< PreviousHYBRID DATA CENTRES www.networkseuropemagazine.com 20 A compendium of needs Any disruption in service delivery must be minimised. Data management and network performance that delivers maximum uptime are critical for all channels. Adopting a hybrid approach has proven to enable organisations to integrate their systems, reduce complexity and take full advantage of what a hybrid IT infrastructure can bring. Data centres that provide fast spin-up of additional capacity become destination service providers simply because they can react quickly to changing market conditions and business needs. Scaling at speed has become a core competence for businesses and data centre service providers. No discussion of hybrid data environments would be complete without considering security. There are increased risks with hybrid environments as the span of IT networks increases, making it more susceptible to attacks and often harder to ascertain precisely the vulnerabilities, especially when looking at structures across multiple geographies. Therefore, any hybrid strategy must be grounded in high levels of accountability and structure to ensure the setup delivers on what is required. The operational environment that enterprises now find themselves within, has forced rapid change. In the last ISG Provider Lens, Fujitsu concluded that hybrid IT has become the result of these massive shifts: “Large enterprises are increasingly adopting hybrid IT services: The adoption of hybrid IT is high among large enterprises in the UK, as they have the niche talent to implement specific solutions in the hybrid IT segment. ISG observed that small and medium-size companies are also moving towards this direction.”HYBRID DATA CENTRES www.networkseuropemagazine.com 21 As businesses increasingly take a granular approach to customer connectivity across multiple channels, hybrid data centre services are vital to support these initiatives. Digital diversification is now a watchword for all enterprises. Partnering with data centre service providers immersed in the changing data and IT environments driving today's commerce can deliver critical advantages, including lower cost, greater efficiency, state-of-the-art cybersecurity and critically world-class customer services. Infrastructure for the future Moving an enterprise's IT infrastructure to colocation supports hybrid data and network management. It delivers reliability, resilience, access to network resources and the high levels of data security businesses require to meet customer demand and drive innovation. JLL states; "Companies continue to maintain enterprise solutions, but hybrid and multi-cloud systems are becoming more mainstream. According to a recent Cisco survey of 2,500 IT decision makers, 82% have already deployed a hybrid cloud strategy to their business. Hybrid cloud systems ensure organisations have full control and the highest security over their core data.” For several years the mantra of ‘cloud first’ has reigned supreme. However, as no two businesses are the same, bespoke personalised IT infrastructures now dominate network capabilities. Here, the hybrid approach allows companies to tailor their data and network needs to their precise requirements, with the aid of colocation hybrid service providers, achieving agile and thriving business results. Fundamentally for data centres, the hybrid environment benefits customers that require agility and the capacity to scale at speed. The working world is evolving. Data centre service providers must ensure their technical expertise and infrastructure is geared to support these new environments while maintaining the security and resilience they have spent years perfecting. Gartner concluded: “As enterprise infrastructure moves toward cloud distributed application delivery, the data centre itself is being transformed. As a result, I&O leaders must transition to a hybrid model mindset where the presence of an on- premises data centre is no longer the primary driver for infrastructure decisions.” Longevity and business agility need a firm data and IT infrastructure management foundation. Only a hybrid approach integrates all enterprises' data strands into an insightful and actionable ecosystem with the hybrid colocation data centre at its hub. The adoption of hybrid IT is high among large enterprises in the UK, as they have the niche talent to implement specific solutions in the hybrid IT segment. As enterprise infrastructure moves toward cloud distributed application delivery, the data centre itself is being transformed.HYBRID DATA CENTRES www.networkseuropemagazine.com 22 How SMEs Make Their Hybrid Architectures Fit for the EdgeSimon Michie CTO Pulsant HYBRID DATA CENTRES www.networkseuropemagazine.com 23 The Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report estimates that 80% of organisations now have a hybrid cloud architecture and 89% use multi-clouds. Flexibility, security and control are what attract so many organisations to the hybrid cloud. Yet all too often, hybrid architectures suffer from a lack of visibility and the difficulty of optimising workloads. This in turn generates significantly excessive costs and undermines any idea of agility. And it certainly reduces the likelihood of any organisation successfully implementing or delivering the low latency applications of edge computing. Edge computing is already taking shape. Together, with the roll-out of high bandwidth 5G connectivity, it will bring advanced software as a service (SaaS) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications within reach of almost every business. 5G alone cannot enable this – edge computing depends on a network of highly connected edge data centres at strategic locations which process data close to where businesses generate it. It also demands an effective, fully functioning edge infrastructure platform so organisations can implement the Internet of Things (IoT), or machine learning (ML), automation, analytics, content delivery and streaming applications. Processing data close to where organisations or end-users generate it opens everything from specialised manufacturing to automated logistics, highly personalised, super-fast fund management and sophisticated accountancy applications. Get the hybrid house in order first To avail themselves of these advances, organisations first need to iron out the difficulties they face managing unwieldy and increasingly costly hybrid architectures. According to the Flexera 2022 report, cloud spending by SMEs increased significantly in 2021 with 53% now spending more than $1.2 million – up from 38% in the previous year’s report. This extra cloud investment is, unfortunately, not leading to greater efficiency, especially in SMEs where IT teams are small. Efficiency-sapping complexity of management and ever-higher costs are consistently causing problems. As organisations spread their data and workloads across different clouds and their own data centres, management difficulties mount. d Hybrid cloud has become the architectural choice for the great majority of small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) businesses, but the increasing complexity of its management and optimisation could stand in the way of the next major advance in IT: edge computing.HYBRID DATA CENTRES www.networkseuropemagazine.com 24 In the Thales 2021 Data Threat Report, only 24% of responding organisations said they fully knew where their data is stored. Flexera’s research suggests organisations waste as much as 32% of cloud expenditure. Such cost-inefficiency is perhaps inevitable when so many businesses expand cloud workloads on an ad-hoc basis rather than as part of a digital transformation strategy. This is not how it should be. Hybrid architectures should give organisations of any size the agility to thrive in a data-driven world, mixing on-premises data centres, colocation and cloud. IT departments should be fully able to right-size workloads quickly and simply, deploying policy-based and coordinated service provisioning and management. These are capabilities organisations are going to need if they are serious about edge computing. They must get their hybrid architecture in order – but the question is how to do it when time and expertise are short. Refurbishing hybrid architecture for the edge Companies should start by re-examining what they want from the cloud, and whether their cloud and on- premise environments meet their business objectives. They must understand their current patterns of resource consumption across their entire architecture. It is common, for example, for lack of visibility to hamper IT departments so they cannot calculate the difference between on-premise and cloud costs for the same size of virtual machine (VM). And in many businesses, there is often poor understanding of where to locate workloads for optimal cost and performance. Workloads with stable performance requirements can be more cost-effective in a private cloud on a longer-term contract. Architecture also needs to be flexible to cope with peaks and troughs and have a built-in capacity to scale automatically within parameters. Next-generation cloud management tools What SMEs in particular need are more effective management tools for hybrid architectures. The time has come for organisations to adopt a next-generation cloud platform that optimises cost and performance regardless of environment, providing control and a transparent view of data. This will unify management across all clouds and on-premise data centres. These more sophisticated toolboxes address all the security and management difficulties of hybrid architectures across multiple cloud environments. Organisations regain visibility and control and are thereby able to choose providers and services for the best value. They can deploy, allocate and migrate resources using a plan developed in collaboration with the platform provider. Just as importantly, these next-generation tools have been devised to take hybrid architectures into the era of edge computing, unlike the cloud management platforms provided by the big names in public cloud infrastructure. The new tools enable IT departments to obtain all the innovations of edge computing while maintaining, controlling and optimising access to the most sensitive data and workloads wherever they are – including secure locations. Preparing the ground To stand the best chance of successfully extending hybrid architectures into the cloud, organisations HYBRID DATA CENTRES www.networkseuropemagazine.com 25 should prepare with a workload assessment. Employing best-in-class software, an SME will be fully capable of identifying usage of every server. This will examine different cloud environments and recommend where workloads should go in line with the business objectives of each deployment. Inputs into this process should include how the business expects to use AI and machine learning, requirements for data orchestration, along with specific security and compliance requirements. IT can then accomplish configuration in line with aims specific to the business, making the different hardware and software elements fully interoperable. Once they have a detailed overview of all their environments and requirements, organisations should also ensure they have maximum flexibility and resilience via cloud on-ramps such as Megaport, which provides high availability of cloud services and the ability to add or change cloud connections. Fast fibre connections to the main public cloud providers’ hubs are also important since organisations, including SMEs, are still likely to use the resources of the hyperscalers. It makes sense to store certain types of data with AWS, Google, or Azure, and of course, to continue using proprietary applications. A genuine edge infrastructure platform Businesses must then ensure the edge infrastructure platform they adopt has all the capabilities it promises – most importantly, a network of strategically-sited regional data centres and fast connectivity with the major cloud providers’ hubs. Low latency and full route diversity to provide maximum resilience, are essentials. An evolved edge platform will also have an ecosystem of partners and specialist providers, which is a great advantage for any organisation, but especially SMEs, accelerating implementation and bringing access to a wider range of expertise and capabilities. Moving from an edge strategy to digital transformation Equipped with the right partners and detailed knowledge of their own hybrid environments, a business can then draft an edge strategy that leaves little to chance, enabling its decision-makers to understand which use cases will deliver the greatest gains and what is their best starting point. In this way, they will achieve the right balance between the use of their edge data centre and hyperscalers. An edge infrastructure platform will give a business the strategic freedom to decide where data should be located and how it wants to access it, whether for compliance, latency or cost reasons. Edge computing is the most significant advance in IT for almost all businesses. The range of edge computing use cases is immensely broad and will profoundly change how businesses operate. For regional or highly dispersed organisations, it will significantly change how they view their own potential, opening up new business models. But they must first address the current challenges of managing hybrid architecture and prepare the ground for the edge using a next-generation cloud management platform. Once they are in control of their hybrid environments, they can adopt new edge capabilities, enjoying a potent combination of agility and innovation. It will be through next-generation hybrid cloud toolsets and edge infrastructure platforms that they follow the most direct route to digital transformation.Designing and Building Hybrid Data Centres Some Key Considerations HYBRID DATA CENTRES www.networkseuropemagazine.com 26In recent years, many companies have shifted away from in-house data centres and moved to the cloud, with mixed feelings. Working in the cloud means apps, operating systems, IT stack, data and workloads can be distributed in an intelligent way to save costs. However, bridging the distance to the cloud costs time and money. What’s more, it often makes more sense to process data closer to a company’s location using on-premise and edge data centres. IT departments also need to retain full access to their own resources and applications for a variety of reasons and are increasingly using colocation providers for this. All of these approaches can be used together and as a result, the data centre can no longer be seen as a single, fixed infrastructure, but rather as a hybrid IT architecture between the data source and the cloud. The hybrid approach makes adapting to an organisation’s changing scale and requirements significantly faster and easier. When demand increases, applications can move from private to public cloud for example, so that the organisation doesn’t need to invest in hardware that might be idle a lot of the time. Let’s examine some of the considerations that need to be taken into account when developing hybrid solutions. Infrastructure compatibility On-premise data centre hardware needs to connect seamlessly with public infrastructure. A company using a hybrid solution can’t choose which resources will be used in the cloud, so ensuring compatibility with servers, load balancers, storage and LAN for example, is essential. Energy requirements A hybrid data centre combines facilities of very different sizes – from edge and enterprise DCs to ‘traditional’ DCs. For each of these, there needs to be adequate power on site. Because computing power is distributed, the power load is distributed too. Demand is not concentrated in one single location but shared between power grid sections across a larger territory. The distributed power requirement introduces an opportunity to provide power for smaller hardware configurations’ processing and cooling requirements on-site, for example using photovoltaic in combination with solar panel battery backup. Management and security In a hybrid setup using a combination of colocation, cloud and on-premise hardware and very different technologies and tools, management can become complicated. The fact that infrastructure is spread across multiple locations also makes it considerably more difficult to see what’s going on in different network segments and how each part of the hybrid setup is affecting other parts. Network monitoring that pulls together real-time data from all sites into a single consistent environment is essential. Today, countless applications require real-time data processing close to where the action is, in order to realise the required speed and reliability. Hybrid data centres can provide this by offering a combination of virtual, physical (on-premise) and cloud infrastructure. Depending on their needs, businesses can use edge ddata centres combined with main and local data centres. This approach introduces vast scalability and flexibility – as well as some challenges. Andreas Rüsseler CMO R&M d ns HYBRID DATA CENTRES www.networkseuropemagazine.com 27Modularity To quickly and independently develop and organise the most efficient hybrid architectures, networks and services, a ‘building block’ approach is recommended. Every element needs to be freely configurable: from software to physical infrastructure, backhaul, interconnects, networks, and meet-me rooms. Instead of opting for one bespoke solution, a modular solution can be assembled and precisely tailored to every kind of customer need and topology. Finding the right partner With all of the above in mind, what do you need to look for in a partner when designing, specifying, building, testing and operating a hybrid data centre? One-stop-shopping: planning and building everything yourself costs time and requires skilled personnel, detailed knowledge, planning, project management as well as the coordination of the various third parties. When using a wide range of products, it becomes easier to control costs when dealing with one manufacturer as opposed to multiple resellers. Because we’re dealing with multiple topologies, technologies and sites, from LAN and cloud to colocation and hyperscale, it’s vital to work with a partner that is not only familiar with every topology type (LAN, colocation, hyperscale, enterprise) and understands how they interact, but who also offers a sufficiently broad portfolio. It’s worth pointing out that experience with modular and containerised solutions translates very well to hybrid solutions. What do you need to look for in a partner when designing, specifying, building, testing and operating a hybrid data centre? HYBRID DATA CENTRES www.networkseuropemagazine.com 28Working with a single partner is recommended to build stronger infrastructures, whether for campuses, interconnects, edge data centres or connections to 5G, internet and network providers as well as for outdoor systems such as cable splitters, joints and weatherproof building connections. It’s also important that suppliers have sufficient global manufacturing and logistics capacity and local technical support. The advantages are streamlined and off-site planning, short-term delivery and lower costs. An owned supply chain, in-house sourcing, global manufacturing facility and integrated production control has a cost-optimising effect. Services: you need to look for a party that can offer consulting, multidisciplinary engineering, CAD and Building Information Modelling, customisation and standardisation, project management, installation and maintenance, documentation, certification, measurements and acceptance tests, application development, quality assurance, long-term guarantees, warehousing and logistics. Other critical factors are knowledge sharing and transfer, for example through documentation, videos and webinars. Support from planners, architects and specialists can eliminate challenges and risks early on. They develop a common understanding of your situation and there is less need for coordination on site. Why it’s time to stop thinking in terms of discrete networks Hybrid (and edge) data centres are just two of the trends driving convergence, bandwidth and uptime in order to provide greater flexibility, scalability and uniformity. Bringing previously disparate systems together allows users to make the most of increasingly sophisticated system intelligence. It provides enormous efficiency increases, from both technical and business perspectives, by centralising management of IT resources, consolidating systems, boosting resource utilisation rates and lowering costs. Deployment of hybrid networks helps reduce overall power consumption, improves cooling efficiency and enables introduction of further energy-saving measures. Within a few years, every network will operate a unified ‘holistic fibre’ backbone. Data communication, mobile, video and everything else will merge onto a coexisting network. Benefits include reduced investments in rollout and maintenance, phasing out of legacy technologies, and a unified underlying technology and interfacing. Network operators and users can focus on their core business, and develop applications that exactly match requirements, interact across systems and platforms, and are always up to date. The future is already here! HYBRID DATA CENTRES www.networkseuropemagazine.com 29Next >