Digital agility is of utmost importance in modern business, encompassing speed and responsiveness. For instance, a rapid turnaround to address an infrastructure bottleneck, a quick resolution to erroneous code, a prompt diagnosis of user-reported issues, or an immediate response to contain a cyberattack would undoubtedly be appealing. Nonetheless, achieving agility in a large enterprise is no easy task, and these efforts can be hampered by a risk-averse corporate culture, untimely policies, and staff competency.
I define Capacity-on-Demand as an organization’s ability to scale up digital capacity, specifically focusing on infrastructure capacity in this post, as and when it is required. A highly versatile, high-performing, and secure infrastructure is a crucial asset for any enterprise, with strict uptime and performance requirements often committed as service levels to their business partners by Enterprise IT.
However, this system works well only when the operating environment remains unchanged. As usage increases, businesses modernize, technologies become obsolete, and maintenance costs for aging equipment escalate, many enterprise technology chiefs are faced with the due diligence of upgrading their infrastructures approximately once every five years to keep up with user demand and application workloads.
But what alternatives exist when this upgrade entails intensive capital outlay for a system likely to be useful for only 60 months? Even with the blessing of new investment, the epic effort to commission the major upgrade, including technical design, prototyping, specifications, installation, and other administrative overheads, may amount to a woeful 18 months or more. The Return on Investment (ROI) in such a scenario is utterly inefficient!
Cloud Storage
From mirror copies to backup and archival copies of enterprise data, meeting operational and legal requirements necessitates provisioning nearly triple the storage capacity for every unit increase in data volume. In a large enterprise, this total can amount to tens of petabytes or even more. Dealing with such large-scale and unpredictable demands often leads us to consider Cloud storage. It offers elasticity and helps reduce data centre footprint. However, it also assumes no legal implications on data residency, and the organization must be willing to accept less desired contract terms on service levels, data privacy, liability, indemnity, security safeguards, and exit clauses.
Storage Leasing
Storage leasing presents a viable alternative if you possess the economy of scale, a mid- to long-term horizon, and a fairly accurate but non-committal year-by-year growth prediction during the contract period. These considerations are crucial for a cost-effective proposal.
Similar to Cloud storage, storage leasing helps alleviate capital constraints and smoothes out lumpy expenses in the budget plan over the years, a preferred approach by some finance chiefs. Additionally, you have the option to choose between finance lease with asset ownership or operating lease to save tedious efforts in asset keeping.
Sporadic Demands
Despite the forecasted storage growth rate, addressing urgent demands within a short notice necessitates pre-provisioning spare capacity onsite without activating it. I used to include such requirements in the leasing contract at a fraction of the total cost, enabling the option to turn it on and off as needed or normalize it as part of the forecasted growth, although the latter approach prevailed in my previous environment.
Access Speed
Does the access speed to the Cloud differ from onsite storage? It is a rather complex assessment. Apart from factors like drive technologies, data transfer protocols, and cache size, onsite storage in any end-user environment, where users and employees are mostly located within the enterprise, would provide a better user experience since the speed is not limited by Internet bandwidth. Additionally, we should consider the nature of data that nowadays, is predominantly machine-generated data such as transaction logs, user access records, and security events, etc. These voluminous and real-time data are latency-sensitive, consuming much of the Internet bandwidth, making it advisable to be located closest to the storage.
Storage Operations
Equipping the workforce with the necessary expertise and knowledge of proprietary tools to manage and operate Cloud or onsite storage is crucial. Cloud storage offers ease of provision and management, including storage provisioning, backup & recovery, and site redundancy, etc. However, I am hesitant about operating a black box in a heterogeneous environment without understanding its internal dynamics and having a plan for skill transfer. Storage is a significant component of the entire enterprise technology stack, and highly committed and collaborative efforts from the storage provider are essential for planning and successfully executing drills and post-reviews and avoiding not my problem syndrome.
Onsite storage will entail more technical management overheads compared to the Cloud. One can include the required expertise and make provisions in the contract to support the adopted solution. The service provider, backed by the principal, will have the most experienced personnel to support your organization. Once again, we must not overlook the importance of having a plan for skill transfer.
Mutual Trust
Technology leasing is not a novel concept. The key is to customize a contract to bridge the gap left by the Cloud. The initial journey may encounter challenges, but with shared goals and mutual trust, it can lead to a long-term win-win partnership. Throughout my experience, I have utilized both Cloud and onsite storage, ranging from file storage to block and object storage, and transitioning from SCSI to Fiber Channel connectivity and finally to all-flash drives, to meet my needs. At the end of each contract, there was a comprehensive review of the overall service performance and upcoming technologies, resulting in reduced data centre space and energy footprint, as well as lower per terabyte cost for the next phase of development. This approach also provides the right opportunity to give a new lease of life to the storage infrastructure.
Next Post
On-demand provisioning is far from complete without the agile provisioning of the server and network capacity which I will cover in the next post.
*Post is copyedited by ChatGPT, https://chat.openai.com/chat