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Premise

As enterprises gain experience with cloud computing, the practical limits with public cloud options become more obvious. Hybrid cloud is the necessary response, but enterprises face a range of options for bringing the cloud experience to their data’s locations. A lot of new technology is queued up to support a common cloud operating model across hybrid locations, but hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, will be the hardware basis for on-premises cloud options.

Key findings

While advances in technology are amazing, computing isn’t magic. Applications still must run on hardware somewhere, whether in data centers of public cloud facilities. As chief information officers and other technology executives envision digital business strategies, they must consider IT options carefully. The issue of “the hardware runs somewhere” still matters: Physical, cost, sourcing, time-to-value, security, administrative complexity and other constraints are reshaping enterprise architectures and technology decision making, and all of these issues are impacted by hardware choices. Which hardware technologies are most important to achieve the cloud experience regardless of where the hardware resides? Which integration approaches will best alleviate infrastructure constraints? Which sourcing partnerships are most likely to sustain a strong and steady stream of simpler and superior systems technology?

To answer these and other questions, Wikibon convened a CrowdChat to discuss the impacts of cloud computing and digital business. For an hour in December 2017, 54 industry experts who are part of the Wikibon community met online to discuss this topic. The conversation comprised nearly 225 collaborative observations that generated nearly 800,000 customer impressions. Among the key findings from the collaboration (a summary of that CrowdChat can be found here):

• The cloud experience is more than public cloud
• HCI is the favored platform for private cloud
• Hardware matters when choosing private cloud technologies
• Vendor relationships also matter when choosing private cloud technologies

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What is a CrowdChat?

CrowdChat is a community engagement tool used by Wikibon to research innovation. A CrowdChat brings together – online – experts in a domain to discuss complex technology, social, and business issues. Wikibon posts questions to these experts, which catalyzes a bloom of conversational interactions about the subject. Wikibon analysts then combine these interactions with other research sources to develop the findings that we publish in a Voice of the Community research paper.

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The cloud experience is more than the public cloud

Cloud computing is becoming the design point for all computing, but cloud computing also is becoming more than just the public cloud. The ability to offer self-service, metering, charge-backs are important regardless of whether the hardware is within the four walls or outside. The reason for this is not some specific failures of public cloud companies nor is it something that can be “solved” by innovation or marketing. Rather, the evolution of cloud computing is responding to a variety of very practical data realities that are fixed and permanent. Most importantly is the fact that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, including data. Given that new classes of application are increasingly distributed and more data oriented, latency is emerging as a crucial question for designing not only infrastructure, but also applications – and even digital business strategies. Consequently, the Wikibon community observes that:

• The cloud is moving to data. After years of predicting that IT strategies would focus solely on moving data to the cloud, the Wikibon community is focusing on how best to move the cloud experience to data. Our counsel is “true private cloud” or TPC, a combination of technologies capable of providing the cloud experience on- or near-premises. What do we mean by TPC? A technology set (e.g., Dell EMC VxRack SDDC) that offers increased automation, usage-based pricing and rolling maintenance and in-place upgrades, among other things (Figure 1) in an on-premises or near-premises package. A few years ago, TPC was a novel concept. Today, viable TPC products are available from an expanding array of technology sources. The number is going to increase, and the cloud functionality of the products will improve.
• Most enterprises are taking a hybrid approach to cloud. While the debate regarding cloud options rages among cloud purists, most enterprises in fact are taking a practical approach to cloud infrastructure investments. We asked participants in our Crowdchat how their business’s perspective on cloud experience was impacting choices of infrastructure technology (Figure 2). Overwhelmingly (64 percent), they indicated that their businesses are employing a mix of private and public cloud options. Only 18 percent indicated that they’re wedded to public cloud services.
• True private cloud investment is accelerating. TPC will be the favored hardware for investment in many edge computing, legacy migration, and digital differentiation applications. Our industry models show that TPC will grow between 30 and 35 percent over the next decade or so, eclipsing spending on traditional IaaS service by about 2023 (Figure 3). This kind of spending is more than enough to support industry investment in both public cloud services and true private cloud products. As new generations of applications that employ AI, machine learning, recommendation engines and other data-rich technologies diffuse, infrastructure options for supporting those applications will be broadly available at cost-effective price points.

Figure 1: The cloud experience is moving to the data (Source: Wikibon)

Figure 2: Impact of the cloud experience on technology selection (Source: Wikibon)

Figure 3: Cloud infrastructure market is trifurcating (Source: Wikibon)

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Sidebar: What does the Wikibon community say about hybrid cloud strategies?

• “Cloud is about the operational model, and the services that are offered.”
• “Pay-as-you-go, scale, automation, things that cut my IT operations labor.”
• “Let’s first define what the cloud experience should feel like…. It should be adaptable, allowing customization for programs and applications…. It should be reliable and always on, like power or water to your house.”

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HCI is the favored platform for true private cloud

Because of the dynamic nature of data, hybrid cloud will be the dominant enterprise technology platform, and TPC will be an essential component of any enterprise’s cloud strategy. The goal is the cloud experience wherever the data demands. Hyperconverged infrastructure technologies will be the basis for many forms of cloud infrastructure, including TPC. Converged infrastructure technologies leveraged systems support hardware, like racks, power supplies and operator consoles, across server, storage and networking gear. HCI extended this concept by converging system software to streamline or automate infrastructure expansion (with a special emphasis on pay-as-you-go increments), configuration, linear scaling, maintenance and resource administration activities. These are powerful and rapidly evolving technologies, that nonetheless are fully ready for enterprise deployment because:

• HCI is market tested. Although only a few years old, HCI products are broadly adopted within the Wikibon community. Fifty-five percent of CrowdChat participants indicated that their organizations have deployed HCI technologies (Figure 4). Thirty-five percent more are in planning stages. Fully 100 percent of CrowdChat participants are at least considering HCI technologies. While HCI is relatively new (in comparison to other infrastructure technologies), it is based on mature piece-parts, like volume-based hardware components and standardized virtualization software. Moreover, HCI solutions are designed to support newer classes of applications that exploit software-defined everything, big data, cloud services and modern application development tooling, such as containers.
• HCI provides a rich set of benefits. Digital business increasingly is tied to infrastructure capabilities and constraints. Our clients indicate a broad set of existing HCI benefits that, we believe, will grow over time. At the top of the list is simplification of operations, both IT and business (which in a digital business, increasingly merge; see Figure 5). One client told us that their HCI platform reduced their configuration times from days to a few hours, reducing the number of setup steps by 90 to 95 percent. The simplification impacts are extensive enough that one CIO told us that his biggest challenge with HCI is that it puts enormous pressure on his organizational structure, which is resisting the opportunity to change administrative practices. Increased simplification has multiple derivative benefits, of course. Reducing the frequency and complexity of administrative tasks can result in a much faster time-to-value for digital outcomes (mentioned by 21 percent of CrowdChat participants) and more predictable infrastructure costs (17 percent of respondents).
• HCI is the focus of system innovation. The original cloud value proposition centered on workload elasticity. The cloud promised – and delivered – a brilliant approach to scaling up and down workloads without having to purchase peak scale. While users continue to value elasticity, increasingly digital business strategies are focusing on rapidly turning great market ideas into superior customer experiences and simpler operations by innovatively sharing and leveraging data and technology assets. Above all else, HCI is the best platform today and going forward for facilitating resource and data sharing across applications and users. As enterprises gain experience with the evolving internet of things, AI, robot and other technologies, users will point these new technologies at new classes of business opportunities and problems. Increasingly, infrastructure must be more than elastic, it must be plastic: capable of scaling given workloads up and down and rapidly reconfiguring – automatically molding – to accommodate new classes of function and forms of simplification (Figure 6). HCI is a crucial feature of plastic infrastructure. Enterprises that which to enhance their plasticity must employ HCI hardware and software combinations or risk undermining digital business objectives with insufficiently plastic infrastructure.

Figure 4: Wikibon community has strong HCI experience (Source: Wikibon)

Figure 5: HCI business benefits tied to simplicity (Source: Wikibon)

Figure 6: Infrastructure plasticity (Source: Wikibon)

Sidebar: What does the Wikibon community say about HCI and cloud strategies?

• “HCI is an organizational testbed for the cloud operating model.”

• “Big issue for CIO: I can converge technology easier than I can converge my organization.”

• “[Our business leaders] just want IT to *not* be an impediment. To the degree that HCI facilitates this, they’re all in. It’s a simple decision for them.”

Hardware and vendor relationships matter when choosing private cloud technologies

Generally, HCI solutions are constructed of common hardware and software elements, including flash-based memory, software-defined infrastructure tools, and industry-standard CPUs. The use of these types of components, of course, accelerates invention and innovation, lowers out-of-pocket costs, increases administrative simplicity and makes HCI a more attractive target for new development frameworks and workloads. However, the Wikibon community is clear: component commonality does not translate into solution commodities in the HCI market, or simply put, hardware matters. On the contrary, 100 percent of Crowdchat participants indicated that the design and integration of underlying HCI hardware and software technologies influenced solution choices, with 45 percent indicating that it strongly influenced these choices (Figure 7). We think users are differentially valuing different vendor HCI solutions because of:

• The rapid pace of cloud-related invention. Cloud shines a bright light on the systems technologies that can create new classes of value and dims interest in others. For example, Wikibon observes that flash memory improves options for data sharing, which can dramatically improve developer productivity and accelerate time-to-value of emerging classes of AI-based applications. Over the next few years, rapid adoption of new AI, security, development and data management technologies will lead to increased utilization of hardware acceleration. The big public cloud players will employ these technologies to improve their services; HCI vendors, too, must rapidly incorporate specialized facilities to keep pace. One area of particular importance is security. We asked the Wikibon community specifically about their appetite for differentiated security and hardware acceleration features in HCI solutions and the overwhelming answer was “very important” (Figure 8). The HCI vendors that consistently demonstrate that they can keep pace with cloud design, development, packaging and business model changes will win in the HCI market.
• HCI customers want single-vendor accountability. The cloud experience generally is a service experience, not a product experience, and the centerpiece of any service experience is the idea that the service provider is always delivering and available. As digital business increasingly becomes the basis for business value propositions, technology is more deeply embedded in business operations, especially customer engagement activities. As a business embeds technology more deeply into revenue-producing activities, its dependency on suppliers of those technologies increases dramatically. The Wikibon community is clear on this point: Some 87 percent of Crowdchat respondents indicated that they expect leading HCI vendors to be a “one throat to choke” for all aspects of an HCI solution (Figure 9). This has enormous business model implications, including scope of partnerships, scale of global operations and experience with rapidly evolving technologies. Not all HCI vendors can amass the investment and market presence required to be a one-stop HCI option for enterprise users.

Figure 7: Hardware still matters in HCI purchases (Source: Wikibon)

Figure 8: Still room for differentiation in HCI (Source: Wikibon)

Figure 9: Users value “converged vendor relationships” (Source: Wikibon)

Sidebar: What does the Wikibon community say about HCI sourcing relationships?

• “Hardware matters — we just don’t want to know about it…. We want it to be fast, rock solid and cheap.”

• “The software must work in concert with the hardware and as workloads scale and change over time, greater speed and performance is demanded. A key factor is solutions that most effectively combine the two.”

• “Plumbing matters when it breaks. Hardware matters for #HCI.”

Summary

Customers want a consistent cloud experience, wherever their data demands it. Where the data demands an on-premises or near-premises option, HCI is the right technology choice for almost all use cases. Our CrowdChat confirms that HCI is the market-tested, most flexible, most feature-rich and simplest option. Moreover, the Wikibon community believes that HCI will be the focal point for on-premises or near-premises system innovation going forward. Finally, HCI simplifies technology and sourcing management by establishing simpler lines of accountability, especially by creating a single-vendor relationship.

Action item

To ensure that a business is not constrained by digital infrastructure – including real limits on the use of public cloud options – CIOs must establish clear plans to exploit HCI technology. The cloud operating model must operate where an enterprise’s data demands it, including at the edge, in the core and in the cloud. HCI will be the common hardware element throughout a modern digital business. Look for HCI solutions that best mimic the cloud experience, rapidly and simply incorporate technology advances, and come from reputable vendors with long-term skin in your game.

Image: geralt/Pixabay