Today's enterprises need to be agile and flexible. When it comes to data centres, there are several approaches, from 'bricks and mortar' to pure cloud, to a hybrid solution.
So said Alita Maharaj, SEMEA, inbound marketing manager South Africa, and field marketing manager at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, who will be presenting on "What is the best solution - the legacy 'bricks and mortar' solution; a hybrid approach or pure-cloud" at the ITWeb Data Centre Summit, to be held on 20 July at The Forum in Bryanston.
"Most of enterprises that we meet, either as a client or a prospect, are in discussions to transform their IT infrastructure and services," she says. "Bricks and mortar" is a conservative approach well suited for businesses in a non-competitive sector, such as public institutions that won't necessarily move to a pure-cloud transformation, as they have already invested heavily in-house, and the benefits of moving to the cloud are not clear.
It is her view that the most suitable approach for a majority of enterprises is a hybrid approach. "It enables IT organisations to quickly deploy new services while keeping developments in-house and companies in full control of their data."
Speaking of the pros and cons of the different approaches, Maharaj says the bricks and mortar approach is a pure CAPEX investment for infrastructure that has a clear OPEX mode for the rest. "It is less expensive than a renting, leasing or a consumption-based model but it doesn't give the flexibility to adapt to the business need quickly and leverage the latest technology or unlimited resource available provided by a cloud service provider."
On the other hand, she says, the hybrid approach offers many advantages. "Firstly, it enables the business to keep development in-house and continues to leverage long-term IT investments such as industrial applications, CRM, ERP and data protection infrastructure. Moving fully to the cloud would mean a substantial effort from IT teams and no guarantee of a positive ROI."
For quickly deploying new IT services the cloud offers the flexibility of resource "a la carte" and cost based on usage. "Development team can use PAAS, office applications are now cloud accessible from anywhere with any devices, and sales forces efficiency increase with cloud-based CRM tools. One of the drawbacks would be the complexity of integrating cloud-based services with in-house infrastructure, as it is complex to manage and control end-to-end."
She says the pure cloud approach is good for enterprises where IT is not core for their business or for small enterprises that do not require more than office apps and a Web presence. "Enterprises with limited capital will benefit from the on-demand service offered by a pure-cloud approach with the ability to manage IT infrastructure and service costs based on their revenue. On the other hand, the pure-cloud approach does not enable custom-made IT applications and services."
During her presentation, Maharaj will delve into the software defined network (SDN) and the underlying infrastructure: "SDN promises to eliminate the complexity and limitations of a static network and will simplify a hybrid cloud deployment."
Her talk will also look into the physical layer evolution of the data centre network which needs to change in order to leverage the SDN architecture. Maharaj will review the different data centre fabric solutions and talk about the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards evolutions to overcome the inherent limits of Ethernet to ease the deployment of SDN-based services.
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