Hyper Converged Buyer Beware
Transcript
alright alright so this is Dave Littman and I'm bringing you another edition of extreme an hour and today I am joined by the CTO advisor AKA Keith Townsend as he's also known by Keith welcome thanks lucky today we are going to talk about hey advising CTOs and let's talk today about hyper convergence and if you are a CTO and maybe the CEO is said to you hey look you know we need we need to start looking at hyper convergence we need more efficiency we need to
save money um you know what would you advise other CTOs who might be watching on what they should look for what they should ask when surveying the vendor landscape out there for a hyper converged solution so you know it I love the way you started out the question because I think this is where a lot of CTOs fall into a little bit of the market texture where you know its marketing architecture of technologies when we start to peel back the onion of what is a CI
and hyper converged infrastructure and what are the kind of main selling points or the main values from the enterprise perspective beyond the vendor speak and one of the things that I really like this dis bail right at the top is this this idea that you're going to save money over traditional three-tier architectures at least and what sense save money one of the things that you know you need to really X vendors right off the bat is the solutions that they're selling a one-to-one or apples to
apples replacement of the technologies you're using to today in your data center so could I replace my whole IT infrastructure with a HCI or with their HCI solution or is this a point use case and once you ask that question I think that will start to peel back a little bit more of the technical questions one of the things that I found when doing the basic math is once you get to a certain scale hyper converge from a cap X perspective stars too costs more than
traditional three-tier architectures and if you're not aiming to really really go after a peck savings then it becomes a challenge to meet that ROI on a hyper converged okay and so you're talking about at scale so if I'm looking to replace my entire infrastructure as the capacity grows that's when you're saying that hyper converge starts to lose its ability to meet that ROI well you know even if we go back to it be it depends on your overall data center operations at skill let's say that
you are big enough that you have a storage admin I think the storage admin is the role that we really like to pick at when it comes to ipex when you look at hyper converged and you no longer and have that need to lay out lawns and have this you spreadsheet and this is this overhead this human overhead associated with managing your infrastructure the hyper conversion is really appealing however how much of your infrastructure are you displacing with hyper converge versus adding on so let's say
that I have a new project it's a new it's a new VDI project we love to use VDI is a great use case for hyper converged you're just adding on to your infrastructure as opposed to replacing you know some outdated a monolithic storage array or some up-to-date monolithic storage array that is using up all of your effects budget if you get up having both HCI in your monolithic storage array where exactly is that savings and I think that's the trap that a lot of CEOs need
to be careful of if you're not actually reducing headcount or doing some type of cost avoidance that you can quantify I challenged the notion that you save money from a up X perspective with HD I do you think that I mean it must be a touchy sale for a lot of the HCI guys because if the ROI really in many cases depends upon a head count you know it I could see where it could be a concern for for IT professionals in the data center yeah
so I think it is a touchy sale but when I talk to most of the HCI vendors is not around specifically headcount and that type of costas you when you talk to ACI vendors I think all of them across the board we're agreed to you that the value of ACI the primary value is speed to value or and being able to acquire a piece of data set equipment and implement that so we know we talked about the pressures of cloud on in shadow IT on IT
and the ability to come up with ideal on the business side and execute HCI reduces the risk when it comes to the ability to execute upon the IT vision I think that's where when you talk about savings and and agility where a CI has the true argument over traditional three-tier applications okay awesome so Keith um when a CTO is speaking to the competitive landscape and he's now got in the back of his mind that it should be able to provide an ROI and maybe that means
scaling back head count maybe it doesn't whatever whatever that means but are there is there may be one or two other things you can think of that a CTO should be asking the vendor landscape as he as he does his due diligence we can look at it from the ground up you know from the technology up ACI isn't magic you know you look back a lot of ACI vendors like to compare their solutions to the iphone but if you look at the iphone especially the early
days of the iphone i think we're still in the early days of ACI the iphone really wasn't a great anything it wasn't a great phone wasn't a great camera wasn't a great PDA so a CI I think has those same technical hurdles that it has to overcome I pic with the ACI vendors that you know what yeah you're the term is kind of funny because you don't add networking to it so my whole infrastructure isn't hyper converged it's looking at specific pain points within your infrastructure
and this agility piece is something I really want to harp on if you're losing out to competitors if you're losing out to uh performance and uptime because you just can't keep up with your IT demand because that legacy even when you design a pre-engineered pod where you have you know best-of-breed storage best a breach net breasts a breed networking a compute and you have a pre engineered solution you bring it in house it still takes time to ramp that up most type of converged solutions you
can order it heaven in receive it and have it up and running that same day if not the next day I think that's the true ability to for cost savings that at that time to implement that engineering time it still takes you know engineer three months in your environment to come up with that initial reference design for that architecture for when you deploy your pot style you save three months of engineering time in three months of ibex time required to engineer solution I think that's where
the savings for a pre engineered solution such as HCI comes into play so it also sounds like Keith and it may be running short on time so we'll finish up on this point that when you are surveying the landscape of HCI partners one of the things you want to look at sounds to me like is the organization in the architects you're standing behind it to you know make sure that it's matching the specific needs that you're trying to accomplish it exactly that's a great point one
of the things that you really want to key on and this is beyond hyper converged we're we're just as CTOs CIOs were asked to do more with less where X to add all of these high-end capabilities from a platform as a service perspective serverless technologies were asked to hire really smart people to take care of the I think the true value add things from an infrastructure perspective solutions like a CHC I give us the head start in providing those solutions no longer are we spending a
lot of time doing that pre-engineering work so when we talk to ACI vendors it's important to understand their vision for those higher levels how do they integrate with containers how do they integrate with container management and orchestration was the vision enrolled map to those future proof technology structure technologies all right all right well key thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today David I really appreciate you helping me all right so hey you have been advised today by the CTO advisor
follow him at sitio advisor signing off this is Dave Litman for extreme and our thanks to Keith Townsend again at sitio advisor thanks again everyone and make it a great day
