Modern enterprise IT infrastructures are complex beasts. They grow and morph organically over time and have likely undergone one, if not more, significant point-in-time transformations. If these environments were easy to manage, IT infrastructure teams wouldn’t be swimming in the overabundance of tools promising all kinds of “easy buttons.” Having the right tools is crucial, of course, but smarter hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure management doesn’t start—or end—there.
The point is not to simplify your infrastructure. Enterprises are complex and need sophisticated environments to support their mission-critical strategies and varied functional operations. For example, you should be running workloads on premises and in multiple private and public clouds to support differing business requirements. And you should treat different workloads differently, depending on a variety of factors. However, you do need to simplify the way you manage this complex infrastructure. To do that, you need to break it down into the key pillars, understand the goals and challenges of each pillar, and identify the best way to address them, including which tools to use. Think of these pillars as the critical foundation that creates a strong hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure “house” for your enterprise. The four key pillars are:
- Health
- Capacity
- Cost
- Migration
Pillar #1: Health
Primary focus
The infrastructure health pillar focuses on ensuring that your applications are available and performing at expected speeds on an ongoing basis. It means that you have real-time visibility into the overall health of your entire IT ecosystem so you can:
- Monitor performance and availability
- Identify potential risks to performance and availability so you can address them before they impact users
- Speed troubleshooting when problems do occur to minimize downtime
Key considerations
An enterprise infrastructure comprises many varied systems, services, and other components that operate across different layers—compute, network, storage, etc. Each piece must work for the whole interconnected ecosystem to function, so you need tools to help you manage the states of those individual components. But that’s not enough—because of the complex interdependencies, you need to understand how everything works together. An issue that might not be flagged by a component-specific tool could adversely affect performance. Likewise, a performance problem or outage you’re trying to troubleshoot could stem from a non-obvious source buried deep in a chain of interdependencies.
Important capabilities
An infrastructure performance management (IPM) tool will enable you to monitor and manage the health of your hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure. It collects and correlates data from systems and services across the infrastructure and uses advanced analytics, AIOps, and machine learning to help you keep the environment running optimally. When evaluating IPM solutions, look for the following key capabilities:
- Breadth and depth of wire, machine, and ecosystem data ingest to provide you with full-stack visibility
- Infrastructure and application topology discovery and service mapping
- Visualization of application performance
- Workload- and application-centric (i.e., not system-centric) analytics
- AI/ML-powered recommendations
- Integration with ITSM governance for downstream execution
Pillar #2: Capacity
Primary focus
The only constant in life and in enterprise infrastructures is change. You make investments based on your needs, but those needs change over time—and planning for adequate capacity is both an art and a science. The infrastructure capacity pillar focuses on ensuring that your environment can handle current and anticipated resource demands and workload volumes. Data-informed capacity planning requires you to be able to:
- Forecast future demand based on usage patterns and risk exposure
- Anticipate business requirements based on planned growth or changes
- Identify potential availability issues before they occur
Key considerations
Managing the capacity of your hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure requires a balance. Running out of capacity can severely impact business performance. But erring on the side of excess capacity as a strategy to protect against that risk, however, can be an irresponsible use of budget when taken too far. You want to see potential problems—for example, that you’ll run out of storage in six months if your current growth rate continues—so you can plan for them.
Important capabilities
A capacity planning tool will enable you to make smart capacity decisions to ensure performance and stability while managing risk and maintaining budgetary control. Bringing resource efficiency and better purchase and expansion planning to both on-premises and cloud infrastructure requires access to real-time data for highly accurate and reliable forecasts. When evaluating capacity planning solutions, look for the following key capabilities:
- Historical consumption analysis
- Scenario-based capacity projections
- AI-powered insights and predictions
- Integration of upcoming projects
- Ability to configure proactive notifications based on preferences
Pillar #3: Cost
Primary focus
The cloud is a highly dynamic environment—as is your business. The usage-based model of the cloud means that changes in utilization and fast-moving development create cost variability. The infrastructure cost pillar focuses on managing your cloud spend. This requires you to:
- Understand your costs, including whether usage is driving desired business outcomes
- Identify and eliminate wasted spend
- Cultivate accountability for cloud costs
Key considerations
Because you pay for what you use, unexpected changes could result in an end-of-month billing surprise. Unfortunately, most cloud bills aren’t easy to parse, making it difficult to understand precisely where your cloud dollars are going. This challenge is compounded if you operate a multi-cloud environment—which is the vast majority of enterprises.
Important capabilities
A cloud cost management tool with powerful analytics and recommendation tools enables you to easily and confidently cost-optimize your cloud resources. When evaluating cloud cost management solutions, look for the following key capabilities:
- Multi-cloud support
- Ability to easily slice and dice the data and to match specific business needs
- Identification of unused or abandoned compute instances and resources that could be eliminated
- Rightsizing recommendations
- Ability to tune sizing based on individual risk tolerances
- What-if analysis that includes CPU, memory, I/O, and ingress and egress charges
- Cost structure optimization based on changes in CSP offerings
- Ability to track the amortized value of reservation discount usage at the instance level
Pillar #4: Migration
Primary focus
Moving workloads—whether it’s a first-time migration from on premises to a public cloud, a transfer between different clouds, or even repatriation from the cloud back on premises—isn’t a one-time event but an ongoing process. And the decisions you make can impact cost, performance, and risk. The migration pillar focuses on any-to-any workload placement so you can:
- Understand how workloads impact costs
- Evaluate which configurations drive optimal performance across your entire infrastructure
- Identify application dependencies and test what-if scenarios
Key considerations
As your business evolves, you need to be able to migrate workloads, and these transitions can’t disrupt your infrastructure or your business functions. Workload placement must simply become part of how you operate in a hybrid/multi-cloud environment. Better planning enables migration to become an efficient, smooth procedure.
Important capabilities
A workload placement tool will enable you to plan smarter any-to-any migrations with better decisions about workload priorities, groups, and deployments. When evaluating workload placement solutions, look for the following key capabilities:
- Assessment of which workloads to move to the cloud and which should stay in a private cloud/on premises
- Workload placement optimization across your entire environment, including edge, private cloud, public cloud, and on-premises applications
- Evaluation of performance and sizing data to compare costs across multiple public clouds
- Best-fit selection of public or private cloud provider based on specific needs
- Data science algorithms to identify application dependencies and separate business applications from shared services
- Discovery of suggested “move groups” for more efficient migration
- Ability to test what-if scenarios before migration events
Strengthen your infrastructure pillars with Virtana Platform
Virtana Platform delivers a single source of multi-cloud truth to manage your infrastructure performance, cost, and capacity and enables you to take action based on full-spectrum insights. Virtana Platform offers Infrastructure Performance Management, Capacity Planning, Cloud Cost Management, and Workload Placement to manage your entire IT infrastructure more effectively across on-premises and cloud deployments.
James Harper
Head of Product Marketing, Virtana
