TECHNOLOGY

Cloud Repatriation is picking up speed

Published

11 months ago

June 8, 2023

Massive data growth, rising costs for cloud services, and the need for more flexibility have given hosting data and workloads on-premises new momentum, as Eric Bassier, senior director of products at Quantum, explains.

The benefits of cloud computing, in general, are undisputed. Cloud usage has grown rapidly over the past decade and particularly in the last three years, as the need to modernise IT quickly to enable remote working drove many organisations to the cloud. While some workloads are well served in the cloud, many organisations are now finding that some of their data and workloads are better off located in the organisation’s own data centre.

Accordingly, most organisations today deploy a hybrid or multi-cloud approach. Given this, cloud repatriation has become an increasingly popular trend over the last few years. Organisations are moving workloads and data back to their data centres. Why are we seeing this trend?

The cost of cloud computing is rising.

While the public cloud can be cost-effective for specific use cases, it has, in general ,led to higher costs for organisations that moved data and workloads to the public cloud without considering the best location for that data. There are numerous good reasons why cloud services have been becoming more expensive. Rising costs generally, higher demand or growing complexity, are all understandable reasons. However, one of the biggest reasons why cloud budgets have been ballooning out of proportion is that charges for egress or other service fees have made the costs for public cloud storage highly unpredictable. In the end, many organisations paid much more for their cloud services than they expected or budgeted for. To lower the costs and make it more predictable, organisations have been looking for other options.

Organisations need more cloud flexibility.

In a perfect cloud world, customers could easily pick and mix their ideal setup and flexibly move their data and workloads between the parts of their chosen multi-cloud ecosystem. However, this is anything but easy. For one, public cloud vendors have successfully locked-in customers and their data onto their cloud platforms. The providers’ price lists are structured in a way that it is cheap to upload data to the cloud, but it is incomparably more expensive to download it again. As the amount of data is increasing, especially around ever larger files of unstructured data, storing and processing them in the cloud has become very expensive.

On top of this, “Data Gravity” forces organisations to keep their data and workloads close. It’s also increasingly clear that some of an organisation’s data should reside in the data centre and not be sent to the cloud, given the concerns about cloud storage implementation, data sovereignty and security. To solve these problems and improve their cloud setup, organisations are comparing all options of where their data and workloads might be ideally located. Inevitably, they’ve concluded that some of their cloud-workloads should come “back home” on-premises as, in doing so, it promises a higher ROI.

Complete cloud repatriation makes little sense.

Several factors influence the decision to move back from the cloud to on-premises. At the storage level, the advent of object storage on relatively inexpensive tape offers companies a tantalising business case for moving appropriate data back to their own hardware. The tape renaissance comes at a time when the storage space is undergoing a seismic shift from disk storage to a storage strategy with two main tiers: a fast flash tier for high-performance workloads and a tape tier for low-cost bulk storage.

However, full repatriation of data and workloads from the public cloud makes little sense for most organisations, just as a cloud-only strategy is neither economically nor practically ideal. In the past, enterprises have made a conscious decision to incur the additional costs of running applications in public clouds to maintain flexibility and scalability. But as organisations are now actively looking for ways to improve their data portability, they have noticed that they need more flexibility on both the hardware and software levels. Only with a flexible overall system they will be able to find the optimal infrastructure-mix, including repatriating data and workloads back to on-premises hardware, resulting in a net gain in ROI.

Conclusion: Flexibility in a “cloud-also” world

To achieve a higher ROI, enterprises need more flexibility in the data centre. This allows them to build hybrid- and multi-cloud environments that allow them to place their workloads and data where they are best suited. For some data and workloads, that means repatriating them from the public cloud back into the data centre, where they can be stored much cheaper. The availability of NVMe as a fast flash tier for high-performance workloads adds another layer of flexibility for workloads that need higher performance. And for special use cases, like PaaS-Solutions, a hyperscaler’s platform might be suited best.

To reap the benefits of cloud-computing, organisations today need the highest amount of flexibility to use whatever infrastructure works best for every use case. Modern technologies like software-defined data management solutions help organisations to achieve that flexibility, whilst the emergence of fast NVMe and cheap tape storage give them options to improve the mix of ideal locations to place their data and workloads. So it is not a question of “cloud-only” vs “on-premises only” but a combination of both – and the flexibility to change, shift, move and migrate data and workloads whenever needed.

Tags: on-premise, Public Cloud, Storage

Related Topics:Cloud Picking Repatriation Speed technology

Up Next

Leveraging the Potential of Generative AI to Drive Business Success

Don't Miss

Transforming the Future of Technology and Connectivity

TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud