UPDATED 18:05 EDT / DECEMBER 10 2013

NEWS

Blade systems offer capacity, scalability + ease of management | #HPDiscover

Traveling all the way to Spain for the HP Discover event, theCUBE team mingled with over 10,000 attendees and is broadcasting live from Fira Barcelona GranVia, providing viewers with ongoing and insightful interviews from top executives and analysts. First on the agenda was Victor Laurel, Director of Strategic Architecture with the recently rebranded Archutech, who talked in-depth with host Dave Vellante about being a service integrator transitioning to a service provider and the many challenges the company faced during that process.

Over the past couple of years, Archutech as a service integrator has helped its clients solve a bevy of problems they faced. For instance, there were companies who had their own solutions, but weren’t working very well.

Talking about their modus operandi, Laurel explained: “We take a look at their solution, storage, services and goals and we find a great solution for them.” The trend they’ve come to see over and over during the last couple of years was that things tend to become too big to be easily manageable. Hence, “the transition to a service provider was quite natural; after seeing the same problem over and over again, we wanted to provide our own solution. We’ve taken all the lessons learned from our customers and provided the solution in the form of a cloud service.”

Wanting to get the info right, Vellante summarized: “So you are transitioning from a service provider that would do high touch to a cloud service provider, focused on infrastructure as a service. Where are you in that transition?” he asked next.

“We’ve built up the solution platform, and over the past couple of years we’ve done our research on different kinds of technologies, and there’s always the same three parts: network, servers and storage,” Laurel clarified. “About 16 months ago, building the cloud, we looked at all those individual pieces, and the biggest one we found was storage.

“Storage is the largest part of your enterprise infrastructure and it’s also the largest cost,” explained Laurel. “Storage has a number of factors in it, but you always want it to be fast, highly mobile, easy to expand, and easy to maintain. Traditional enterprise architectures basically involve large storage chassis, large disks, fiber channel – and we found out those were too bloated.”

The challenge with a virtual server infrastructure was keeping it very flexible and fast, and having a storage that can keep up with it all. “After a lot of research we found a simple solution: you have to virtualize your storage as well,” said Laurel.

Providing a server solution fast, with the least costs

 

Dissecting Archutech’s business model, Vellante wanted to hear about the customer perspective: “What are the customers asking for? What are some of the challenges that they’re facing?”

“Customers want to be able to rapidly provision their services. Everybody knows how to run a server and a service (or a collection of services), but they don’t know how to deploy that in less than a week, involving less than 10 or 12 people,” responded Laurel. Our challenge was making a solution that could provision a server as rapidly as possible while keeping it cheaper and faster.”

Vellante brought the newly popularized term “software-defined everything” in the spotlight, asking Laurel what he made of the trend, what it meant for storage and how it had affected their infrastructure.

“Software-defined simply means you start at the software layer to roll out any kind of service, or modify it; in the past you had to go through a hardware tool, lay that foundation down and then try to find a way to bridge that gap,” Laurel explained. “Now you leave your hardware there, you set it up once and then you put software on top of it and do all the controls to the software. That’s the easiest way to put it,” finished Laurel. “Through the fewer hardware changes that you have to make, those software changes are implemented much faster: go into control panel, hit a couple of buttons and then there’s a new server that comes out. And that’s what a cloud product can do for them.”

“Historically, the trade-off has been that the software is easier, but it’s slow,” noted Vellante. “What’s changed?”

“There’s so many hardware choices now – choosing hardware has always been kind of a problem – so when you introduce a hypervizor to a set of servers, you don’t really care what the server is because the hypervizor on top of it, it gives you the performance,” Laurel answered. “As long as the hardware and the software are compatible, you can leverage the benefits and performance of targeting that hardware for that software product.”

Vellante then asked Laurel to describe the architecture they are using, and he obliged.

“The idea behind our solution was, you needed to make sure that every piece of hardware could work with a cloud product,” started Laurel. “We are providing a cloud service that can handle any bit of software you put on top of it. After testing several choices, we went with VMware suite, because it had all the functionalities built in and it allowed us to leverage the benefits of our hardware solution. HP had not only the greatest compatibility with VMware and the products that we wanted, but they had every single component (network, servers, storage) in the form of a Blade system. We went with the Blade system, and that gave us – as a provider – capacity, scalability, and ease of management.”

As for the networking, Archutech chose Virtual Connect, “which allowed setting up up a massive highly available gigabit infrastructure between chassis, which are acting as a very large aggregate,” Laurel noted.

He went on to aptly point out that “with hardware, the goal is to outperform everybody, while with a cloud solution you have to accommodate everybody’s solutions.”

Symbiosis and security

 

“Security has to be everywhere; you have to protect your management portals, your data and your network in and out,” continued Laurel. “Our approach was that we wanted to give everyone a private cloud. Clouds are designed to be public, they are front ends, so we created a private cloud infrastructure so that all of our customers have to connect through a security gateway.

“Our cloud solution is a little different as we partnered up with a very large data center and that data center already has established customers; what established customers have is established networks within the data center. Our cloud basically direct connects to those customers, but on top of that we had to have a solution for security. We partnered up with a third party security provider which actually is part of our solution. We consult with the customer to see what they need in therms of security. We have a tailor-fit solution for every customer,” explained Laurel.

Differences between Europe and the USA

 

“America seems to be very technology-oriented. Everything seems to be solved by a new product,” noted Laurel on the differences in these two sides of the world. “Working on solutions in America, every time you get a solution out of the door, they want to change it. They’ve seen a great product and they want to add it to the solution. In London – and I don’t mean this to sound like a negative – they are very rigid and they don’t grow as fast.

“They don’t react as fast to newer technology or emerging things. ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ sort of mentality, as we say back home. The approach in London is that they have very stable systems, but they are very near the end of their life. In London the fear is not the capability of the system to meet the needs that I don’t know I have, but the fact that the system is so old that if it dies I don’t know if I’m going to get replacement parts for it or how to keep it going,” concluded Laurel.


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