Burgers Vs. Spaghetti: The changing palate of IT

INDIA: IT infrastructures - from the delicate ceramic of hardware to the accompanying cutlery of software-and-applications - are being re-arranged. Not only the plating and table layout but the very approach towards ingredients is undergoing a hard-to-miss shift here.

This could be because virtualization has become the new microwave and Cloud is the new napkin. Or it could be something related to the way ‘software’ has turned into a peanut-butter of sorts, spreading its taste across and beyond layers like networking, storage, architecture and what not.

Not many have the time to make, serve, relish or digest veal parmigiana these days. The sauce does half the work for other options, specially if your organization is an always-running, take-away mode.

Bundling everything together for one big bite is an idea that has caught the fancy of even the most extreme fork worshippers.

In fact, customers including MNCs are not averse to a big revamp in their existing IT infrastructure given the way their conventional systems are being stonked with complex applications, tough hardware upgrades, and a brutal rise in penetration levels of software in so-far siloed areas of servers, storage, operations and networking. When you juxtapose that with the flexibility, configuration power, reduced wastage of hardware and operational agility that a converged system apparently delivers, you suddenly realize the pointlessness of schlepping all the chaos with erstwhile pot-pourri versions of IT to date.

Complexity then, is a curtain, that is definitely being ripped off for the good of both sides of the view– front-end as well as back-end.

Not so surprisingly, when you move towards the Charcuterie side, the scene seems to be changing too. Buffets are being replaced with simple hot dogs.

Ask Maneesh Sharma, Head – Business Development, SAP India about the newly-embraced RunSimple theme that the company is tapping its feet to, and he unveils how the campaign is much more than a model. “This is about value to be provided to a customer. SAP has evolved different models over the last forty years and now customers desire simplicity so that’s where we go. A lot of millennials are joining today’s workforces so we need to evolve IT in the way users are changing.”

In a report in April, Forrester’s Sudhanshu Bhandari outlined that to accelerate business growth, infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals in Asia Pacific (AP) must understand and ultimately master key I&O-related trends like continually consolidating and optimizing the technology infrastructure as well as simplifying and automating via a software-defined data center strategy.

As IDC augured, the integrated systems market will grow from $5.4 billion in 2013 to $14.3 billion in by 2017, at a clip of some 32.8 percent and Gartner’s estimates predicted too that, by 2015, one-third of all servers will ship as managed resources integrated in a converged infrastructure.

Services and applications however form the ketch-up that may continue even in the post-spaghetti world.

Stephen Miles, VP – Service Assurance Business, APAC, CA Technologies, also opines that applications are driving the bottom-line today like never before and many businesses are hinged with this new force for relevance, optimization and competitive differentiation. The underlying complexity of supporting it is an issue to be addressed, he pointed. Application fabric is changing the skeleton of IT infrastructure and Miles highlighted that in reality, innovation and invention are happening at both ends of the spectrum. The concept of SDN, NFV etc are changing the space and progression of both applications and infrastructure and this new dance is creating new possibilities. “The opening of dynamic API mapping and mash-up concept evolution and increasing levels of precision are bringing forth a new standard of service-centric and optimized applications.”

Noted IT infrastructure hardware vendors, like Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), HP, IBM, and Oracle, have stepped up on offering basic converged infrastructure (CI) solutions and as Forrester dissected towards 2013, CI offerings have been maturing beyond their original blade-based roots.

Incidentally, Richard Fichera, I&O analyst, Forrester had pointed that this transformation of virtual computing environments into fully software-defined data centers is disrupting the architecture of the underlying physical infrastructure. The wave of converged infrastructure products targeting purely virtualized environments has been reckoned as a markedly different approach from the previous generation of service-centric products.

These new systems, which Forrester calls storage-centric virtualized infrastructure, are designed from a storage-centric perspective for simpler and lower-cost hardware; easy, modular expansion; and architectures optimized to deliver fast storage administered with virtual machine (VM)-centric abstractions instead of the logical unit numbers (LUNs), partitions, and volumes of conventional storage.

“New forces in IT, SDN and new workloads are pushing us towards new design and architecture realms. Architecture makes impact on scale and progress and new ones are emerging for a different future. From scale-out genres to cloud-ready types, architectures have seen a big change. A lot of automation inside servers is visible and it’s hard to miss the way storage, server and networking spaces are converging.” Vikram K, Director, Servers, HP India reminds. He feels that adoption of converged systems would see a massive rise and HP’s goal is to simplify this converged journey as much as possible.”

He also illustrates how an integrated approach from HP helped BSE to launch new platform on or before time for all the major segments like Equity, Currency and Derivatives. “A well-defined support strategy from HP has helped exchange to run critical operations and a platform which is open, flexible and scalable to meet future product launches.”

HP’s move towards this new DNA is being visible in its portfolio shaping. Vikram K cited HP ProLiant Gen9 Servers as designed to address new challenges, delivering flexible, scalable computing resources optimized for convergence, cloud and software-defined environments.

In a column recently, Neeraj Matiyani, Director, Storage Solutions, Dell India had noted that today customers are looking for converged infrastructure to be more than just the integration of compute, storage, networking and infrastructure management, specially as traditional infrastructures can take too long to design, procure, deploy and integrate new IT infrastructure, and there are too many tools needed to manage it.. “The objectives are now more towards simplifying management structure, maximizing datacenter efficiency, strengthening IT service quality and most importantly to reduce datacenter costs.” He said arguing for workload-centric IT replacing inside-out IT approaches of the past.

This June, Henry Baltazar from Forrester observed how Dell's new original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partnership with hyperconvergence pioneer Nutanix adds a disruptive element to its portfolio and that it reflects Dell's willingness to provide an alternative to its branded storage for virtualization environments.

While vendors are busy finding new-IT world answers, IT users are grappling with forces like Cloud, Mobility and DevOps and coming up with new questions.

When asked about the extent of process-engineering being brought in by DevOps beyond some obvious and cosmetic changes, Miles argued that unwanted complexity cannot be ignored any more, especially with the pace with which underlying infrastructure is getting virtualized and hybrid IT environments are taking roots. “Organisations are now talking to us about simplicity, integration, better management modules etc. There is no point is accelerating time-to-market metrics if your operational infrastructure is broken.”

So, at least for now, simplicity is turning to be a synonym of convergence and if both customers and the serving table can get it right, seven-course meals can be signed off to some Victorian Era again.