Review your Technical requirements, migration pattern, and needs for capacity & availability (Part 3)

“Considering an infrastructure refresh in data center consolidation, edge deployment, or compute refresh and consolidation? Today’s decision-making requires analysis, vision, calibration, and foresight for the next request from the business. For successful organizations and leaders, this requires a review of success factors for Business, Technical and Compliance / Risk goals.”

This is part three in a five-part series for organizations considering a refresh of computing infrastructure, moving, or migrating to the cloud or application consolidation. VMware takes these inputs into consideration with our operating model for premise and cloud. See the considerations below.

In part one of this modernization series, we provided an overview for organizations looking to prioritize decisions in your data center modernization. During part two, we reviewed how to identify and execute on business goals related to infrastructure refresh. Clearly defined business goals can build your technical use case and objectives. For technical goals, you will want to define how they support consistent operations, common management, reduce repetitive tasks, and create a flexible model for operating your technology assets.

In this section on technical goals, the focus is on which technical goals should be evaluated for refreshing infrastructure.

Defining the context and requirements for your infrastructure transformation technical goals

By the time you have reached the technical requirements phase of your modernization, many teams already have a list of the business goals and technology outcomes. The list below is a summary of the workstreams you should have already documented prior to embarking on your technical requirements.

• Document and list business outcomes.
• Identify and label business capabilities.
• Describe technology organization projects.
• Describe Infrastructure cloud-ready architecture development.
• Identify technology review/ research and implementation plan.
• Identify and describe changes to people and process structures.

In this post, we lay out a method for documenting understanding technical goals. The following progressive sections lay out the path.

• Business goals tied to capabilities and technology outcomes.
• Setting priority for modernization of infrastructure
• Understanding how technology products are being delivered, deployed, and consumed.
• Defining your infrastructure services
• Refining your technical goals to be the feature and future capabilities.
• Check the technology patterns you select to fit your economic model.

Prioritize finding your path for modernization and including an assessment for software and hardware:

1. Set a priority for what requires replacement in the short-term. Which infrastructure, creates immediate business impact or risk should it fail or become degraded?
2. Review platforms that will expire in the next 6 – 12 months. Review end-of-life platforms, such as storage, operating systems, and appliances that host critical applications.
3. Invest in your team prior to making choices. Consider who wants to invest in the next generation of containers, innovate with existing platforms or stick with the mainframe.
4. Teams should ask how they can operate with lower investment or provide services that are cost-competitive to internal/external/ industry benchmarks. There will be demands for reduction of cost and time to market.

Understand technology packaging pricing economics and existing relationships:

• Organizations may choose to buy on-premises infrastructure, including hardware, based on usage and consumption (similar to the cloud). Included in purchase benefits are simplified packaging and operations, much of which is performed by the vendor.
• Organizations should consider the infrastructure that is integrated with software automation to move faster toward delivery quickly. Using a manual patchwork of hardware requires an investment that does not show immediate value.

Define your infrastructure services using your technical goals:

• Be purposeful in combining services into useful abstractions.  Consider your customer use case for creating a modern infrastructure architecture. Self-service, common APIs, and reusable/repeatable code and hardware-software patterns reduce labor on non-value-added work.
• A solid design creates value for your business customers and allows adaptability across your services. This includes critical reduction of repetitive tasks increased operational speed and application mobility.
• A rich ecosystem is more valuable than a sole source. All organizations must now deal with Multi-cloud delivered services from infrastructure whether AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud or many others, to SaaS-delivered applications like Salesforce and Workday. Create predictable integrated infrastructures and application services that allow flexibility across these domains.
• The infrastructure technology supply chain continues to grow with many options and specializations. Understand that adapting infrastructure also requires a modern software supply chain that can take advantage of automation, velocity, and new software-defined capabilities.

Infrastructure design and automation require the discovery of your technical goals:

1. Focus on a model that embraces velocity; cooperation; continuous testing; and small, frequent change attributes that are critical for every organization that wants to deliver for customers.
2. Infrastructure architects write code, understand cloud architecture and orchestration, and navigate a complex and dynamic ecosystem of suppliers on-premise and in the cloud. Provide a platform and strategy to incorporate, these capabilities into your modernization blueprint.
3. Keep in mind Speed, Scale, and Stability for infrastructure that scales transparently, dependably, and at high speed, just like well-written applications.
4. Integrate multiple environments of cloud with on-premises technology and edge computing
5. Introduce the discussion of financial models for new infrastructure offerings to help establish new accounting and economic models, enable teams to see the savings or costs included with decisions.
6. Eliminate Manual infrastructure configuration efforts and empower automation for the operational tasks such as environment creation, upgrades/patches, and deployment activities.

Understand technology packaging pricing economics and existing relationships:

• Organizations may choose to buy on-premises infrastructure, including hardware, based on usage and consumption (Similar to the cloud). Included in purchase benefits, are simplified packaging and operations, much of which is performed by the vendor.
• Organizations should consider the infrastructure that is integrated with software automation to move faster towards delivery quickly. Using a manual patchwork of hardware requires an investment that does not show immediate value.

Take Action: Work with VMware to launch your modernization efforts and make impact with the next generation of modern infrastructure, hybrid and multi-cloud

Engage with us for a discussion about how to enable a modernization effort:

Next: Review your goals for business, technical and security and compliance with this series. Consider the inputs for your future-ready cloud and premise operating model.

Part:1 Modern Infrastructure Refresh Preparing for Cloud Capabilities in your datacenter and the edge.

Part:2 Modern Infrastructure Define business success for budget refresh cycle and measures for value

Part 3 Modern Infrastructure refresh review your technical requirements, migration pattern, and needs for capacity and availability.

Part 4: Modern Infrastructure refresh Identify your Risk frequency, magnitude, primary and secondary Loss to determine security goals.

Part 5: Define Value across your technology refreshing using Business, Technical and Risk measures to identify successful value translation.