This blog is part 1 of 3. You can skip ahead to parts 2 and 3, or take a deep dive and download our white paper to get it all at once: Cloud Infrastructure and the Game of Tradeoffs
Cloudy, with a high chance of complexity
Today, the vast majority of organisations rely on some type of hybrid cloud in one form or another. Gartner predicts that by “2023, 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services, up from 20% in 2020”1.
More recently, Cisco’s 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report2 found that a whopping 82% of their survey respondents have adopted hybrid cloud, and 47% of organisations use between 2-3 public IaaS clouds.
That’s a lot of cloud.
Complexity disguised as simplicity
And although no one refutes that the cloud remains the “future” of computing, hybrid infrastructures are undeniably full of frustrating complexity, performance, cost, control, and resiliency tradeoffs. Coupled with the need for better approaches at the edge and global skills challenges – things are only getting worse. Increasingly, CIOs are wrestling with questions about repatriation, sovereignty and sustainability, adding further layers of difficulty in managing complex infrastructure operations.
The problem is that virtually every new “solution” that comes to market isn’t better—it’s just complicated or fragmented in a different way.
Here comes the sun
Our vision from day one has been to meet our customers on their terms, on their turf, to set them free from some of the biggest legacy infrastructure tradeoffs by introducing a radical new approach. We have lots more to share with you over the course of the coming months, but today, we’re thrilled to introduce HyperCloud, a fully turnkey, totally integrated and supported intelligent cloud fabric that allows you to effortlessly deploy your own cloud independent of any public or private cloud provider.
HyperCloud is delivered with full access to all its capabilities “out of the box”, with no additional licensing required to access any features, compute or storage capacity.
Its modular nature, and the simplicity with which new compute and storage resources can be added means architectures do not need to be needlessly over-provisioned reducing financial outlay and improving the overall efficiency of the platform.
Because it uses task-specific building-blocks, you can scale your cloud asymmetrically, growing your compute or storage resources independently.
Radical simplicity, limitless freedom
HyperCloud enables low-touch cloud operations and provides the highest level of resiliency, without requiring hyperscale or the need for highly skilled operators to keep it running. It frees you to build the hybrid and/or multi cloud strategy that meets your unique objectives, with the kind of reliability, availability, elasticity, and serviceability previously reserved for hyperscale cloud builders.
If you have the time, why not take a deeper dive with our white paper
Cloud Infrastructure and the Game of Tradeoffs
Where does it hurt?
CIOs today experience pain points across a variety of issues, but a few in particular that loom “cumulonimbus-large” are the challenges of operating and maintaining infrastructure from the core to edge, resiliency and the impact of global supply chain disruption, and licensing lock-in that inhibits agility and innovation.
From the core to the edge
Comparisons of common models aside, evolving compute demands are spurring many organisations to rethink how they rely on cloud. New apps like AI and IoT-based analytics need nearby infrastructure. And edge requirements demand the introduction of a host of new infrastructure-configuration-related considerations.
Restrictions in space, power, heat, and network connectivity requirements in edge and colocation facilities are very real, and need careful consideration to avoid problems later down the track. Coupled with the aforementioned skills shortage, organisations are having to think carefully about how they staff these facilities with the right mix of diverse, experienced, expensive skill sets. And then have those skills in the right place for maintenance and repair activities, potentially across disparate infrastructure.
Disrupted Supply Chains
Given the impact of recent supply chain disruptions and growing political instability, many organisations are also carefully considering what resiliency in service delivery now means.
Again, this is just the overview. We cover this in more detail in our white paper
Cloud Infrastructure and the Game of Tradeoffs
The problem with legacy vendors and public cloud providers
One reason public cloud vendors have become so popular is because they’ve successfully created a “wall” between the services that their customers can consume and the incredibly complex threading of technologies underneath that make it all work.
In their model, consumers sit happily above the complexity, blissfully unaware of what’s happening behind the scenes. They get a set of interfaces and clearly defined services to interact with, and the provider then invests in the skills required to build, grow, and maintain those services. And that requires armies of engineers, thousands of them. It’s a huge undertaking for non hyperscale cloud providers.
And, while this isn’t a problem in itself, the problem is that they charge extortionate sums for the privilege of hosting your workloads. Even then, it’s not the cost in itself that’s the issue. It’s the fact that when you use public cloud services you give up the ability to optimise. The cloud provider does the optimisation, and they get more profitable as a result – while your costs remain flat (or go up).
With a few exceptions, the vendors who claim to sell some kind of private or hybrid cloud infrastructure are really only selling part of the story. Under the covers, it’s a complex combination of technologies that are often loosely tied together or not at all, leaving IT to figure out how to weave it all together, or paying for a long complicated professional service engagement, creating complexity and requiring high levels of skill.
Recognising this, one or two of the largest IT vendors have begun to mask this complexity behind a professional services abstraction layer and an “as a service” business model to amortise that overhead into more digestible chunks. But they’re also very transparent about the fact that you can and should interact with individual technologies for all those cases where their overlay interface doesn’t give you the kind of flexibility you need. Imagine though, if you could strip all that PS overhead out of the cost of delivering the service?
So the question looms: how do you get the economies of scale that the public cloud providers do without needing an army of engineers?
HyperCloud Intelligent Cloud Fabric™
In a world of overwhelming technical complexity and operations overhead that are inhibiting IT innovation, HyperCloud provides virtually effortless private and hybrid clouds, independent of any public cloud provider.
This means that for the first time, CIOs can now dynamically provision cloud services based on parameters including cost, performance, security or regulation, from infrastructure designed for low touch, generalist IT skills, and resilient operation
HyperCloud enables your organisation to provide a hybrid cloud experience to IT consumers with a fraction of the time and a fraction of the complexity than was previously possible. Independent of any public cloud vendor, it frees you to build the hybrid and/or multi cloud strategy that meets your objectives, with the kind of reliability, availability, elasticity and serviceability previously reserved for hyperscale cloud builders.
You can arrange these intelligent, self configuring building-blocks into the right size and shape cloud for your business without introducing the complexity of multiple firmware, operating systems, or hardware components.
HyperCloud delivers a platform for deploying virtualised, bare metal, and containerised workloads across private, on-premises zones and public clouds, with support for secure multi-tenancy, full programmability, and full life cycle automation. All of this is delivered through a seamless and intuitive user experience supporting both GUI and REST-based consumption of infrastructure services.
Next Steps
Read part 2 of this blog series “What is HyperCloud, and who is it for?” or download the full white paper here Cloud Infrastructure and the Game of Tradeoffs
Or, read more about HyperCloud here. We’ve outlined deployment use cases for you to better understand how HyperCloud can help solve your cloud challenges.
If you want to jump right in, watch our demo on demand here to
see HyperCloud in action
1Gartner, Predicts 2021: Cloud and Edge Infrastructure, Published 8 December 2020, John McArthur, Arun Chandrasekaran, Thomas Bittman, Tim Zimmerman
Craig Chadwell
VP Product
