Sustainable Platforms

Welcome to the latest edition of the OCTO retrospective, this month we are going to take a look at the sustainability conversation as it relates to your infrastructure platforms, some customer conversations around the future of cloud and a round-up of wider content from the CDW Office of the CTO.

Sustainable Outcomes:

The topic of sustainability is a fast-rising business leader priority, often with the more technical IT leaders being aligned to own the strategy or at least contribute to the wider Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) initiative.? The topic raises some interesting points ranging from morale obligations, financial, and talent attraction impacts not to mention the future state of our planet! I wanted to look at the IT-impacting elements this month.?

With IT potentially impacting on a large portion of the in-scope emissions this is a great time to really understand the conversation. IT services contribute to a noticeable amount of global emissions with storage taking a large part of that load. With storage requirements growing at alarming rates, we need to find new ways of balancing the need for innovation and speed with a sustainable outcome.

A Catalyst for Transformation:

I see Sustainability becoming a catalyst for transformation within many customers, the conversation is shifting from one that is tactical to a more strategic and holistic approach. This is a trend we need to be riding and making sure we are the partner of choice for our customers.

The challenge is it’s not an easy area for organisations to operate in, the legislation is still solidifying, and cross border can be even more complex. Couple this with CIOs still wrestling with how to balance the need for innovation against building sustainable futures. The other big conversation is the external view a company presents and its impact on the talent war that is raging. The new generation of workforce will be looking closely at the organisations they choose to work for, can you take the chance of missing out on the next wave of talent?

The Supply Chain Challenge:

For those organisations that fall into the mandated reporting categories, the need to consider all three scopes of emissions is critical. This means that many smaller organisations will fall into the line of sight of these larger ESG initiatives. Being part of the upstream or downstream supply chain of the larger legislation-bound entities will force the wider adoption of sustainable practices. The risk for the smaller companies is they lose contracts for reasons not about price or product quality but because of the negative impact, they have on ESG reporting! This is why I believe every organisation needs to consider how it addresses its ESG initiative and why everyone in the IT business needs to be ready to support the wider organisation.

Why Platforms are a key battleground:

As we touched on above It's not a trivial task managing the balance of innovation and sustainability. Data is exploding increasing storage requirements, and new applications like AI are even more processing-hungry than ever before. All of which increase IT pressure to provide additional resources, each of which then increases the overall impact on sustainable reporting. This is why it is so key that IT teams have tight control over the architecture and technology deployed. The traditional way of architecting, purchasing, and deploying IT resources does not lend itself to a sustainable story, we need to consider how we leverage optimal resource utilisation and just-in-time provisioning. The old 5-year capex, sized for today + x% growth +x% free space +x% buffer 'so I don’t need to ask the boss for more' practices that won’t meet the sustainable goals going forward.

Look to optimise cross the stack:

Some of the stats produced around current resource utilisation make for very interesting reading:

The great news is as IT experts we have many places we can look to optimise across the entire stack. Digging into each is beyond the scope of this newsletter, but I would love to continue the conversations offline.

?Some questions to ask yourselves as you consider the role of IT in your organisation's ESG strategy.

• What is the role of IT in the wider ESG initiatives and is it defined?
• Do the statistics above resonate? Do you have the data to qualify/prove?
• Can you provide the level of reporting needed across the entire estate, Edge to Cloud??
• Do you understand the impact of older equipment on cost and carbon reporting?

?Customer conversations

When Cloud First does not mean what it used to!

Two strong cloud conversations with customers in the last month really cemented with me that we are moving out of the public cloud first era to the Hybrid Cloud era. I wanted to touch on the subtle change in the last sentence from previous thoughts, 'public cloud first' v just 'cloud first'. I have been a big advocate that we move on from the cloud-first era, when the definition of cloud just meant the big hyperscale clouds (Azure, AWS, GCP etc). If customers and the industry are happy that 'Cloud' does not mean just public, then I am happy to keep talking about cloud-first strategies. I think though for ease of communication a Hybrid Cloud Strategy would be best.

The reality for most organisations that have been trading for 10+ years is the mix of legacy, traditional and modern applications will mean a Hybrid Platform will be a reality for many years to come!

This was the conversation outcome of the two conversations over the last month, one in the retail sector and the other in the software development space. Both with medium-sized deployments scaling for a few thousand VM's both with established cloud practices and datacentres hosting legacy and traditional workloads. Both have seen the benefits that the public cloud can bring in terms of the speed and agility needed to understand the future of traditional data centres.

What is becoming clear as we continue to have these conversations, is that organisations (of the right size and application make-up) need to build their own cloud, mixing the correct execution environments to meet each application's needs. When I say this, I don’t mean building from scratch using open source, I mean leveraging technology ecosystems from the likes of VMware and Nutanix and the new purchasing models like Dell APEX or HPE Greenlake. The technology exists now to build true developer-ready clouds in any location of choice, allowing for the right commercial, security, data sovereignty and performance needs to be balanced with financial realities. This is the core of our YOUR Cloud message and the principles of Right Workload | Right platform that CDW adopts (more on this in the future)

If we look at my doodle below, we can see a use case for a 4,000 workload environment. Some workloads need a place to execute until they die or are retired (Execution Env A). Some need all the developer/container functions of the public cloud but have reasons to not 'be' in public locations (Execution Env B). Finally, we have workloads that take full advantage of what the public hyperscaler provides (Execution Env C). By wrapping the correct cloud management platforms, tooling, and purchasing models all three environments can be simple and consistent for developers to consume and easy for IT admins to manage! Providing the best balance to speed and cost.

The rise of 'vendor cloud'?

The number of conversations has been quite interesting over the last couple of months, around what I like to call Vendor Cloud Solutions (think Azure VMware Solution, VMware Cloud on AWS or Nutanix NC2). These solutions allow for the option of running the vendor hypervisor (ESXi/AHV) on the public cloud providers' hardware, in their facilities. Giving you the same operating model on-premises and in the Public Cloud and data locality for traditional workloads and cloud-native. Think about a mid-transformation step when one system is still on a traditional architecture and one has been moved to a cloud-native architecture, keep latency low between the two could be key without the worry of application vendor support on native cloud technologies.

With more customers looking at ways to quickly exit expensive on-premises facilities or ways to provide quick scale-out as part of a true hybrid cloud strategy it will be interesting if this influx in requests turns into real-world deployments. Having done several Vendor cloud projects there are some interesting use cases, if you would like to discuss drop me a message.

?HPE Partner Festival

It was great to get invited to the main stage at the HPE Partner Festival last month, not strictly a customer conversation but I promise there is a link! Joining a discussion on the future of Digital Transformation it was clear that no one partner can help a customer with all aspects of transformation, this means forming strong partnerships between Partners (CDW), Vendors like HPE and our customers is critical to everyone's success.

It was a great discussion on topics such as, feel free to reach out if you wish to discuss in more detail:

• The reality that even the term Digital Transformation is become fatiguing to talk about!
• Why have transformation projects slowed in the last 12 months ?
• Why are people and process often at the heart of failed projects ?
• How the future of platforms is going to be hybrid and that most are starting to accept this :)
• How Partnership between vendors, like HPE and Technology Delivery Partners like CDW will offer customers far greater value and lower overall risk.

OCTO Content Round Up

The content keeps on flowing some great content is below for you to explore from across the wider team.

Cisco announced the End of its Hyper Converged software HyperFlex in Sept, triggering more consolidation in the on-premises private could arena. Here are my thoughts on the announcement and some of the considerations for organisations that have adopted the technology.

https://news.uk.cdw.com/the-end-of-cisco-hyperflex

Hopefully, by next month we will have some concrete information from Cisco on how they will support customers on the transition to Nutanix or VMware VSAN. So far am pleased to say that verbal communication looks promising for customers.

@Tim has started a multi-part article series on the topic of AI, parts one and two are live now on the CDW site, take a look at part 1 here, for some great insights.

https://news.uk.cdw.com/ai-disruptor-innovator

Lots going on with Cisco and Security last month and even more coming in October as the new XDR and ZTNA solutions go GA. Cisco announced the acquisition of Splunk to further its security surge, @greg penned some words here on what that means to the market.

https://news.uk.cdw.com/cisco-acquires-splunk

@Greg also sat down with Cisco's Security Research Technical Lead, Martin Lee for a discussion on cybercrime, cybersecurity and threat intelligence, There are some fantastic conversations here:

Cybersecurity Really Matters

Random personal thought

September my wife and I finally managed to get away on our Canadian road trip, something that was postponed from 2020 when we all suffered lockdowns! Two weeks driving the Rockies west of Calgary seeking out wildlife and remote landscapes to point the camera at. This generally meant lots of miles (about 3,000 in fact!) and many early mornings and late nights, with little sleep time :) On top of the wildlife and landscapes, there is so much culture and history to explore in that part of Canada as it relates to the First Nations and periods like the gold rush.

It had been 15 years since our last visit so was good to explore some new locations and revisit old ones to see how time had treated them. The interesting thing was a few days spent at a lodge and the dinner conversation with other travellers from around Canada and Europe. It became very clear that the outside view of how a country operates v the internal view of its citizens is very different. From topics of immigration, social housing, sport, food, travel, and the weather the perceptions v reality were enlightening to debate over a good meal.

I will leave you with a dawn shot of Moraine Lake in Alberta, taken a few minutes after sunrise one morning. We got very lucky as about 20 mins later the cloud descended and the entire scene vanished for the rest of the day! Such serenity in one location :)

Stay Safe and look out for next month’s recap and please reach out if you want to discuss anything in more detail.?

Rob Sims?

Chief Technologist (Hybrid Platforms)?

CDW UK?

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