Data center strategies have shifted dramatically over the last 20 years. Leaps in performance and capacity, plummeting connectivity costs and massive investment in cloud have radically changed the landscape.

Enterprise architects have had to make significant adjustments in strategy to leverage these opportunities, while maintaining agility and speed to meet the market demands. This results in IT investments which must produce a positive ROI, in significantly shorter timeframes.

Mphasis advises clients to consider the following guiding principles in this space, to achieve their business goals.

Cost Effective Workload Placement:

Over the last decade, cloud has consumed a significant amount of IT R&D dollars. While we agree that cloud must be a part of all strategies, we balance that with the reality that cloud is a metered service much like mainframes. The best ROI strategies leverage the massive cloud investments, while recognizing that certain workloads should be routinely evaluated and run on the most cost-effective environments, be that a cloud provider or an on-prem approach.

Logical Configuration vs. Physical:

Data center solutions should seek to have a “one-time physical” install and “many times logical configuration” approach, using software defined infrastructure and infrastructure APIs to perform end-to-end automation. For example, the installation of additional compute or storage capacity should be limited to the insertion of a blade or drive into a chassis versus risky re-cabling or rack changes.

Modular/Pre-Packaged Designs:

Many environments have been built over decades with a mix of vendors and products, to take advantage of technical advancements and meet increasing capacity demands. Cloud is a great approach to “clear the deck” and avoid complex on-prem refreshes. We recommend that client’s couple their cloud strategies with a modular on-prem design (Data-Center-In-A-Rack) to maintain an alternative to cloud and service workloads, which may not be a technical fit for cloud.

Open Source Tooling:

In order to minimize cost and maximize the ability to move workloads and keep the environment financially optimized, open source based tooling (such as a Terraform, Nagios, Ansible, Puppet, etc.) should be considered. These tools should manage all applicable infrastructure across on-prem, co-lo and cloud, to form a truly hybrid environment which maximizes ROI.

Infrastructure SaaS/Advanced services:

In many cases, SaaS providers for infrastructure services (ITSM, backup, directory services, etc.) help achieve the best ROI. Ensure that SaaS solutions are benchmarked against on-prem options, and be careful to consider all costs in either case.

Disposable Infrastructure/Decommissioning:

As we move to a world that demands extreme scalability and rapid deployment of system changes, the concept of containers can be used to create disposable systems. Instead of patching/updating existing containers, containers can be designed to be dataless and application enhancements/fixes are simply brought online in new containers. Traffic is redirected to the new containers, and the previous containers are deleted.

Boutique Infrastructure Solutions:

One area which can provide strategic advantage is highly specialized infrastructure tuned for extreme performance. Revenue or savings opportunities may be delayed or abandoned because typical infrastructure is simply unable to meet performance / throughput expectations. Examples include the need to analyze a massive monthly data set within a week, or the delayed release of an application due to database throughput bottlenecks. Solving these problems temporarily with specialized hardware should be considered.

Data / Storage:

Data volumes are out of control. We see this as a natural result of (1) User experience driven business needs, (2) Data intensive workloads, (3) Desire to slice and dice data, and metadata in many ways (4) High supply of storage at lower costs. It is not a stretch to say that some consider it free. It is perceived easier to duplicate a terabyte database without having to go back to clean and purge the storage, until another need arises. Cloud has only accelerated this problem. While there are many technical approaches to taming this problem, we advise clients to first look at the economics of storage for their organization, and understand how individuals make cost/benefit decisions when storage is involved. We help clients define their storage policies at granular level across the different infra spaces.

Security Controls:

Security controls must transform from simply blocking bad transactions to enabling good transactions at high speed. Business goals must be at the forefront in order to justify the investment, and ensure that the risks/reward decisions are made with care. Blending the right security service providers into a wholistic approach, which meets the needs of the business and flexes as the business changes, is critical to security being seen as the key enabler of the business model.

Stakeholder Alignment:

Data center enhancement investment can be a tough sell, when it doesn’t directly enhance revenue. In most organizations, it is seen as a pure cost center and not a strategic enabler. One strategy to address this is to isolate the core data center costs (physical plant, HVAC, etc.), and deliver everything above this as solutions for application owners to consume with a charge-back mechanism. By seeing the application owners as clients, providing them proactive updates on roadmaps and seeking their input, you can take on more of their “problems”, and be seen as a strategic enabler of the technical stack.

As always, it is critical to continuously audit and adjust the strategy to minimize drift from desired state, and proactively survey the deployed environment to ensure alignment. This audit should be at least a yearly activity. By following these best practices, clients can get the best of the available infrastructure to support their business needs at the optimized cost.

Mphasis Hybrid Infrastructure Managed Services ensure high availability of infrastructure in consumption-based pricing model. Learn more about our Hybrid Infrastructure Managed Services and connect with us for solutions fitting your enterprise needs.