Many CIOs have long abandoned the ideas of ‘lift-and-shift’ migration to the cloud, instead opting for a hybrid approach that covers the cloud where possible while maintaining legacy systems. on-premise.
Keeping up with a business’s needs while relying on a mix of cloud services and on-premise IT remains challenging.
IT teams may not be able to quickly add on -premises storage arrays. They may also find it difficult to get clear and accurate projections from business units about their on-premise storage requirements in future years, taught Matthew Hurford, vice president of engineering solutions at NetApp APAC.
“What kind of applications will they deploy? Where will those applications run? What kind of data and data services will those applications need?”
Hurford recalled an Australian insurance company approaching Meridian IT for advice on how to avoid investing large amounts to expand their legacy computing environment.
“They have an aging fleet of assets and they don’t want to upgrade them with capital expenditure [CAPEX] model, ”he explained.
“They move to the cloud and think about what makes sense to move when – and they don’t want to pay enough to cover four, five, or six years because big money will be spent up front without really knowing what’s coming. “
If department heads are not meeting their IT needs, they can ask others to address them by using external, unapproved IT environments.
That’s a scenario that NetApp and its partner, IT and managed services company Meridian IT Australia, aim to help IT departments avoid. They do that by addressing the way they acquire, use and manage storage space.
“Buying performance level”
The strategy endorsed by Meridian IT is to give organizations the ability to pay only for the on-premise storage they use through a cloud-like subscription service. This storage-as-a-service is called mStore Flex, and it is powered by NetApp’s Keystone services.
Business application usage is modeled and a service catalog is built to match, optimizing the use of storage tiers to maximize performance and reduce costs. Includes the ability to burst into the public cloud through the data fabric.
Meridian IT Australia’s head of solutions and architecture, Robert Simione, explains: “You just buy a performance level and an SLA, as opposed to buying bits and bytes and a complete set that you only use 20 per cent . . ”
“It really looks at what kind of service you need from that particular device and will deliver that service as a result,” Simione said.
Also available are features such as capacity dashboards, software integration such as ServiceNow, chargeback and showback, multitenancy and tenant management.
Provisioning, execution and management can be offloaded to Meridian IT, reducing the time and skill required by organizations.
“We have long been delivering models as a service, perhaps over the last five years in a very secure unregulated environment for government entities,” Simione explains. “We have deep expertise to deliver that today for commercial and business customers.”
Closing the cycle
IT decision makers are encouraged to broaden the way they think about these issues.
“I think it’s more about rotating VMs or increasing storage capacity,” Simione said. “Having the right platform will allow them to look at new workloads like cloud native apps [and practises like] DevOps. ”
“It’s key to understand what, what you’re trying to achieve and put those services in place and create that path, so that you have the ability to thrive when the business needs to grow.”
For the insurance company mentioned earlier, this approach provided a variety of benefits, as Hurford explained: “What we gave those people was the ability to use their on -site environment as a service. There was they’re tech refreshed, they have all the latest equipment on-prem, and they pay dollars per gigabyte for all their assets. ”
When a company starts moving its applications to the cloud, it can turn off consumption of those on-premises services. “So now they have flexibility. They have moved away from those aging assets. They have the flexibility to consume things, and they also have the freedom to move to the cloud when they want, ”Hurford commented.
Others are following suit, including legacy-heavy telecommunications companies and government agencies, Hurford said.
“These have been very strong CAPEX organizations in the past, but the transition to OPEX -based models will be a very important way of consuming resources in the future.”
To learn more visit Meridian IT Australia.