HPE Exec: Increased 'Pullback' From Public Cloud Driving Demand For Hybrid IT Management Systems

In Midsize Enterprise Summit keynote, HPE's top hybrid IT executive describes the key "must-have" elements of a next-generation hybrid IT data center.

With some customers experiencing "sticker shock" from their soaring public cloud computing bills, businesses and organizations are rethinking their use of cloud computing and moving toward a hybrid model, according to a Hewlett Packard Enterprise executive.

But that has its own challenges, said Jason White, HPE chief technologist for hybrid IT, in a keynote speech at The Channel Company's Midsize Enterprise Summit in Orlando Monday in which he detailed the key elements of a successful hybrid system.

"The way we run IT is dramatically changing," White said, who went on to say that hybrid IT – a mix of on-premises, private and public cloud – "is the Nirvana almost everyone is trying to get to, regardless of size."

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A major driver toward the adoption of hybrid IT is the inefficiencies in traditional IT system architectures where independent compute, network and storage systems create "a data gap" between operational applications and data, creating "what are quickly becoming the most inefficient data centers on Earth," White said.

Some businesses sought to remedy the problem by adopting public cloud computing on a wide scale, moving applications and data to public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. But that has created its own problems.

"People got a little bit of sticker shock" when they began to realize the costs, White said. He told a story about an HPE customer, a major footwear maker, that on a day White visited the company was having an emergency IT management meeting because the firm had just received a $39 million bill for one month of cloud services.

"We're actually seeing a little bit of a pullback from public cloud," White said. He noted that HPE itself has capped public cloud usage at 10 percent of its IT operations, limiting it to "low-risk, low-security environments that we want to spin up, spin down and blow away," he said.

White's presentation zeroed in on the core components of a hybrid IT system – what he called the "must-haves," not the "nice-to-haves" – and making the right choices with cloud and what HPE calls "composable" infrastructure.

Next-generation data centers must have composable or abstracted levels of hardware for speed and scale, evolving from "siloed and complex to simpler and faster," White said. Software-defined infrastructure is a critical element of composable systems with management orchestration, global APIs, a hypervisor-of-choice and cloud-of-choice also core components.

He pointed to an HPE customer, a major pharmaceutical maker, that plans to eliminate physical storage arrays in its data centers within 24 months.

Successful next-generation data centers also must have "autonomous infrastructures" and be self-managing and self-correcting, eliminating the need for extensive manual trouble-shooting. "We can't keep touching everything," White said. "It's too slow. It's too costly. It's too dangerous. We need cloud velocity, but we need it on-prem."

White made a pitch for several HPE products that make the transition to hybrid IT possible, including the HPE OneView IT infrastructure management system, HPE OneSphere hybrid cloud and multi-cloud management system, HPE Synergy Composer for composing and deploying application system resources, and HPE Synergy Image Streamer for system deployments and updates.

The HPE InfoSight VMVision analytics portal works to analyze a VMware virtual environment, along with an HPE Nimble storage environment, to diagnose potential system latency problems, White said.

In 2017 HPE acquired Cloud Cruiser, a developer of cloud consumption analytics software, that enables businesses to identify and manage cloud service usage and spending. "Do you know that Amazon cannot give you that information," White said.