice president and CTO for the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware, said current spending levels on multiple cloud platforms are unsustainable. However, that doesn’t mean IT organizations should consolidate clouds. Rather, he said, organizations need to streamline the management of multiple clouds to reduce costs.

    VMware has been making a case for deploying its VMware vSphere platform both on-premises and on public clouds from Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others to make it easier to build and deploy application workloads as organizations best see fit. Just because an application workload was created on a specific public cloud, for example, it doesn’t follow that workload needs to be deployed on that platform, Colbert said.

    At the same time, VMware has been making a case for deploying cloud-native workloads based on Kubernetes on top of VMware vSphere as well. VMware Cloud Foundation 4 provides access to a complete stack of infrastructure software that includes a distribution of Kubernetes that has been embedded in the latest update to VMware vSphere. VMware also provides a VMware Tanzu cloud service that can be employed to build, manage and deploy containerized applications across multiple distributions of Kubernetes.

    In effect, VMware and Dell are pushing to extend a management plane that is already widely deployed in on-premises IT environments to encompass both monolithic and microservices-based applications running in the cloud. There may be more workloads moving into the cloud than ever, but Colbert noted the bulk of application workloads and data still reside in on-premises IT environments.

    While Dell and VMware may have an advantage because of the number of IT organizations that already rely on its platforms to manage IT, every provider of a rival platform is making a similar hybrid cloud computing case. AWS, for example, is enabling VMware vSphere to run on its cloud while simultaneously pushing adoption of its infrastructure in on-premises IT environments as an alternative to platforms from Dell and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE).

    It may be a while before IT organizations define their hybrid cloud computing strategies. Most IT organizations today continue to manage IT environments in isolation from one another. However, the pressure to reduce the number of specialists required to manage each IT platform is mounting. Most IT organizations are being directed to do more with less regardless of how complex the IT environment becomes. The challenge now is figuring out how best to automate the management of what by any measure is now a confusing mix of platforms and workloads.