In the not too distant past, enterprise IT leaders struggled mightily with complex, inflexible tangles of heterogeneous technologies – typically a motley mix of old and new, custom and off-the-shelf.
Today, everything is different.
Don’t get me wrong – IT shops still have to deal with complex, inflexible, heterogeneous technologies. So, what’s different?
The modern IT shop lives and breathes heterogeneity. The variety of technologies, architectures, and environments that make up the day-to-day world of IT make us better able to deliver on ever-changing, ever-growing customer demands.
In other words, complex heterogeneity isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
The Rise of Hybrid Everything
We don’t even use words like ‘heterogeneous’ much anymore. Today we talk about ‘hybrid’ – as in hybrid cloud and hybrid IT.
In a sense, hybrid still means heterogeneous – only now, instead of connoting an accidental mishmash of this and that, hybrid is on purpose.
As Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo explained in the first BrainBlog post in this series, enterprises are less likely to make their choices of infrastructure elements that make up hybrid cloud in isolation.
Instead, the new management paradigm for hybrid cloud – private and public cloud infrastructure consisting of various compute, storage, and network capabilities – is the workload and the data that supports it.
Hybrid IT extends this workload-centricity to all environments, including on-premises, hosted, private, and public cloud. Yet, in spite of the unquestionable complexity such a combination of technologies presents, the emphasis is on implementing a coherent abstraction across all such environments.
Intelligent Hybrid Clouds Require Policy-Driven Infrastructure
In the ‘old days,’ that is, before the cloud, the primary approach for dealing with heterogeneous systems and applications was via integration, typically by leveraging middleware. In other words, the way to deal with A and B was to connect A to B with some piece of software.
It was usually possible to provide the business with the functionality it required following this approach, but what suffered was any kind of flexibility. The whole mess was too rigid, and there were too many interdependencies to expect changes to be anything but risky, expensive, complicated, and slow.
Integration technologies are still part of the modern hybrid IT landscape, of course, but they are no longer the primary approach to getting different parts of that landscape to work together. Instead, they are now part of a broader policy-driven management infrastructure.
If this notion of a policy-driven approach to infrastructure sounds familiar, it’s no wonder – cloud computing made it a reality. Instead of manually configuring and provisioning cloud resources, users do so via simple interfaces that establish configurations as a matter of policy.
HCI: Dealing with Change in Today’s Hybrid IT Environments
Today, IT is able to extend this policy-driven cloud goodness across the modern IT landscape using intelligent technology from vendors like Pivot3, a supplier of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software and systems.
Instead of the difficult work of configuring and managing hybrid infrastructure manually, we now architect an abstraction of that infrastructure, enabling operations personnel to deal with configurations and policies, and broadly speaking, based on the business intent.
Abstractions, in essence, are nothing more than useful simplifications – they take complex technologies and provide a simple management veneer, but more than that, they give tools to people they can actually use to extract business value from those technologies.
The Pivot3 Intelligence Engine, a central part of the company’s HCI software platform, is an example of intelligent, policy-based abstraction in action. Pivot3’s Intelligence Engine provides a set of easy-to-use policies that automate data protection, security, application performance and prioritization, and workload mobility across on-premises, cloud or edge environments. The end result is a simpler way to meet application workload SLAs.
Workloads, after all, are abstractions in their own right. To make the notion of a workload useful, it must hold together as a durable entity that ops personnel can manage and move about, independent of the specifics of the underlying infrastructure.
The Intellyx Take: Why Workload-Centricity is so Important to Intelligent Hybrid Clouds
A workload is in essence nothing more than a collection of running programs – and computer programs have been with us since the 1940s. Why, then, are they such an important abstraction?
Intelligent, policy-based abstractions are at the heart of how modern IT deals with the complex and dynamic nature of today’s hybrid IT environments. Workloads are among the most important of those abstractions.
Once we place workloads into modern hybrid IT, they serve a critically important role. Workloads become the primary mechanism for how the infrastructure supports the applications that customers, employees, and other people use every day.
The underlying hardware may not have changed much – but the proper intelligent, policy-driven infrastructure abstractions have enabled us to think and work in terms of such cross-functional workloads.
If we have the technology to manage workloads, then we are able to manage applications and thus the customer experience, in the context of today’s intelligent hybrid cloud/hybrid IT environment.
When we talk about digital transformation, this is how IT must step up to the plate to make the vision a reality.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Pivot3 is an Intellyx client. At the time of writing, none of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx clients. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper. Image credit: musicmoon@rogers.com.
