Surveys by Gartner,IDG, and Right scale in 2018 leave no doubt that cloud adoption is mainstream. Public cloud adoption led the way increasing to 92% in the Right Scale survey. The same survey showed that 81% having a multi-cloud strategy, leveraging almost 5 clouds on average. 51 percent have a Hybrid cloud strategy, combining public and private clouds.
The number of respondents adopting private cloud is 75%. While the respondents in the survey ran 40% of their workloads in public cloud and 39 % in private cloud, enterprise customers ran fewer workloads in the public cloud, 32%, and more in Private clouds, 45%, which reflects their concern with security and safety of critical workloads. Private cloud adoption also increased with VMware vSphere with 50% adoption, followed by Open Stack with 24%.
Hybrid and Multi-cloud Benefits
Hybrid and multi-cloud strategies offer flexibility, scalability, and agility by providing the freedom to choose where and how to deploy workloads, without the complexity and delays of acquiring and deploying infrastructure and operations resources. Applications can burst out into a public cloud during peak periods. Hybrid and multi-cloud also provide flexible data management, governance, compliance, availability, and durability. It eliminates upfront capital costs and avoids the risk of infrastructure vendor lock-in. Another aspect of agility is the self-service resources that enables the DevOps culture to run dev/test workloads in the cloud. Another major benefit of public clouds is to geographically distribute apps and services especially as more applications gravitate to the edge.
Hybrid and Multi-cloud Challenges
A cloud is a computing model where IT services are provisioned and managed over the Internet in the case of public clouds or over private IT Infrastructure in the case of private cloud. Selecting an application and merely moving it to a cloud provider is typically a poor decision. It needs to be designed and built to take advantage of a cloud environment else it is likely to become more problematic. Public cloud providers typically develop highly specialized tools for monitoring, orchestration, cost management, security and more to suit the capabilities of their services. However, these tools may not map over to other clouds. In the case of Hybrid and multi-cloud, we are mixing up multiple clouds which increases operational and data management complexity. Operational policies and methods are different and aggregation of data across multiple clouds boundaries makes it difficult for governance, analytics, and business intelligence. When you have petabytes of data in one cloud, how long will it take you to switch to another cloud?
While the major cloud companies have security measures in place that probably exceed what most private companies can provide, they present a very visible target, and we must assume that nothing is fool proof. Security still remains a key concern for critical applications, especially when it comes to public clouds.
Cloud Changes in 2019
While lift and shift application migrations to clouds will continue in 2019, more applications will be modernized to take advantage of the new capabilities of containers, serverless, FPGAs, and other forms of computing. Competition between the leading cloud providers will increase, resulting in more services available for infrastructure as a service, integrations and open source, analytics, compliance, and hybrid cloud capabilities. With Microsoft running GitHub, open source is becoming the model for developing new technologies and cloud vendors will become more open to developer communities. Hybrid clouds become a battleground with Amazon Outpost delivering an on-premise server rack to deliver AWS cloud, and IBM acquiring Redhat to increase their relevance in the data center.
All these changes will require new skill sets in migrating, modernizing, and managing new cloud deployments. Cloud providers realize that customers need help migrating and implementing cloud solutions, so they have carefully qualified services partners that customers can trust with support or managed services.
Hitachi Vantara Hybrid and Multi-cloud capabilities
Hitachi Vantara provides support for private, hybrid, public and multi-cloud deployments. There are three major areas of support:
- Cloud gate way for block, file and object storage with HNAS and HCP.
HNAS provides a transparent data migrator for block and file data to private and public clouds and integrates with HCP object store.
HCP, Hitachi Content Platform, lets users securely move data to, from, and among multiple cloud services, and better manage use cases including data governance, IoT, and big data. Read IDC’s 2018 Marketscape report on HCP and see how HCP addresses security, multi-cloud, and performance. Data can be moved from one cloud to another without the additional cost of reading from one cloud to write to another. Since HCP always creates two copies, a new copy can be created on a new cloud repository while the old repository is crypto shredded.
HCP also provides out of the box integration with the Pentaho data integration and analytics platform enabling the use of Pentaho to ingest, integrate, cleanse and prepare data stored in HCP-based data lake environments for analytics and visualization. While there is tight integration between Pentaho and HCP, it can actually be used to support an abstracted data architecture enabled by the separation of compute and storage. Specifically, while the data might reside in HCP, Pentaho’s adaptive execution functionality enables users to choose their preferred execution engine (such as the Apache Spark in-memory processing engine, as well as Pentaho’s open source Kettle ETL engine) at runtime. This functionality could be used to execute data processing in multiple cloud environments. The vehicle history information provider CARFAX is doing just that: deploying HCP to combine structured and unstructured data in a single environment and cleansing and preparing it to use Pentaho before sending it to AWS or Microsoft Azure for processing, as appropriate for a given application. Read the 452 Research report on this capability
2. On Premise Cloud Deployment with Hitachi Enterprise Cloud (HEC).
The Hitachi Enterprise Cloud portfolio of on-premises enterprise cloud managed services, are pre-engineered and fully managed, to achieve faster time to value, and get guaranteed business outcomes and service levels for mission-critical applications and workloads, within a traditional IT infrastructure, a DevOps architecture, a microservices architecture, or in some combination Hitachi Enterprise Cloud integrates implementation, deployment services, and cloud-optimized software and infrastructure to deliver rapid business value. The first solution of its kind, it also offers the ability to add container capabilities to support both traditional virtualized environments and born on the web applications.
3. Accredited and Certified REAN Cloud services.
REAN Cloud has expertise working with the hyperscale public clouds. They are a Premier Consulting Partner in
the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) and a Microsoft Azure Silver Partner. REAN Cloud offers
managed services and solutions for hyperscale-integrated IaaS and PaaS providers and is one the few systems
integrators capable of supporting the entire cloud services life cycle. Backed by extensive security DNA and deep
compliance IP and expertise, REAN Cloud specializes in helping enterprise customers that operate in highly
regulated environments – Financial Services, Healthcare/Life Sciences, Education and the Public Sector –
accelerate their cloud investments while extracting maximum value from use of the cloud itself.
Last year REAN Cloud acquired 47Lining to provide deep capabilities in cloud-based analytics and machine
learning that expands Hitachi Vantara’s ability to maximize data-driven value for vertical IoT solutions. This
April, 47Lining, announced its Amazon Web Services (AWS) Industrial Time Series Data Connector Quick Start. The Connector Quick Start allows companies to quickly and easily synchronize their industrial time
series data to AWS so they can perform advanced predictive and historic analytics using the full breadth of
AWS big data and partner services.
Summary
Hitachi Vantara recognizes the value of private, hybrid and public clouds and provides the tools and services to enable our customers to choose the right combination of cloud solutions for their specific requirements. Cloud is much more than just using a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage, and process data. Cloud is really about methodology, automation, financial models, software development approaches, and more.
We’ve known that for years as we have provided storage, converged, hyperconverged, and other infrastructure solutions to our customers deploying cloud on-premises for private clouds. Private clouds are not simply existing data centers running virtualized, legacy workloads. They require highly modernized digital application and service environments running on true cloud platforms like Hitachi Enterprise Cloud
With the introduction of Hitachi Enterprise Cloud (HEC) a few years back, as a Service offering, and recent Smart Data Center initiative, we are building out the components to support private cloud and connectivity to public clouds for hybrid cloud deployments. Hybrid clouds must bond together private and public clouds through fundamental technology, which enable the transfer of data and applications.
With the introduction of REAN, we have a public cloud portfolio to complement our existing services. This allows us to step away from the limiting descriptions of” private”, “public”, and “hybrid”. REAN is also a cloud agnostic platform that can address a multi-cloud requirement. Many, if not most, of our customers are expecting to manage an incredibly diversified environment based on intellectual property, latency, security, and integration needs. The main point is that we offer customers a range of capability that only a very few can. The big 3 public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and Google Compute) are focussed on their cloud solutions and don’t provide a platform for multi-cloud. Most infrastructure companies do not have solutions for the public cloud and make the argument for private clouds to protect their product portfolio. The global SI’s, like Accenture, don’t provide the hardware and software that we do. As customers look for a partner that can help with the massive diversity of the multiple cloud environments, we are the only partner that has the breadth of capabilities they are seeking.