If cloud technology has a silver lining, then much of that silver is ending up in the pockets of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other “big” cloud providers.
It’s a harsh reality for many CIOs that, no matter how well they build their own private clouds, they’re still losing internal customers to the public cloud’s lure of unlimited storage, unparalleled flexibility, and low prices. How can companies possibly compete? By first getting composed.
Composable infrastructure offers a very different approach to IT than traditional hardware-based architectures. Using fluid pools of compute, storage, and network fabric resources instead of fixed hardware, composable infrastructure allows enterprises to compose their IT resources in real time as application workloads change. It’s not a virtual data center and it’s not converged infrastructure. It’s a cloud-native way of approaching IT that delivers unprecedented levels of simplicity, flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency.
Introduced by HPE, composable infrastructure is based on three key design principles:
- Everything should be able to talk to everything else through a unified API;
- IT infrastructure should be completely fluid so it can be composed, decomposed, and recomposed continuously as workload demands change;
- The whole infrastructure should be driven by software-based intelligence to deliver seamless automation.
That’s a much different view than most CIOs have of their data centers today, yet very similar to the way that most massive clouds operate. Of course, the big three cloud providers have billions of dollars to spend on a sophisticated cloud infrastructure, and you probably don’t. The good news is that you don’t need to spend your entire budget on high-end, next-generation hardware. If fact, you don’t need to buy any hardware at all.
Just as enterprises lease IT resources in the cloud today, you can lease the IT resources you need right in your own data center through the HPE Flex Capacity program. What that allows you to do is “turn on” extra IT capacity in your data center as you need it, and turn it off again when you don’t, paying only for the IT capacity you use.
The ability to expand your IT resources without incurring upfront costs is a completely different way of growing your data center, but completely natural to enterprises that have become accustomed to the cloud’s on-demand, pay-as-you-grow business model.
With composable infrastructure and flexible on-premise capacity, CIOs can compete with the big cloud providers right in their own backyard—both in terms of price and performance. It completely changes the way IT departments and business users view the private cloud.
To learn more about composable infrastructure and flexible capacity options, stay tuned for our next blog in this series, “What The Walking Dead Can Teach Us About Building a Private Cloud.” ▪