storage , servers & hardware
Banks need an infrastructure that can flexibly scale and keep up with the rapid pace of change delivered through a DevOps environment .
industries can build an entire cloud platform from commodity hardware , regardless of hardware vendor . All this aims to provide organisations with the ability to provide fast IT , creating competitive advantage for the business , leveraging IT as the engine for converting ideas into reality . Whether it be two of the most well known high street banks adopting OpenStack to create their own private cloud and running a DevOps environment , or an online grocer using OpenStack to orchestrate a fully automated distribution warehouse using bots .
The banks , for example , which have adopted OpenStack have had to undergo business process reengineering . It all starts with the fundamental question from a business perspective ‘ how can we cut operational costs , improve customer service and differentiate ourselves in the marketplace ?’ This has ultimately led them to a DevOps model of operating which fosters closer collaboration and strong communication between business operations , the development team and Quality Assurance . The synergy of which is designed to lead to the output of a competitive advantage in products , services and operations . To support this model , banks need an infrastructure that can flexibly scale and keep up with the rapid pace of change delivered through a DevOps environment . If we look at the traditional IT department that procures servers from one vendor , storage systems from another and network switches from yet another vendor , it becomes extremely difficult to add new workloads in such an environment and in some cases , scale within a short timeframe .
Recognising the need for OpenStack IT teams need to understand the profile of the additional workloads ; performance , storage and bandwidth requirements of the workloads coming on board . Any change is likely to be conducted out of hours to minimise disruption to existing services and SLAs . The change will need to be agreed with the business and scheduled before gathering staff and resources to carry out the work . Changes at all three levels of the infrastructure stack are also needed .
This entire project cycle typically takes anywhere from days to months and costs money , not just in the procurement of additional hardware , but in fees for consultants , professional services and out of hours resources . What if the additional infrastructure resource was only needed for a limited period of time ? What happens to all the extra infrastructure hardware that was put in place when interest withers away a few weeks later ? This was the issue faced by a genome research organisation which procured thousands of pounds ’ worth of equipment to handle an increase in demand for viewing a particular genome study generated by a media story , but interest only lasted for a short spell . The rest of the year , this IT infrastructure would gather dust and sit idle .
Similar challenges faced Rackspace and NASA who needed IT resource to scale on-demand , in a flexible fashion and provisioned fast . NASA had so much data generated by satellites in space ( classed as Internet of Things ) that the back-end IT function couldn ’ t provide resource fast enough to keep up with demand . Similarly , the digitalisation of organisations who harness IoT through devices and wearables require massively scalable infrastructure on the back-end to house the enormous amount of data being generated . This data then needs to be processed and analysed to become meaningful to an organisation .
It was the need for an IT infrastructure that could overcome
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