FINAL WORD
Chris Huggett , Senior Vice President ,
Europe & India , Sungard Availability Services for breaches fall squarely on the organisation , so assessing any gaps in compliance is key .
Performance enhancing infrastructure , but at what cost ?
As an organisation considers infrastructure options , it doesn ’ t need to choose only one model . The best approach is often a combination of clouds and infrastructures to best meet the requirements of the business . One approach , often referred to as ‘ own the base and rent the spike ’ addresses cost and performance requirements . A common scenario for organisations to experience is spikes in demand , such as sales events that drive increased traffic but hardware , as you are not investing in unused capacity outside of demand spikes .
Owning the base , on the other hand , is about calculating the capacity needed to securely support the steady state outside of demand spikes and procuring the capacity and associated hosting , such as buying servers , networking on storage to be hosted on-premise or in a colocated data centre . This is a relatively simple exercise for existing applications , but when there are new applications to be deployed , how much capacity does an organisation need ? One simple way of addressing this is to rent capacity in the cloud and then evaluate the utilisation and performance needs of that application , then procure the resulting requirements and deploy it on company owned infrastructure . This approach can very quickly identify the true capacity and performance needs prior to committing to a large capital outlay . Not applying this approach , however , can result in significant overprovisioning . Analysis of customerpurchased capacity and performance , compared to what is actually used , often shows significant levels of over provision , which is all wasted investment . Buying the base provides organisations with the peace of mind that they are meeting their predictable needs , while renting the spike accommodates the unpredictable .
Organisations that host their data on-premise in local storage systems should be in a position to identify the location of most – hopefully all – of their data quite quickly .
When adopting clouds , the on-premise IT footprint is reduced . However not all workloads are suitable for cloud deployment , meaning there are often legacy systems that need accommodation , and maintaining an on-premise hosting for a smaller footprint does not always make economic sense . Many organisations recognise the benefits of utilising a colocation facility to meet the needs of legacy workloads , because they offer advanced hosting and support capabilities with resilient power cooling and networking that would simply be overkill to deliver on-premise for a smaller set of workloads . Many organisations can then repurpose on-premise hosting environments into more productive space .
The best of both worlds still require consistent performance . A public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service ( IaaS ) environment provides the agility and scalability to rapidly accommodate these demand spikes . Traditionally , this is addressed by scaling out a web or application tier during these spikes and contracting outside of such periods .
The benefit of the ‘ own the base , rent the spike ’ scenario is that it ensures maximum cost-efficiency , performance , security and reliability , with the least risk of lost revenues and customers . In essence , it ’ s the best of both worlds , which , of course , is what hybrid IT is all about .
Conversely , public cloud , as well as some multi-tenant private cloud offers , are usually a pay per use model , meaning an organisation pays for the infrastructure it rents only for the time it is being rented . Renting IaaS capacity can be very cost-efficient when compared to throwing money at the problem and purchasing
The success of a business isn ’ t just about one application , one workload or one environment . It ’ s the ability for all applications and workloads to reliably work together within or across multiple environments and to always be available . Today , that ’ s what keeps a business moving forward . p
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