Transcript of a discussion on how IT architecture and new breeds of service providers are helping enterprises manage complex cloud scenarios.

1. How Cloud Architects Transform the
Messy Mix of Hybrid Cloud Factors
into a Consistent Force Multiplier
Transcript of a discussion on how IT architecture and new breeds of service
providers are helping enterprises manage complex cloud scenarios.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer
podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host
and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories. Stay
with us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off disruption -- in favor of
innovation.
Our next cloud strategies insights interview focuses on how IT architecture and new
breeds of service providers are helping enterprises manage complex cloud scenarios.
We’ll now learn how composable infrastructure and auto-scaling help improve client
services, operations, and business goal attainment for a New York cloud support
provider.
Here to help us learn what's needed to reach the potential of
multiple -- and often overlapping -- cloud models is Arthur
Reyenger, Cloud Practice Lead and Chief Cloud Architect at
International Integrated Solutions (IIS) Ltd. in New York.
Welcome, Arthur.
Arthur Reyenger: Thank you so much, I really appreciate
being on the show.
Gardner: How are IT architecture and new breeds of service
providers coming together? What's different now from just a few
years ago for architecture when we have cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud services?
Fast and Flexible
Reyenger: Like the technology trends themselves, everything is accelerating. Before,
you would have three-year or even five-year plans that were developed by the business.
They were designed to reach certain
business outcomes, they would design
the technology to support that and it was
then heads down to build my rocket
ship.
It’s changed now to where it’s a 12-
month strategy that needs to be modular
Reyenger
It’s changed now to where it’s a 12-
month strategy that needs to be
modular enough to be reevaluated
and re-architected — almost as if
were made of Lego blocks.

2. enough to be reevaluated at the end of those 12 months, and be re-architected -- almost
as if it were made of Lego blocks.
Gardner: More moving parts, less time.
Reyenger: Absolutely.
Gardner: How do you accomplish that?
Reyenger: You leverage different cloud service providers, different managed services
providers, and traditional value-added resellers, like International Integrated Solutions
(IIS), in order to meet those business demands. We see a large push around
automation, orchestration and auto-scaling. It’s becoming a way to achieve those
business initiatives at that higher speed.
Gardner: There is a cloud continuum. You are choosing which workloads and what data
should be on-premises, and what should be in a cloud, or multi-clouds. Trying to do this
as a regular IT shop -- buying it, specifying, integrating it -- seems like it demands more
than the traditional IT skills. How is the culture of IT adjusting?
Reyenger: Every organization, including ours, has its own business transformation that
they have to undergo. We think that we are extremely proactive. I see some companies
that are developing in-house skill sets, and trying to add additional departments that
would be more cloud-aware in order to meet those demands.
On the other side, you have folks that are leveraging partners like IIS, which has acumen
within those spaces to supplement their bench, or they are building out a completely
separate organization that will hopefully take them to the new frontier.
Gardner: Tell us about your company. What have you done to transform?
Reyenger: IIS has spent 26 years building out an amazing book of business with
amazing relationships with a lot of enterprise customers. But as times change, you need
to be able to add additional practices like our cloud practice and our managed services
practice. We have taken the knowledge we have around traditional IT services and then
added in our internal developers and delivery consultants. They are very well versed and
aware of the new architecture. So we can marry the two together and help organizations
reach that new end-state.
It's very easy for startups to go 100 percent to the cloud and just run with it. It’s different
when you have 2,000 existing applications and you want to move to the future as well.
It’s nice to have someone who understands both of those worlds -- and the appropriate
way to integrate them.
Gardner: I suppose there is no typical cloud engagement, but what is a common hurdle
that organizations are facing as they go from that traditional IT mindset to the more
cloud-centric thinking and hybrid deployment models?
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3. The cloud answer
Reyenger: The concept of auto-scaling or bursting has become very, very prevalent.
You see that within different lines of business. Ultimately, they are all asking for
essentially the same thing -- and the cloud is a pretty good answer.
At the same time, you really need to understand your business and the triggers. You
need to be able to put the necessary intelligence together around those capabilities in
order to make it really beneficial and align to the ebbs and flows of your business. So
that's been one of the very, very common requests across the board.
We've built out solutions that include intellectual property from IIS and our developers,
as well as cloud management tools built around backup to the cloud to eliminate tape
and modernize backup for customers. This builds out a dedicated object store that
customers can own that also tiers to the different public cloud providers out there.
And we’ve done this in a repeatable fashion so that our customers get the cloud
consumption look and feel, and we’ve leveraged innovative contractual arrangements to
allow customers to consume against the scope of work rather than on lease. We’ve been
able to marry that with the different standardized offerings out there to give someone the
head start that they need in order to achieve their objectives.
Gardner: You brought up the cloud consumption model. Organizations want the benefit
of a public cloud environment and user experience for bursting, auto-scaling, and price
efficiency. They might want to have workloads on-premises, to use a managed service,
or take advantage of public clouds under certain circumstances.
How are you working with companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), for
example, to provide composable auto-scaling capabilities with the look and feel of public
cloud on their private cloud?
Reyenger: Now it’s becoming a multi-cloud strategy. It’s one thing to say only on-
premises and using one cloud. But using just one cloud has risk, and this is a problem.
We try to standardize everything through a single cloud management stack for our
customers. We’re agnostic to a whole slew of toolsets around both orchestration and
automation. We want to help them achieve that.
Intelligent platform performance
We looked at some of the very unique things that HPE has done, specifically around
their Synergy platform, to allow for cloud management and cloud automation to deliver
true composable infrastructure. That has huge value around energizing a company’s
goals, strengthening their profitability, boosting productivity, and enhancing innovation.
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Updated Book
HPE Synergy for Dummies

4. We've been able to extend that into the public cloud. So now we have customers that
truly are getting the best of both worlds.
Gardner: How do you define composable
infrastructure?
Reyenger: It’s having true infrastructure that
you can deploy as code. You’ll hear a lot of
folks say that and what it really means is
being able to standardize on a single
RESTful API set.
That allows your platform to have intelligence when you look at infrastructure as a
service (IaaS), and then delivering things as either platform (PaaS) or software as a
service (SaaS) -- from either a DevOps approach, or from the lines of business directly
to consumers. So it’s the ability to bridge those two worlds.
Traditionally, you may have underlying infrastructure that doesn't have the intelligence or
doesn't have the visibility into the cloud automation. So I may be scaling, but I can't scale
into infinity. I really need an underlying infrastructure to be able to mold and adapt in
order to meet those needs.
We’re finally reaching the point where we have that visibility and we have that capability,
thanks to software-defined data center (SDDC) and a platform to ultimately be able to
execute on.
Gardner: When I think about composable infrastructure, I often wonder, “Who is the
composer?” I know who composes the apps, that’s the developer -- but who composes
the infrastructure?
Reyenger: This gets to a lot of the digital transformation that we talked about in seeking
different resources, or cultivating your existing resources to gain more of a developer’s
view.
But now you have IT operations and DevOps both able to come under a single
management console. They are able to communicate effectively and then script on either
side in order to compose based on the code requirements. Or they can put guardrails on
different segments of their workloads in order to dictate importance or assign guidelines.
The developers can ultimately make those requests or modify the environment.
Gardner: When you get to composable infrastructure in a data center or private cloud,
that’s fine. But that’s sort of like 2D Chess. When I think about multi-cloud or hybrid
cloud -- it’s more like 3D Chess. So how do I compose infrastructure, and who is the
composer, when it comes to deciding where to support a workload in a certain way, and
at what cost?
Consult before composing
Reyenger: We offer a series of consulting services around the delivery of managed
services and the actual development to take an existing cloud management stack --
whether that is Red Hat CloudForms, vRealize from VMware, or Terraform -- it really
doesn't matter.
Composable infrastructure is
having true infrastructure that you
can deploy as code. It’s being
able to standardize on a single
RESTful API set.

5. We are ultimately allowing that to be the single pane of glass, the single console. And
then because it’s RESTful API integrations into those public cloud providers, we’re able
to provide that transparency from that management interface, which mitigates risk and
gives you control.
Then we deploy things like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible within those different virtual
private clouds and within those public cloud fabrics. Then, using that cloud management
stack, you can have uniformity and you can take that composition and that intelligence
and bring it wherever you like -- whether that's based on geography or a particular cloud
service provider preference.
There are many different ways to ultimately achieve that end-state. We just want to
make sure that that standardization, to your point, doesn’t get lost the second you leave
that firewall.
Gardner: We are in the early days of composability of infrastructure in a multi-cloud
world. But as the complexity and scale increases, it seems likely to me that we are going
to need to bring things like Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) because
humans doing this manually will run out of runway.
Projecting into the future, do you see a role for an algorithmic, programmatic approach
putting in certain variables, certain thresholds, and contextual learning to then make this
composable infrastructure capability part of a machine process?
Reyenger: The things that companies like HPE have done, and their new acquisition,
Nimble, as well as Red Hat, and several others in the industry, to leverage the
intelligence they have from all of their different support calls and lifecycle management
across applications allows them to provide feedback to the customer.
And in some cases, if you are tying it back from an automation engine that will actually
give you the information as to how to solve your problem. A lot of the precursors to what
you are talking about are already in the works and everyone is trying to be that data-
cloud management company.
It's really early to ultimately pick favorites, but you
are going to see more standardization. Rather
than having 50 different RESTful APIs that
everyone is standardizing on and that are
constantly changing, so that I have to provide
custom integrations. What we will see is more of
that single pane of glass they will leverage across
multiple cloud providers. That will leverage a lot of the same automation and
orchestration toolsets that we talked about.
Gardner: And HPE has their sights set on this with New Stack?
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We will see more of that
single pane of glass that they
will leverage across multiple
cloud providers.

6. Reyenger: 100 percent.
Gardner: Looking at composable infrastructure, auto-scaling, using things like HPE
Synergy, if you’re an enterprise and you do this right, how do you take this up to the C-
Suite and say, “Aha, we told you so. Now give us more so we can do more”?
In other words, how does this improve business?
Fulfilling the promise
Reyenger: Every organization is different. I’ve spent a good chunk of my career being
tactically deployed within very large organizations that are trying to achieve certain
goals.
For me, I like to go to a customer’s 10-K SEC filing and look at the promises they’ve
made to their investors. We want to ultimately be able to marry back what this IT
investment will do for the short-term goals that they are all being judged against, as well
as from both the key performance indicators (KPI) standpoint and from the health of the
company.
It means meeting DevOps challenges and timelines, ruling out new green space
workload issues, and taking data that sits within traditional business intelligence (BI)
relational databases and giving access to some of that data to different departments.
They should be able to run big data analytics against that data from those departments
in real-time.
These are the types of testing methodologies that we like to set up so that we can help a
customer actually rationalize what this means today in terms of dollars and cents and
what it could mean in terms of that perceived value.
Gardner: When you do this well, you get agility, and you get to choose your deployment
models. It seems to me that there's going to be a concept that arises of minimal viable
cloud, or hybrid cloud.
Are we going to see IT costs at an operating level adjusted favorably? Is this something
that ultimately will be so optimized -- with higher utilization, leveraging the competitive
market for cloud services -- that meaningful decreases will occur in the total operating
costs of IT in an organization?
An uphill road to lower IT costs
Reyenger: I definitely think that it’s quite possible. The way that most organizations are
set up today, IT operations rolls back into finance. So if you sit underneath the CFO, like
most organizations do, and a request gets made by marketing or sales or another line of
business -- it has to go up the chain, get translated, and then come back down.
A lot of times it's difficult to push a rock up a hill. You don’t have all the visibility unless
you can get back up to finance or back over to that line of business. If you are able to
break down those silos, then I believe that your statement is 100 percent true.

7. But changing all of those internal controls for a lot of these organizations is very difficult,
which is why some are deploying net-new teams to be ultimately the future of their
internal IT service provider operations.
Gardner: Arthur, I have been in this business long enough to know that every time
we’ve gotten into the point where we think we are going to meaningfully decrease IT
costs, some other new paradigm of IT comes up that requires a whole new round of
investment. But it seems to me that this could be different this time, that we actually are
getting to a standardized approach for supporting workloads and that traditional
economics that impact any procurement service will become in effect here, too.
Mining to minimize risk
Reyenger: Absolutely. One of our big pushes has been around object SaaS. This still
allows for traditional file- and block-level support. We are trying to help customers
achieve that new economic view -- of which cloud approach ultimately provides them
that best price point, but still gives them low risk, visibility, and control over their data.
I will give you an example. There is a very large financial exchange that had a lot of
intellectual property (IP) data that they traditionally mined internally, and then they
provided it back to different, smaller financial institutions as a service, as financial
reports. A few years back, they came to us and said, “I really want to leverage the agility
of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in terms of being able to spin up a huge Hadoop form
and mine this data very, very quickly -- and leverage that without having to increase my
overall cost. But I don’t feel comfortable providing that data into S3 within AWS, where
now they have two extra copies of my data as part of the service level agreement. So
what do I do?”
And we ultimately stood up the same object storage service next to AWS, so you
wouldn’t have to pay any data eviction fees, and you could mine everything right there,
leveraging the AWS Redshift, or Hadoop as a service.
Then once these artifacts, or these reports, were created, they no longer had the IP. The
reports came from the IP, but these are all roll-ups and comparisons, and now they are
not sensitive to the company. We went ahead and put those into S3 and allowed
Amazon to manage all of their customers’ identity and access management to go ahead
and get access to that -- and that all minimized risk for this exchange. We are able to
prevent anyone outside of the organization to get behind the firewall to get at their data.
You don’t have to worry about the SLAs
associated with keeping this stuff up and
available and it became a really nice hybrid story.
These are the types of projects that we really like
to work on with customers, to be able to help
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Updated Book
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We help customers gain all
the benefits associated with
cloud — without taking on any
of the additional risk.

8. them gain all the benefits associated with cloud -- without taking on any of the additional
risk, or the negatives, associated with jumping into cloud with both feet.
Gardner: You heard your customers, you saw a niche opportunity for object storage as a
service, and you have put that together. I assume that you want a composable
infrastructure to do that. So is this something on a HPE Synergy a future foundation?
Reyenger: HPE Synergy doesn’t really have the disk density to get to the public cloud
price point, but it does support object storage natively. So it's great from a DevOps
standpoint for object storage. We definitely think that as time progresses and HPE
continues down the Synergy roadmap that that cloud role will eventually fix itself.
A lot of the cloud role is centered on hyper-converged infrastructure. And in this kind of
mantra, I don’t see compute and storage growing at the same rates. I see storage
growing considerably faster than the need for compute. So this is a way for us to be able
to help supplement a Synergy deployment, or we can help our customers get the true
ROI/TCO they are looking for out of the hyper-converged.
Gardner: So maybe the question I should ask is what storage providers are you using in
order to make this economically viable?
Reyenger: We are absolutely using the HPE Apollo storage line, and the different
flavors of solid-state disks (SSD) down to SATA physical drives. And we are leveraging
best-in-breed object storage software from Red Hat. We also have an OpenStack flavor
as well. We leverage things like automation and orchestration technologies, and our
ServiceNow capabilities -- all married with our RIP in order to give customers the choice
of buying this, deploying it, and having us layer services on top if you want or if you want
to consume a fully managed service for something that’s on-premises. I have a per-GB
price and the same SLAs as those public cloud providers. So all of it’s coming together
to allow customers to really have the true choice and flexibility that everyone claimed
you could years ago.
Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been exploring how IT
architecture and new breeds of service providers are helping enterprises better manage
their complex cloud requirements. And we learned how a composable infrastructure and
auto-scaling capability have helped a New York cloud services company put together
innovative object storage as a service offerings.
So please join me in thanking our guest, Arthur Reyenger, Cloud Practice Lead and
Chief Cloud Architect at International Integrated Solutions (IIS) in New York. Thank you,
Arthur.
Reyenger: Thank you, Dana. I really appreciate being part of your program.
Gardner: And thanks to our audience as well for joining this BriefingsDirect Voice of the
Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at
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Updated Book
HPE Synergy for Dummies

9. Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-
sponsored interviews.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this content along to your IT community, and do
come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on how IT architecture and new breeds of service
providers are helping enterprises manage complex cloud scenarios. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.
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