Transcript of a discussion on how public cloud-like experiences, agility, and cost structures are being delivered via private cloud models.

1. Case Study: How HCI-Powered
Private Clouds Accelerate Digital
Transformation
Transcript of a discussion on how public cloud-like experiences, agility, and cost
structures are being delivered via private cloud models.
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. Stay
with us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off disruption -- in favor of
innovation.
Our next thought leadership interview examines how a world-class private cloud project
evolved in the financial sector. We’ll now learn how public cloud-like experiences, agility,
and cost structures are being delivered via a strictly private cloud model.
Here to help us explore the potential for cloud benefits when
retaining control over the data center is a critical requirement,
is Jim McKittrick, Senior Account Manager at Applied
Computer Solutions (ACS) in Huntington Beach, California.
Welcome, Jim.
Jim McKittrick: Thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.
Gardner: Why do certain enterprises require an aggressive
adoption of private cloud for security and control reasons?
They want an OPEX, public cloud structure, but can you have it
both ways?
Privacy as priority
McKittrick: We are showing that you can. People are learning that the public cloud
isn't necessarily all it has been hyped up to be, which is what happens with newer
technologies as they come out.
Gardner: What are the bigger drivers for keeping it private?
McKittrick: Security, of course, but if somebody actually analyzes it, a lot of times it will
be about cost and data access, the ease of data egress, because getting your data back
can sometimes be a challenge.
McKittrick

2. Also, there is a realization that even though I may have strict service-level agreements
(SLAs), if something goes wrong they are not going to save my business. If that thing
tanks, do I want to give that business away? I have some clients who absolutely will not.
Gardner: Control, being able to sleep well at night.
McKittrick: Absolutely. I have other clients that we can speak about who have HIPAA
requirements, and they are privately held and privately owned. And literally the CEO
says, “I am not doing it.” And he doesn’t care what it costs.
Gardner: If there were a huge delta between the price of going with a public cloud or
staying private, sure. But that delta is closing. So you can have the best of both worlds
and not pay a very high penalty nowadays.
McKittrick: If done properly, certainly from my experience, we have been able to prove
that you can run an agile, cloud-like infrastructure or private cloud as cost effectively or
even more cost effectively than you can in the public cloud. There are certainly places
for both in the market.
Gardner: It's going to vary, of course, from company to company -- and even
department to department within a company -- but the fact is that that choice is there.
McKittrick: No doubt about it, it absolutely is.
Gardner: Tell us about ACS, your role there, and how the company is defining what you
consider the best of hybrid cloud environments.
McKittrick: We are a relatively large reseller, about $600 million. We have specialized in
data center practices for 27 years. So we have been in business quite some time and
have had to evolve with the IT industry.
Structurally, we are fairly conventional from
the standpoint that we are a typical reseller,
but we pride ourselves on our technical
acumen. Because we have some very, very
large clients and have worked with them to
get on their technology boards, we feel like
we have a head start on what's really
coming down the pipe -- we are maybe one
to two years ahead of the general marketplace. We feel that we have a thought
leadership edge there, and we use that as well as very senior engineering leadership in
our organization to tell us what we are supposed to be doing.
Gardner: I know you probably can't mention the company by name, but tell us about a
recent project that seems a harbinger of things to come.
Hyper-convergent control
McKittrick: It began as a proof of concept, but it’s in production, it’s live globally.
I have been with ACS for 18 years, and I have had this client for 17 of those years. We
have been through multiple data center iterations.
When this last one came up, three things happened. Number one, they were under
tremendous cost pressure -- but public cloud was not an option for them.
We have a head start on what’s
really coming down the pipe —
we are one to two years ahead of
the general marketplace.

3. The second thing was that they had grown by acquisition, and so they had dozens of IT
fiefdoms. You can imagine culturally and technologically the challenges involved there.
Nonetheless, we were told to consolidate and globalize all these operations.
Thirdly, I was brought in by a client who had run the US for this company. We had
created a single IT infrastructure in the US for them. He said, “Do it again for the whole
world, but save us a bunch of money.” The gauntlet was thrown down. The customer
was put in the position of having to make some very aggressive choices. And so he
effectively asked me bring them “cool stuff.”
They asked, “What's new out there? How can
we do this?” Our senior engineering staff
brought a couple of ideas to the table, and
hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) was
central to that. HCI provided the ability to
simplify the organization, as well as the IT
management for the organization. You could
give control of it to anybody in the organization across the globe and they would be able
to manage it, working with partners in other parts of the world.
Gardner: Remote management being very important for this.
McKittrick: Absolutely, yes. We also gained failover capabilities, and disaster recovery
within these regional data centers. We ended going from -- depending on whom you
spoke to -- somewhere between seven to 19 data centers globally, down to three. We
were able to consolidate down to three. The data center footprint shrank massively. Just
in the US, we went to one data center; we got rid of the other data center completely. We
went from 34 racks down to 3.5.
Gardner: Hyper-convergence being a big part of that?
McKittrick: Correct, that was really the key, hyper-convergence and virtualization.
The other key enabling technology was de-duplication, so the ability to shrink the data
and then be able to move it from place to place without crushing bandwidth
requirements, because you were only moving the changes, the change blocks.
Gardner: So more of a modern data lifecycle approach?
McKittrick: Absolutely. The backup and recovery approach was built in to the solution
itself. So we also deployed a separate data archive, but that's different than backup and
recovery. Backup and recovery were essentially handled by VMware and the capability
to have the same machine exist in multiple places at the same time.
Gardner: Now, there is more than just the physical approach to IT, as you described it,
there is the budgetary financial approach. So how do they maybe get the benefit of the
Learn How to Transform
To A Hybrid IT
Environment
You could give control to
anybody in the organization
across the globe and they
would be able to manage it.

4. OPEX approach that people are fond of with public cloud models and apply that in a
private cloud setting?
Budget benefits
McKittrick: They didn't really take that approach. I mean we looked at it. We looked at
essentially leasing. We looked at the pay-as-you-go models and it didn't work for them.
We ended up doing essentially a purchase of the equipment with a depreciation
schedule and traditional support. It was analyzed, and they essentially said, “No, we are
just going to buy it.”
Gardner: So total cost of ownership (TCO) is a better metric to look at. Did you have the
ability to measure that? What were some of the metrics of success other than this
massive consolidation of footprint and better control over management?
McKittrick: We had to justify TCO relative to what a traditional IT refresh would have
cost. That's what I was working on for the client until the cost pressure came to bear. We
then needed to change our thinking. That's when
hyper-convergence came through.
The cost analysis was already done, because I was
already costing it with a refresh, including compute
and traditional SAN storage. The numbers I had
over a five-year period – just what we would have
spent on hardware and infrastructure costs, and not
including network and bandwidth – would have
been $55 million over five years, and we ended up
doing it for $15 million.
Gardner: We have mentioned HCI several times, but you were specifically using
SimpliVity, which is now part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Tell us about why
SimpliVity was a proof-point for you, and why you think that’s going to strengthen HPE's
portfolio.
McKittrick: This thing is now built and running, and it's been two years since inception.
So that's a long time in technology, of course. The major factors involved were the cost
savings.
As for HPE going forward, the way the client looked at it -- and he is a very forward-
thinking technologist -- he always liked to say, “It’s just VMware.” So the beauty of it from
their perspective – was that they could just deploy on VMware virtualization. Everyone in
our organization knows how to work with VMware, we just deploy that, and they move
things around. Everything is managed in that fashion, as virtual machines, as opposed to
What we would have spent on
just hardware and infrastructure
costs, not including network
and bandwidth — would have
been $55 million over five
years, and we ended up doing
it for $15 million.
Learn How to Transform
To A Hybrid IT
Environment

5. traditional storage, and all the other layers of things that have to be involved in traditional
data centers.
The HCI-based data centers also included built-in WAN optimization, built-in backup and
recovery, and were largely on solid-state disks (SSDs). All of the other pieces of the
hardware stack that you would traditionally have -- from the server on down -- folded into
a little box, so to speak, a physical box. With HCI, you get all of that functionality in a
much simpler and much easier to manage fashion. It just makes everything easier.
Gardner: When you bring all those HCI elements together, it really creates a solution.
Are there any other aspects of HPE’s portfolio, in addition now to SimpliVity, that would
be of interest for future projects?
McKittrick: HPE is able to take this further. You have to remember, at the time,
SimpliVity was a widget, and they would partner with the server vendors. That was really
it, and with VMware.
Now with HPE, SimpliVity has behind them one
of the largest technology companies in the
world. They can really build out their roadmap.
There is all kinds of innovation that’s going to
come. When you then pair that with things like
Microsoft Azure Stack and HPE Synergy and
its composable architecture -- yes, all of that is
going to be folded right in there. I give HPE
credit for having seen what HCI technology can bring to them and can help them
springboard forward, and then also apply it back into things that they are already
developing. Am I going to have more opportunity with this infrastructure now because of
the SimpliVity acquisition? Yes.
Gardner: For those organizations that want to take advantage of public cloud options,
also having HCI-powered hybrid clouds, and composable and automated-bursting and
scale-out, and soon combining that multi-cloud options via HPE New Stack – this gives
them the best of all worlds.
McKittrick: Exactly. There you are. You have your hybrid cloud right there. And
certainly one could do that with traditional IT, and still have that capability that HPE has
been working on. But now, [with SimpliVity HCI] you have just consolidated all of that
down to a relatively simple hardware approach. You can now quickly deploy and gain all
those hybrid capabilities along with it. And you have the mobility of your applications and
workloads, and all of that goodness, so that you can decide where you want to put this
stuff.
Learn How to Transform
To A Hybrid IT
Environment
Now with HPE, Simplicity can
really build out their roadmap.
There is all kinds of innovation
that’s going to come.

6. Gardner: Before we sign off, let's revisit this notion of those organizations that have to
have a private cloud. What words of advice might you give them as they pursue such
dramatic re-architecting of their entire IT systems?
A people-first process
McKittrick: Great question. The technology was the easy part. This was my first global
HCI roll out, and I have been in the business well over 20 years. The differences come
when you are messing with people -- moving their cheese, and messing with their rice
bowl. It’s profound. It always comes back to people.
The people and process were the hardest things to deal with, and quite frankly, still are.
Make sure that everybody is on-board. They must understand what's happening, why it's
happening, and then you try to get all those people pulling in the same direction.
Otherwise, you end up in a massive morass and things don't get done, or they become
almost unmanageable.
Gardner: Unfortunately, there are plenty of examples of that out there.
McKittrick: Certainly. Recently, I have been saying it more, “It always comes back to the
people, that’s always the case.”
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how a world-
class private cloud project evolved in the financial sector. And we have learned how a
private cloud model using HCI can deliver a public cloud-like experience -- with agility
and cost structures that mimic public cloud attributes. This is especially important for
those organizations that need to retain control over their data centers.
So please join me in thanking our guest, Jim McKittrick, Senior Account Manager at
Applied Computer Solutions in Huntington Beach, California. Thanks so much, Jim.
McKittrick: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining this BriefingsDirect
Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard
Enterprise-sponsored interviews.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along as you can in 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 public cloud-like experiences, agility, and cost
structures are being delivered via private cloud models. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.
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