Selling the benefits of the software-defined data centre

Nathan Knight (Lenovo); Julie Barbieri (NTT Communications ICT Solutions); Denis Maguire (Cisco); Phil Jones (Focus Group Technologies); David Hanrahan (Dimension Data); Joe Tasevski (AdventOne); Hafizah Osman (ARN); Andrew Sylvester (APC by Schneider Electric); Dean Riach (Veritas); Sean Murphy (Nexus IT); Patrick Devlin (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) and JP Clemence (Sententia)

As organisations evolve into agile digital businesses, and place new demands on a maturing data centre, a state of software-defined is surfacing across the Australian channel.

Triggered by the need to innovate, and a desire to consume IT differently, businesses are increasing adoption across Australia.

Reflective of an upwards global spending trend, the worldwide software-defined data centre (SDDC) market is estimated to grow from US$25.61 billion in 2016, to US$83.21 billion by 2021.

Specifically, major growth drivers include uptake of advanced centre management software that provides increased security at low cost, increased data centre agility and scalability, alongside central management of data centre operations.

Yet such adoption comes in different shapes and sizes, with the SDDC market playing host to a varied network of customers, each harbouring different demands and requirements.

“We’re seeing customers that were managers of hardware 10 years ago, transition to become managers of applications and now service delivery managers,” Hewlett Packard Enterprise director of distribution and mid-market Patrick Devlin observed.

Consequently, the new CIO of the future is taking charge of delivering an outcome to the wider business, with technology expected to service such requirements on an ongoing basis.

“A SDDC is a service that customers consume that delivers on that promise,” Devlin explained. “It’s the ultimate in virtualisation of a hardware and software layer in a central environment. It’s a new way of looking at IT consumption.”

From a technology perspective, the overriding objective of a SDDC is to simplify infrastructure, alongside offering more centralised management and a better understanding of application requirements.

“To do that, you need hardware and software infrastructure to be working together,” Cisco data centre and virtualisation solutions regional manager Denis Maguire said.

“What has accelerated the process has been cloud and the types of services that can be consumed in the cloud for IT to be able to deliver a better experience.”

In addition, virtualising many layers of the data centre helps create a transparent platform, a platform capable of adjusting according to fluctuating business requirements.

“We started off with virtualised IT in a server, moving on to virtualised networking and now we’re looking at virtualised storage,” APC by Schneider Electric Asia Pacific and Japan data centre software regional director Andrew Sylvester added.

“That is the critical middle piece sitting underneath all that hardware and above the actual applications connected layer.”

Delving deeper, the rise of ubiquitous application programming interfaces (APIs) at every layer of the stack has also driven fundamental change toward the SDDC market.

“Just two years ago, we had individual vendors locked in to layers of a stack,” Dimension Data cloud services general manager David Hanrahan added.

“Ubiquitous APIs at all levels is what lets us automate and drive towards a software-defined world. A key change that makes a difference is that business is driving that world from an application led perspective.”

Yet for some customers, and partners, change isn’t as closely associated to technology, rather a business mind-set.

“What’s important is the process, the outcomes and what we’re trying to achieve,” Focus Group Technologies director Phil Jones added. “We have to have the right technology to deliver that but it’s about outcomes such as agility and availability.”

Delivering outcomes

As the industry continues to maximise the efficiencies of the public cloud, the SDDC market can similarly create added benefits for partners across the channel.

“SDDC takes us back into our business and gives us the opportunity to be more specialised,” Lenovo A/ NZ data centre group channel sales manager Nathan Knight said.

“We leverage the efficiency of public cloud but when we start looking at outcomes, instead of having to do a huge infrastructure investment, we can be specialised in our investments with software- defined which also allows us to scale as we grow.”

For Knight, the hyper-converged software-defined space is filled with “speed and disruption” changes, with cloud naturally a key trigger of such change.

“We need to think about how this technology will de-power the hardware side of the business and align with the relevant technologies,” Knight added.

At a partner level, Devlin stressed that the notion of as-a-service and delivering outcomes is not a new-fangled concept, meaning that partners must stay faithful to current practices.

“The automation piece is new, the products to back it up are new and the availability of public cloud is new but the service they provide is the same,” Devlin added. “It’s a long-time customer model that our partner community had and needs to keep doing.”

In offering an on-the-ground partner perspective, NTT Communications ICT Solutions national sales director and infrastructure general manager Julie Barbieri added that businesses demand services and are not worried by how such services are subsequently delivered by the channel.

“When we talk to customers, we don’t start the conversation with how we operate our data centre, it starts with what is the business issue and how do we address it,” Barbieri added.

“If customers get that service they request for within the timeframe and budget they want, they’re satisfied. So, the focus should be on that.”

For Barbieri, partners must also adopt an innovative mind-set to maintain relations with customers, in order to stay ahead of the chasing, and competitive, pack.

“Be present and listen to the requirements of the customer,” Barbieri explained. “It’s also got to do with your own delivery and its efficiency and that becomes relevant to your customer as you can do it faster, smarter and cheaper.

“Businesses are on a journey with SDDC and there will continually be evolution in this space but nothing has and will change in this industry.

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“It’s a little smarter, a little quicker and a little different but business is still the same as what it was 30 years ago.”

Even though SDDC marks the next evolution in infrastructure and data centre automation architecture, customers today still rate partners on similar performance levels.

“SDDCs will continue to evolve, but customers won’t really care,” Sententia CEO JP Clemence acknowledged. “You’re solving business problems, so how you do it, most people don’t care.

“They put the SLAs and their budget on the table and service providers will just need to work with it.”

Irrespective of size or stature, customers across Australia require a service that’s rolled out in a budget- constrained environment, with the onus now on the channel to deliver.

“Shifting towards a data centric economy has both pros and cons regardless of which part of the channel you are in,” AdventOne strategy and business consulting executive director Joe Tasevski said.

“To remain relevant, you need to understand more about the requirements of your customer and make changes to your business to suit these needs.

“Businesses should question how the supply meets the actual drivers from a business perspective. We’re moving towards a sophistication conversation now that may or may not have been in place before.”

According to Maguire, many automation projects aren’t currently delivering on previous promises, and coupled with more variety and complexity, infrastructure is now lifting its game.

“The automation is isolated from the complexity of the infrastructure and you can now pull together the policy and deliver that to the infrastructure that delivers the requirements,” Maguire said. “And all that the automation now needs to do is understand the server requirements.”

In operating as a solutions provider, Jones said value can be found by bringing together the right solution, not the best of breed solutions combined, together for customers.

Furthermore, such a solution differs according to the needs of each individual business.

“I often say to customers the best of things doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best solution for them,” Jones explained. “Our job is to point out to the customer where we think the risk vs. reward is very beneficial.”

Channel challenges

Despite a motivation to provide clear business outcomes within the context of SDDC, the channel - and the expanding ecosystem of partners within it — remains challenged.

“By removing workloads, businesses need to ensure they maintain the same service level agreements (SLAs) and level of availability regardless of where the workloads are,” Veritas Pacific SE lead Dean Riach added.

“That comes down to not only understanding what it is, but where you place it in and that can be a challenge for some companies.”

According to Nexus IT managing director Sean Murphy, the question quickly moves towards standards and interoperation.

“If you pick a vendor and you make a bad choice around a key thing that you’re about to invest automation and orchestration effort in, people aren’t necessarily subscribing to the same set of standards,” Murphy explained.

“And even when they do, some vendors implement a standard that’s not quite the same as others.”

Meanwhile, Devlin said infrastructure vendors are challenged by risk and compliance discussions because in a SDDC conversation, there is little emphasis on the hardware that holds the solution together.

“What we’re saying at a SDDC layer is, take all the cool and exciting bits and put it in a software layer and do lots of business-critical things on it,” Devlin explained. “It sounds risky but what’s holding that up? That’s the challenge.

“No one wants to talk about the hardware because it’s not sexy but it is the lynch pin that holds it all together.”

While SDDC remains crucial to the long-term evolution of an agile digital business, today, challenges remain around extracting channel value.

Because currently, SDDC does not represent the right choice for all IT organisations.

Therefore, partners must assess when the business case makes sense, which models and IT projects are best suited and the technology characteristics required for success.

“Software-defined is good from an IT perspective that it drives CAPEX [capital expenditure] costs down but from the perspective of running a data centre, you get a spike in the electricity bill,” Clemence added.

“You must reach a balance somewhere between the amount of virtualisation versus how much you’re paying for energy and the outcome you’re driving for the customer.”

Continuing the financial implications of adopting an SDDC approach, Hanrahan believes the virtualisation of data centres is important because unlike a traditional data centre model, it reduces costs through only charging for what is consumed.

“But in a traditional data centre model, when I take rack space, the space and power allocated to it, I pay from day one regardless if I consume it or not,” he said.

Due to its current immaturity, the SDDC market is perhaps most appropriate for visionary organisations with advanced expertise in engineering and architecture.

Through operating as a data centre in which all the infrastructure is virtualised and delivered ‘as-a- service’, this enables increased levels of automation and flexibility that will underpin business agility through the increased adoption of cloud services and enable modern IT approaches such as DevOps.

Today however, not all organisations are ready to begin adoption and should proceed with caution, with a widening skills gap also creating new barriers to adoption.

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“We’ve got to determine what this skills gap means because graduates haven’t learnt the intricacies of what machines are doing,” Hanrahan added.

“The same goes for security; there are parts of the industry investing in these technologies but we’ve got to make sure that the talent comes through in the next few years.”

In addition, Maguire said partners must help customers advance talent both internally and externally, to help move organisations forward in the years to come.

“What they should be looking to is a balance between run the business and innovate the business,” Maguire added.

“Having the wrong mentality can also get in the way so this is a conversation that we need to have more with customers.”

Future plans

By 2020, however, Gartner predicts the programmatic capabilities of an SDDC will be considered a requirement for 75 per cent of Global 2000 enterprises that seek to implement a DevOps approach and a hybrid cloud model.

But business leaders can’t just buy a ready-made SDDC from a vendor. First, they need to understand why they need it for the business.

Second, they need to deploy, orchestrate and integrate numerous parts, probably from different vendors.

Moreover, aside from a lot of deployment work — new skills and a cultural shift in the IT organisation are needed to ensure this approach delivers results for the business.

As a result, partners must advise leaders to adopt a “realistic view” of the risks and benefits, and make plans to mitigate the top risks of an SDDC project failure.

Furthermore, Knight said vendors can support partners by de-risking pricing models and technology adoption, especially across the SMB market.

“As technologies are emerging, we need to de-risk our pricing models and technology adoption, so moving towards consumption based models,” Knight said.

“It is easy in the enterprise because you’ve got scale but for SMB, more can be done to help partners for them to roll out.”

According to Jones, success in the market always comes down to the relationship between a vendor and a partner.

“A lot of vendors say that they work with the channel, but it’s that engagement with the partner that matters,” Jones added.

“Software- defined is not a single product and it’s not a single stack — the benefit is that it’s multi-faceted. And the system integrator brings it all together.”

For Murphy, the role of the vendor comprises of added support around end-user education, alongside technical support and enablement.

“Customers want a good story that is well told,” Murphy said. “I find that if I take decisions to them, it doesn’t work.

“There needs to be constructive conversations in the boardroom about what works best for them. And the vendors can support us in this by offering us partners with staff smarts.”

In echoing Murphy’s comments, Clemence said vendors must now treat partners as a customer also, in reflection of the changing dynamics of the industry.

“A true partner is a combination of both a partner and a customer, and not all vendors get that. We want to know the good and the bad,” Clemence added.

Specific to new and emerging technologies, Sylvester believes artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) will disrupt the SDDC market in the years ahead, with the explosion of applications set to also continue.

“The app is going to be king,” Sylvester said. “It is going to define what it needs and infrastructure will have to simply react. AI and more software-defined connectivity will further drive this space.

“As these technologies develop further, they will start to collect data from individual devices and aggregate these things together. Why have software-defined when you can have AI correlate and consolidate?”

Despite the rise in AI and IoT solutions however, Murphy said software-defined is here to stay.

“Otherwise, the AI has nothing to talk to,” he said. “AI is going to demand a lot more from commodity infrastructure, resulting in the need for more software-defined.

“That’s the next generation; it’s the next building block for IoT and AI. You’ve got to determine the actual value and what you are trying to achieve.”

This roundtable was sponsored by APC by Schneider Electric, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo and Veritas. Photos by Maria Stefina.