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Scaling systems when the supply chain is broken

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 16 Apr 2020
Paul Ruinaard, regional sales director Sub-Saharan Africa, Nutanix.
Paul Ruinaard, regional sales director Sub-Saharan Africa, Nutanix.

Although borders are shut, supply chains left in flux, and delivery of IT systems and products is severely impacted, CIOs still need to make sure their workforces are able to enable the business and ensure business continuity.

“IT as a whole has been placed under enormous pressure as it is required to keep the knowledge economy up and running,” says Paul Ruinaard, regional sales director Sub-Saharan Africa at Nutanix.

He says the debate with regards to the use of the cloud has been silenced as more and more cloud infrastructure is being acquired to supplement the sudden surge of remote workers. 

“But in the background we are also evidencing increased demand for on-premises infrastructure as more workers connect to systems.”

No room to scale

Ruinaard says many companies do not have the ability to scale their entire workforce to the cloud. 

“Particularly those in the financial services sectors who still need to adhere to data sensitivity policies. Their existing infrastructure has been architected to handle a 20% to 30% load of remote workers, not the over 80%, and in some cases 90% of the workforce we see today.”

So where do they put these users? According to him, business continuity and disaster recovery plans have an inherent flaw. "They are designed to provide data back-ups, they are the site that will kick into gear if another site falls over. They aren’t in theory, designed to create a new work environment and suddenly support an influx of new users, or are they?”

Dusting off Web-scale

Working with local customers who don’t have the room internally to scale, he says Nutanix is seeing a surge in demand for Web-scale architectures that use what is already in the IT cupboard to create more space to house more users.

“Hyperconvergence was the founding father of Web-scale IT,” Ruinaard explains. “The techies who built Facebook and Google's data centres were definitely onto something. In essence, instead of playing Tetris with their three-tier architectures, they looked for a solution that would fit on a smaller footprint and subsequently developed hyperconvergence and gave birth to Web-scale IT.’

Nutanix is seeing a surge in demand for Web-scale architectures that use what is already in the IT cupboard.

At the heart of hyperconvergence is automation and simplicity, he adds. Hyperconverged devices can automate and rationalise infrastructure to meet the needs of businesses with a voracious appetite for data. “The key when first developing these systems was to ensure that they would be as reliable and as stable as the infrastructure of yesterday, while at the same time meeting the demands of today's technologies.”

Unlocking relevance

Today, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) forms the premise of the software-defined data centre, he says. It is the heart of the cloud, and it is the key to scalability.

“However, not everyone had invested in HCI nodes before the lockdown, and now unless they are an essential service, it is near impossible to get access to them. What we are currently helping customers with is looking at their existing environments, seeing how we can scale within these as well as prioritise workloads and streamline application delivery.”

No one could have ever planned for the level of severity and the challenges the IT supply chain would face during the lockdown.

Several of Nutanix’s clients are watching their disaster recovery sites, and with good reason, Ruinaard says. “They have a lot of tin sitting in these environments waiting for a 'disaster' to happen. It makes sense to put it to good use. Of course, there is a risk that they will eat into the space required for backups, but exceptional circumstances require exceptional actions.”

On a more positive note, he says one thing South Africans are is resilient. “They will always make a plan and the current lockdown is no different. IT managers are restarting old systems, buying space in the cloud, securing space in their disaster recovery environments and creating an old fashioned 'daisy chain' of infrastructure solutions on which they are placing hyperconverged solutions to bring it all together and manage it.”

A permanent shift

There is no single answer for business, he says. With the exception of doomsday planners, no one could have ever planned for the level of severity and the challenges the IT supply chain would face during the lockdown.

“In the past, the notion of having unused VMs or cloud space, just in case of an eventuality, didn't make good financial sense. But looking ahead, IT is going to move even further up the value chain, and it will no longer be a department that has to keep the lights on. It will become the new engine room of the global economy,” he says.

The infrastructure of the future is already the infrastructure of today and hybrid, and multi-cloud environments won't be the question anymore – they will be the answer. For those with foresight they already are, concludes Ruinaard.

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