As we noted in part 1 of this two-part series, big acquisitions, à la Broadcom and VMware, can be nerve-wracking for customers to navigate. And the health of your cloud operations is as foundational as your ability to monitor your IT infrastructure, so we’ll repeat here what we said in that first article: The good news is that you have time to consider the future, weigh your options, and make thoughtful decisions about how to move forward.

Considerations for VMware CloudHealth customers

First, some more good news: CloudHealth, as noted by Forrester, is a “win” for Broadcom as it looks to leverage the acquisition to diversify its portfolio. In fact, Broadcom has radically simplified the VMware portfolio, with VMware Cloud Foundation to serve as the “flagship enterprise-class hybrid cloud solution for customers to run their business critical and modern applications—in a secure, resilient and cost efficient manner.” However, even before the deal closed, there was confusion about the Tanzu portfolio as the various products, including CloudHealth, were shuffled around. At that point, CloudHealth, which was first rebranded as a part of Aria Operations and now VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, became part of a new Tanzu Intelligence Services category of products. Exactly how this fits into the new, streamlined offering set is still an open question.

Furthermore, it has been reported that some cloud service providers (CSPs) have been notified that their current partnership program will be terminated with no information about eligibility for a new program, other than that it’s “invite-only.”

When thinking about the future of CloudHealth within your enterprise, here some questions to ask yourself:

What CloudHealth capabilities do you rely on?

Even with the stated commitment to the VMware Cloud Foundation portfolio, there’s no guarantee that the scope covered by CloudHealth today will continue to receive innovation focus and investment, which could put your FinOps program at risk. It may be a good time to evaluate what other options are available to you.

Do you work with a trusted partner?

It’s not just the CSPs who had their partnership status pulled. Broadcom terminated all reseller and service provider partner agreements and is requiring existing partners to reapply—with no indication as to whether they will be approved. If you work with a trusted partner, they may not be able to regain their status—or they may decide to de-emphasize their focus on VMware.

How critical is comprehensive and timely customer support?

VMware’s recent layoff of over 2,000 employees raises questions about support resources and coverage, particularly in light of the partner shakeup. While Broadcom stated that they have added higher support service levels for VMware Cloud Foundation, Broadcom does have a history of diminished support after acquisitions.

The Virtana Alternative for Cloud Cost Management

Virtana Cloud Cost Management provides a single view of your multi-cloud environment for ongoing cloud cost optimization and governance that lets you balance performance, risk, and cost.

Virtana provides multi-cloud, per-instance visibility into programmatic discounts, data transfer fees, and instance utilization that provide a near real-time understanding of the true costs of your cloud environments.

The platform is partner-friendly, providing multi-tenancy and multi-tier capabilities as well as reseller billing, including support for two-tier Azure CSPs that allows partners to present the right price to their customers and seamlessly pass some of the appropriate discounts.

We believe that support is just as important as technology, and we invest in delivering great customer service and making it easy to do business with us. Part of that is allowing you to work with your preferred partner.

And innovation continues to be a strong focus and is a driving factor in our industry leadership.  

Contact us to learn more—or try Virtana for yourself.

The post The Path Ahead for VMware CloudHealth Customers appeared first on Virtana.

A is for Assessing your infrastructure

You need to understand all the elements that comprise your infrastructure—the hardware, software, networks, and applications—and how they work interdependently and can affect performance and availability.

B is for Building a performance management strategy

Your business has a strategy, so why would you leave your infrastructure—which is a critical driver for that strategy—rudderless? You need to set performance targets, establish performance baselines, identify KPIs to measure and monitor, and define the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders, including IT staff, business users, and external vendors.

C is for Continuous monitoring and improvement

Once you’ve mapped out how your infrastructure should perform, you need to ensure that it’s meeting those expectations on an ongoing basis. This requires tools and techniques to monitor performance in real time, identify issues, and troubleshoot problems. And because change is constant, you need to continuously optimize your infrastructure to improve performance, control costs, and ensure it meets evolving business needs.

D is for Data-driven decision-making

Your infrastructure is too critical to manage based on guesswork and too complex to rely on expertise alone. Data analytics and machine-learning tools are essential for identifying trends, patterns, and anomalies in performance data so you can make better decisions about infrastructure optimization, capacity planning, and resource allocation.

E is for Ensuring security and compliance

If you are responsible for managing the performance of your infrastructure, protecting it from cyber threats and complying with industry standards and regulations are part of the package. You’ll need to implement security protocols, conduct regular security and compliance audits, and stay up to date with the latest security vulnerabilities and regulatory requirements.

F is for Fostering collaboration and communication

There are a lot of stakeholders involved in any enterprise infrastructure: IT staff, executive leadership, business owners, external vendors, the list goes on and on. Dashboards and reports must provide views into your infrastructure that reflect the specific information each stakeholder needs. Additionally, it’s important to establish clear communication channels and protocols to ensure stakeholders are informed about performance issues and progress toward performance targets.

G is for Gathering performance data

You can’t manage the performance of your infrastructure if you don’t have information about the performance of your infrastructure. You need to collect sufficient data from various sources, including servers, virtual machines, storage, networks, applications, operating systems, and other infrastructure components. Both breadth and depth of data are critical to monitor your hybrid cloud infrastructure’s performance, utilization, capacity, and health.

H is for Harnessing the power of automation

Automation is a powerful tool in infrastructure performance management. By automating routine tasks, such as system checks and updates, you can save time and reduce the risk of human error. Automation can also help you identify and remediate performance issues quickly, improving the overall efficiency of your IT operations.

I is for Implementing best practices

Your hybrid cloud infrastructure is too complex and too important to build performance management expertise as you go. Implementing industry-standard guidelines and IT operations best practices for performance monitoring, incident management, and change management help ensure your hybrid cloud infrastructure is optimized for performance and reliability.

J is for Justifying performance investments

Maintaining an infrastructure that meets business requirements and performs to expectations requires resources and budget—and it can be expensive. You need to be able to make a business case that outlines the benefits of proposed investments, and perhaps even the likely consequences of not investing. Successful justification requires you to provide credible data and analysis based on your current infrastructure and the anticipated future state.

K is for Keeping pace with emerging technologies

Right now, artificial intelligence and machine learning are quickly emerging as highly effective tools to transform IPM capabilities. Companies adopting AIOps and leveraging AI/ML for performance management, troubleshooting, capacity planning, and other critical functions can fully optimize their infrastructures and gain a competitive advantage. And who knows what may be on the horizon? Staying current with the latest trends and best practices and embracing emerging technologies will keep you at the forefront.

L is for Leveraging vendor partnerships

Your infrastructure uses a lot of hardware, software, networking, storage, and other components, which means you have a lot of vendors—and potential access to their domain expertise. Working closely with your vendors can provide valuable insights into the operation and performance of individual products.

M is for Monitoring performance metrics

You need to track KPIs such as CPU usage, memory usage, network bandwidth, and other critical factors to understand how your infrastructure is performing and identify potential issues, ideally before they have a discernable impact. With the right monitoring tools, you can automate this process and configure alerts when KPIs fall outside of acceptable ranges.

N is for Navigating hybrid/multi-cloud environments

Most enterprise infrastructures consist of on-premises, private cloud, and multiple public cloud environments. You need to understand how to optimize performance within each environment and how its unique characteristics affect the overall performance of your infrastructure. This includes selecting the right environment for each application or workload, understanding the performance metrics, and using the best tools and services to monitor and manage performance.

O is for Optimizing application performance

Application optimization—which includes identifying and remediating performance bottlenecks, optimizing code and configurations, and leveraging performance testing and tuning tools—offers two benefits. You can optimize to boost performance, increasing user satisfaction and business outcomes. You can also optimize to maintain existing performance levels at a lower cost. And sometimes, you can even accomplish both at the same time.

P is for Proactively managing incidents

The worst way to find out about a problem within your infrastructure is to get a call from a user. It’s far better to identify potential issues before they become significant problems. By monitoring performance in real time and flagging trends that could lead to slowdowns and outages, you can reduce downtime and the associated costs and improve infrastructure performance and reliability.

Q is for Querying dependencies

Examining the relationships and interdependencies between the various components and systems in your hybrid cloud infrastructure provides insights into how changes or issues in one can affect the performance of others. This helps identify potential risks or bottlenecks and facilitates proactive measures to mitigate any adverse effects on overall performance.

R is for Reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR)

Reducing MTTR—the time it takes to resolve incidents and return the infrastructure to normal operation—is critical for minimizing downtime and its impact on users and the business. This requires you to establish response procedures, use tools to understand likely impacts and track root cause, and leverage AI to recommend fixes.

S is for Scaling infrastructure for growth

As your business grows, your infrastructure needs to handle increased demand and workloads without affecting performance and reliability. Supporting this growth requires insights about past performance trends, predictive analytics to anticipate future demand, and recommendations for scalable options to meet those needs.

T is for Tuning workloads

A key component of infrastructure optimization is workload tuning. This involves adjusting resource allocation and settings—CPU or memory allocations, storage configurations, network parameters, etc.—to match the specific requirements of each workload for improved performance and efficiency.

U is for Un-silo-ing the troubleshooting process

Because your infrastructure includes so many components—network, compute, storage, etc., not to mention all of the individual hardware and software components—many different teams and vendors are involved. When something goes wrong, this can result in time-wasting finger-pointing. With data-driven troubleshooting and AI-based resolution recommendations, you can avoid turf wars and focus everyone involved on getting the infrastructure back to normal as quickly as possible.

V is for Validating configurations

You want to ensure that the settings and parameters of various components and systems are configured for optimal performance. Ongoing monitoring and alerting will let you know if performance drifts out of band. And with scenario planning and what-if analysis, you can make decisions about changes that will minimize future risks and keep systems operating at peak efficiency.

W is for Workload balancing

Keeping your infrastructure running at optimal resource utilization and performance levels requires you to distribute workloads evenly across systems to prevent any single component from becoming overloaded or overwhelmed. Workload balancing strategies, which may include dynamic workload allocation, load balancing algorithms, and intelligent resource management techniques, can help you avoid bottlenecks, maximize system capacity, and enhance overall efficiency.

X is for eXploiting AI-powered recommendations

With recommendation engines powered by artificial intelligence, you benefit not just from your own infrastructure data but from analytics that incorporate experience gained from working with other enterprises. Recommendations can provide valuable suggestions for many areas of infrastructure management, including resource allocation, workload balancing, predictive maintenance, infrastructure scaling, problem identification and resolution, and more.

Y is for Yielding comprehensive global visibility

When you break down the many data silos—multi-vendor computing, networking, storage, cloud, VMs, containers, databases, and more—you can open up visibility throughout your entire infrastructure. This is critical for unified observability across all of your private and public cloud environments.

Z is for Zooming in on data

Breadth of infrastructure data is critical—but so is depth. Systems that lack granularity, for example, because they use sampling or averages, can deliver “insights” that are misleading and can steer you to make suboptimal decisions that ultimately result in inefficiencies.

Keeping your hybrid cloud infrastructure running at peak performance

Your hybrid cloud infrastructure must meet the business’s functionality, performance and availability, security and compliance, and cost requirements. Managing all of this complexity requires sophisticated technology and deep expertise. Virtana can help. Virtana Platform is a highly modular, scalable multi-cloud insights platform that offers Infrastructure Performance Management, Capacity Planning, Cloud Cost Management, and Workload Placement to manage your entire hybrid cloud infrastructure more effectively. Try Virtana Platform for free

The post Infrastructure is Fundamental: Learn Your Hybrid Cloud ABCs appeared first on Virtana.

Capacity planning is hard

The vast majority of respondents—87%—are getting capacity planning wrong. While 21% tend to underprovision and 28% err on the side of overprovisioning, a larger number (38%) are both over- and underprovisioning on a regular basis.

One critical occasion for capacity planning is when you’re moving workloads from one environment to another. The capacity calculus changes depending on the particular environment, and most organizations, 98% of them, are doing a lot of migrations. Almost two-thirds (62%) are planning to migrate workloads from the public cloud to private cloud/on premises, and nearly the same number (59%) will be migrating new workloads to the public cloud. Given organizations’ track record, chances are high that capacity for these migrations will miss the mark. 

Data for informed capacity planning is lacking

We asked about top hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure management challenges, four of which are critical for effective capacity planning, and all showed up in the top five. Almost half of the respondents (47%) struggle with getting a global view of utilization and spend across their entire infrastructure. Without that global view, you’re likely making siloed capacity decisions that may not allow you to be fully rightsized and cost-optimized. And in fact, 40% said that they are hard-pressed to say optimized and rightsized on an ongoing basis. Around one-third of respondents (35%) have difficulty mapping utilization and spending back to business entities, which can make it hard to factor business prioritization and risk into capacity decisions. And one-third (33%) say making appropriate workload placement decisions is challenging.

When asked to identify their top challenge from the list, respondents put getting a global view of utilization in second place (20%) and staying optimized/rightsized on an ongoing basis in third (17%).

Make capacity planning data-driven—and ultimately more accurate—with Virtana Capacity Planning

With Virtana Capacity Planning, part of the Virtana Platform, you can forecast infrastructure demands across your global hybrid infrastructure. Scenario-based capacity projections allow you to anticipate business needs, and AI-powered cloud budget forecasting helps you identify trends and forecast future growth. Virtana Capacity Planning enables you 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

Get the survey report: The State of Multi-Cloud Management

The post Cloud Capacity Planning Is a Hit-or-Miss Exercise That Mostly Misses appeared first on Virtana.

Enterprises are concerned about cloud costs

Controlling cloud spend is an issue that enterprises are concerned about. We asked about top challenges in managing hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructures, four of which are cost-related, including the top two issues cited. In fact, “keeping rising costs under control” was the number-two challenge, cited by 44% of respondents.

Every organization knows at a high level what it spends on the cloud—the monthly bills give you that top-line information as well as some additional breakdowns. But for most enterprises, this is insufficient. In fact, 73% of survey respondents said it’s important or very important to understand their cloud costs at a detailed level. And while 57% say they know exactly who is responsible for all of their cloud charges, that’s a significantly smaller group, indicating that enterprises don’t have all the cloud cost details they need to control their spend.

Organizations struggle to answer key cloud cost questions

Two-thirds of organizations track their cloud costs on a weekly or monthly basis. They’re fairly evenly split, with 33% reviewing those costs weekly while 34% do so monthly.

You might think organizations that need to understand their cloud costs in greater detail would track those costs more frequently, but this is not the case. In fact, respondents who said it’s not important to understand cloud costs at a detailed level are far more likely to track those costs daily—29% vs. 16%.

It’s also essential to understand who within the organization is tracking these costs. IT is carrying the cloud cost-tracking burden. While 89% of respondent organizations involve IT in the process, only 41% include finance/procurement. Given the size and variable nature of cloud spend, this is surprising.

The final question—in addition to who and when—is how organizations track their cloud costs. Most—76%—are using their monthly cloud bills. This is a good start, but as noted above, it is insufficient, especially if you want to understand your cloud costs in detail. The next most prevalent method, used by 57% of respondents, is to upload cost data spreadsheets to BI tools. This will undoubtedly give them the ability to analyze cloud cost data in various ways, but it can be a time-consuming effort.

There’s also the question of how to track costs across multiple CSPs. Multi-cloud is a reality for 83% of respondents, so this is a near-universal concern, but most organizations don’t have an efficient response. Almost one-third (29%) are consolidating the data manually, which may give them a full multi-cloud view into their costs, but it requires time and effort to get there. And more than half (56%) are simply tracking costs from each CSP separately, which makes it difficult to get a holistic view of cloud costs across the enterprise.

Given the variable nature of cloud costs, another important how question is: How do you find out about cost-impacting changes in utilization? The good news is that two-thirds of respondents (64%) get real-time alerts based on specified thresholds, which means they can act fast to prevent the accumulation of hefty charges.

While many of these approaches are highly reactive, that’s not necessarily a problem if they are simply one tool in a well-stocked cloud cost management toolbox. However, about one-third of respondents cited a single method employed to find utilization changes that affect cloud spend. And of this group, only 39% are using real-time alerts. This means that 61% of organizations in this cohort rely exclusively on just one after-the-fact method to learn about cost-impacting changes—and at that point, they may have racked up high costs that could have been avoided or at least contained.

Financial accountability structures are underdeveloped

FinOps is the practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of the cloud to enable all teams to make informed and appropriate business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality. Less than one-quarter of respondents (24%) have a mature, effective FinOps practice in place, leaving 76% with incomplete, or even nonexistent, processes and controls to hold stakeholders throughout the organization accountable for cloud costs.

Does insufficient cost tracking hinder accountability? Or does a lack of accountability reduce the pressure to track costs in detail? The answer to this chicken-or-egg question almost doesn’t matter. The truth is, enterprises that want to control their cloud spend need both cloud cost tracking and cloud spend accountability.

Virtana enables detailed cloud cost tracking and accountability

Virtana Cloud Cost Management, part of the Virtana Platform, helps you demystify your cloud costs, enabling you to confidently manage your cloud expense to avoid end-of-month surprises. Real-time data collection and analytics allow you to analyze data easily across your hybrid cloud environments, even as conditions and options change. With deep insight into your spend across cloud providers and the ability to quickly customize reports to meet different functions’ and business units’ needs, you can keep all your stakeholders informed and accountable. Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for yourself

Get the survey report: The State of Multi-Cloud Management

Control your cloud spend: Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for free

The post Is Your Cloud Spend Problem a Cloud Cost Tracking and Accountability Problem? appeared first on Virtana.

It’s a hybrid multi-cloud world

Very few organizations aren’t using public and private clouds at all (0.3% and 2% respectively). The vast majority have a solid mix of public and private clouds.

Furthermore, the public cloud isn’t a single environment—83% of respondents use more than one CSP, and 44% use more than three CSPs.

Complexity doesn’t come just from managing multiple CSPs; 77% of organizations manage more than four or more instances, and 22% manage 11 or more.

It’s not surprising that the more CSPs a company uses, the more instances it manages. But even 45% of those using just one CSP have four or more instances. 

The challenges of more

Intuitively, more CSPs and more instances create management challenges. We asked respondents what their number-one challenge is related to managing their hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure among the following:

• Keeping rising costs under control
• Finding and eliminating wasted spend
• Staying optimized/rightsized on an ongoing basis
• Getting a global view of utilization and spend across the entire infrastructure (on premises, private cloud, all public clouds)
• Mapping utilization and spend back to business entities (LoBs, projects, locations, etc.)
• Making appropriate workload placement decisions
• Ensuring performance and availability
• Understanding the impact of changes on cost and performance
• Lack of skills/expertise
• Understanding/minimizing the carbon footprint of IT operations

The top challenge for respondents using five or more CSPs, cited by 31% of that cohort, was keeping rising costs under control, compared to 17–26% of respondents with fewer CSPs to manage. The number-two challenge, at 25%, was finding and eliminating wasted spend, which was a far bigger problem than for organizations managing fewer CSPs—just 8–14%. This makes sense—with more CSPs in play, there are more places for unnecessary costs to “hide.”

There’s less of a stark difference when we look at the top challenges based on the total number of instances being managed, but there is still a discernable trend. One-fifth (21%) of businesses with more than 10 instances reported that getting a global view of utilization ad spend across the entire hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure is their top challenge, roughly the same number as the rest of the respondent groups (18–22%). There’s more of a difference in the number-two trend: staying optimized/rightsized on an ongoing basis. This is a problem for 20% of organizations with more than 10 instances but for only 13% of those using less than three. Rightsizing is challenging enough, but with many instances—each likely running different kinds of workloads with their own utilization and risk profiles and performance requirements—it can be impossible to keep up.

You don’t need to simplify your environment—just its management

Less isn’t always more, and the goal here isn’t necessarily to reduce the number of CSPs and instances you’re using. CSPs are not one-size-fits-all, so going multi-cloud to take advantage of specific capabilities is often the appropriate strategy. And your business needs the flexibility to add instances to support evolving requirements. But you can streamline the management of it all. Virtana Cloud Cost Management, part of the Virtana Platform, helps you do just that. With Virtana Cloud Cost Management, you can:

• Find and eliminate wasted spend, such as unused compute instances, storage blocks no longer attached to a compute instance or attached to a stopped instance, unattached load balancers, and idle elastic IP addresses.
• Automatically optimize instances with rightsizing recommendations, and tune sizing based on your organization’s risk tolerance with what-if analysis that includes CPU, memory, I/O, and ingress and egress charges.
• Gain deep insight into your cloud bills across cloud providers, easily slicing and dicing the data to match specific business needs.

All of this—and more—allows you to avoid end-of-the-month billing surprises and stay on budget, even as conditions and options change. Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for yourself

Get the survey report: The State of Multi-Cloud Management

Optimize storage across your hybrid infrastructure: Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for free

The post The Complex Reality of Multi-Cloud Environments appeared first on Virtana.

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.

Try Virtana Platform for free

The post 4 Pillars of Modern Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Management appeared first on Virtana.

Supply chain problems unequivocally hit the storage sphere

Only 1% of respondents said they felt no effect, and only 8% said the impact was minimal. For nearly half (49%), the pain was substantial.

Storage is not optional—organizations had to find a way to deal with these problems

The top action taken, cited by 67% of respondents, was spending more time on procurement and supply chain management. You can imagine the hours consumed making calls and scouring websites in search of needed gear, all taking time away from other pressing tasks on teams that are perennially overworked and understaffed. That’s a lot of lost productivity. In second place, nearly tied at 65%, is optimizing and extending the life of existing resources. No surprise here—when you can’t replace, you’re forced to work with what you’ve got. There is a limit, however, to how much you can limp along with existing resources. That’s probably why nearly half of respondents ended up incurring skyrocketing costs to get needed equipment in as quickly as possible, and almost as many had to cobble together a temporary strategy to meet immediate needs. The one thing most businesses were not willing to do is tell the business “no,” or at least “not now.”

We dug a little deeper into the numbers to see if the responses depend on the severity of the impact. In general, the bigger the impact, the more likely businesses were to take each action, with two exceptions. Those that experienced minimal impact were slightly more likely than moderates to optimize and extend the life of existing resources (63% vs. 60%). The more interesting exception is that the bigger the impact, the less likely respondents were to migrate more storage to the cloud than initially planned.

Supply chain problems are out of your control, but you can mitigate the risk with Virtana

Of all the strategies noted above, the best is to get more out of your existing storage gear so you can be less reliant on the vagaries of external market forces. Even if, like most organizations, you are already doing this, you want to optimize to the fullest possible potential. This requires deep visibility across your entire hybrid infrastructure, delivered with a strong focus on storage. From our heritage monitoring big-iron SAN infrastructures through our evolution into infrastructure performance monitoring and hybrid cloud performance, cost, and capacity management, Virtana brings unmatched storage expertise to all our Virtana Platform products, giving you the data not just to make smarter storage optimization decisions but to effectively manage your entire IT infrastructure across on-premises and cloud deployments. Try Virtana for yourself

Get the survey report: The State of Hybrid Cloud Storage

Optimize storage across your hybrid infrastructure: Try Virtana Platform for free

The post The Storage Supply Chain and Its Effect on Infrastructure Teams appeared first on Virtana.

But how are they deciding what storage goes where? Is there such a thing as a wrong—or even just sub-optimal—storage placement decision? We dug into the data to answer these questions.

Hybrid is the storage approach of choice

Philosophically speaking, most organizations want storage both in the cloud and on premises. Over half (55%) favor the cloud but will keep storage on premises when there is a cost and/or performance advantage in doing so. Only 32% of respondents insist on one environment exclusively, but of that cohort, 91% (29% of the overall group) said they want all their storage in the cloud.

Of course, desire doesn’t always match reality. While 3% of respondents said they want all their storage to be on premises, zero reported this being the case. In fact, only 1% said they have more than 90% of their storage on premises. The difference is even starker for those with a cloud-only storage mindset. While that group represents 29% of all respondents, only 0.3% said that 100% of their storage is in the cloud, and a mere 1% reported that more than 90% of their storage is in the cloud.

The lesson here is that storage placement is an ongoing concern, even for companies that have “pre-decided” that storage should ideally be placed in a particular environment.

How to make smarter hybrid cloud storage decisions

There’s no prevailing approach organizations use to make storage placement decisions. The good news is that only 3% of respondents have to resort to simply making a best guess. The remaining 97% are pretty evenly split between relying on their team’s knowledge and expertise (33%), using automated third-party tools (33%), and taking recommendations from their CSP (31%).

What are the implications of the various methods for making storage placement decisions? Cost is only one dimension in the equation, but given the size of cloud storage spend, it is an important one. It turns out that respondents who rely primarily on their CSP for storage placement decisions are more likely to see their storage costs grow at a faster rate—63% vs. 45–54% of those using other approaches. And while very few organizations have storage costs that are matching the rate of increase of their overall cloud spend (only 5% of the total respondent pool), they are more likely to use automated third-party tools than the other methods.

This data raises some questions. First, how can we account for the fact that, while expertise and knowledge have allowed a small number of respondents to keep their storage costs in check—growing at a slower rate or even shrinking—the best-guessers seem to be doing a little better at keeping storage cost growth at the same rate as other cloud costs (55% vs. 45%). Is it possible that some in the “knowledge and expertise” group are overstating their know-how and others in the “best guess” group are understating it? Second, and most strikingly, why are companies making CSP-driven storage placement decisions far more likely to see their storage costs grow faster than other cloud costs? CSPs do have a stake in those decisions, but we’re not suggesting anything nefarious is going on with those recommendations. While they will help direct you to the best options within those environments, there may still be better choices when you look across the entire hybrid infrastructure. We can’t fault the CSPs for their provider-centric view—it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise. And this doesn’t mean that you can’t use those recommendations, rather that CSP recommendations shouldn’t be your only decision inputs.

Having a knowledgeable and experienced team is always valuable and can help you make informed cross-environment decisions, but it may not be possible to have all the expertise you need consistently on staff. Automated third-party recommendation tools fill the gap, providing a hybrid-infrastructure-wide view and what-if scenarios so your teams, no matter their size and makeup, can always identify and evaluate best-fit storage placement options.

Virtana knows hybrid infrastructures—and storage

From our heritage monitoring big-iron SAN infrastructures through our evolution into infrastructure performance monitoring and hybrid cloud performance, cost, and capacity management, Virtana brings unmatched storage expertise to all our Virtana Platform products, giving you the data not just to make smarter storage placement decisions but to effectively manage your entire IT infrastructure across on-premises and cloud deployments. Try Virtana for yourself

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Cloud storage costs are a growing problem

Our survey found that cloud storage costs are growing for 94% of respondents. But what’s particularly notable is that for more than half (54%), those costs are growing at a faster rate than their overall cloud spend. Gartner predicts that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will grow 20.7% in 2023, which is higher than the 18.8% forecast for 2022. If the storage portion of those costs is rising faster than that, it’s quite an eye-popping increase.

Of course, it’s essential to understand how much of the overall cloud spend is for storage. After all, if storage represents one-tenth of one percent, it’s probably not worth worrying about. Alas, this is not the case. Only 2% of respondents reported that less than 10% of their total cloud costs are from storage. Indeed, 59% said that more than one-quarter of their total cloud costs are from storage. So, the storage costs growth trend is concerning.

Furthermore, as the percentage of cloud costs allocated to storage increases, it is more likely that those costs are growing faster than other cloud costs. Of the organizations with more than half of their cloud spend going to storage, 71–72% said that those costs are growing at a faster rate, compared to only 29% of those with the least amount of cloud storage spend.

Why are cloud storage costs so hard to contain?

Clearly, cloud does have a storage problem. But why? There are several factors that come into play.

Complex pricing leads to unpredictable spend

Understanding the cost of on-premises storage is relatively straightforward. In addition to the hardware cost, you should also consider how much you spend on physical space and power consumption. These are easy calculations that give you an accurate picture of your cloud storage costs now and over time. There are many good reasons to move at least some storage to the cloud, but one of the trade-offs is that pricing is complex, making it difficult to understand and predict those costs. Many cloud service providers (CSPs) charge various rates and fees. You may have a per-gigabyte-per-month storage rate, on top of which there could be access or processing fees as well as data transfer (aka data ingress and egress) charges. And the specifics of all these cost layers will vary depending on type of storage, region, service tier, volume discount, and other factors. It’s worth noting that while data ingress—moving data into the cloud—is often free, data egress can be very expensive. If you’re moving a lot of data around a large organization, these charges can be hard to spot and rack up big bills.

Agility can create storage waste

One of the significant advantages of the cloud is that you can use the resources you need in the moment you need them. This agility is great for innovation. Need a new instance? A few clicks, and it’s done. It’s just as simple to terminate an instance you no longer need with any storage associated with that instance—except it’s also easy to forget to take that last step. In some cases, terminating an instance will, by default, terminate the associated storage. But this isn’t always the case and could lead to orphaned storage that you continue to pay for, needlessly adding hefty charges to your cloud bill.

The wrong cloud storage service is selected

Cloud storage admins and architects often don’t have data on the best service to use, so they have to rely on their gut, or they simply default to the standard storage services. This isn’t surprising, given the abundance of options out there. For example, AWS S3 storage comes in several flavors, including S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent Tiering, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. That’s a lot of choices to sort through. And if you don’t know that with Glacier, frequent data access can result in higher costs, your storage could end up taking an unexpectedly large bite out of your budget. This isn’t just an AWS challenge; other CSPs have similar slates of storage offerings. Most companies typically don’t evaluate storage costs unless (until) they start to skyrocket, but the bottom line is that optimizing cloud storage costs with the right storage cloud services can forestall unwanted spending increases, and even help decrease costs.

It’s difficult to understand cloud costs in general

Part of the challenge isn’t storage-specific. Enterprises struggle to understand all of their cloud costs. In our previous State of Multi-Cloud Management survey, we found that 65% of respondents lack a single, streamlined approach to getting a global view of their cloud costs. Most (60%) are cobbling together cost information from multiple tools, systems, and processes, which is error-prone and likely to have gaps. And 5% aren’t even trying to get a global view of their cloud costs.

Control your cloud storage costs with Virtana

The good news is that you can address these challenges, and Virtana can help. We may be the premier hybrid cloud infrastructure management platform today, but we know storage. From our heritage monitoring big-iron SAN infrastructures through our evolution into infrastructure performance monitoring and hybrid cloud performance, cost, and capacity management, we bring unmatched storage expertise to our solutions. Virtana Cloud Cost Management, part of the Virtana Platform, enables you to demystify your cloud costs, proactively identify wasted resources—including storage blocks that are no longer attached to a compute instance or are attached to a stopped instance—and improve your cloud resource planning. Try it for free

Get the survey report: The State of Hybrid Cloud Storage

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First, consider where we are right now. According to The State of Multi-Cloud Management survey report that Virtana published earlier this year, 98% of respondents have workloads running in the public cloud. Of course, while nearly all organizations have workloads in the public cloud, it doesn’t follow that all of their workloads are in the cloud. In fact, only 13% said that more than three-quarters of their workloads are running in public clouds. The majority—78%—have between 26% and 75% of their workloads in public clouds. This means that the remaining 25–74% of workloads must be in non-public-cloud environments. In other words, most organizations are managing a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Specifically, the same study found that, on average, 17% of enterprise workloads continue to run on premises while 22% are in a private cloud.

Furthermore, with multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) to choose from, the public cloud isn’t one monolithic environment. Most organizations—82%, according to our survey—use more than one CSP. In other words, they are managing an infrastructure that is both hybrid and multi-cloud.

The problem with “or”

Managing a hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure with an “or” mindset means you’ll tend to frame each of those critical environments as its own distinct ecosystem. It is true that on premises, private cloud, and public cloud are all different, just as AWS, Azure, and GCP public clouds are all different—they each have their own unique characteristics. But while there may be cases where an application or service is fully contained within just one, it’s highly likely that the majority traverse these environments. For example, you could have data living on premises that is used by an application in one public cloud and by another application in a different public cloud.

Given the interconnectedness of all these environments in terms of ongoing workload and application operation, it can be problematic if visibility into and management of those environments is siloed. For example, how would you know if repatriating a workload from the cloud back on premises, or migrating it to another CSP, could deliver substantial cost savings? Or which is the best-fit public or private cloud provider to meet your specific performance and risk criteria? Or how to ensure sufficient capacity to achieve business objectives and minimize potential issues when the unforeseen inevitably happens?

The power of “and”

When you have an “and” mindset—and the tools and processes to go with it—you’re no longer managing a collection of different environments but rather one interconnected infrastructure. To get there, you don’t need to replace all of the environment-specific tools you have in place, but you do need to layer on capabilities to consolidate and analyze the data and then enable the appropriate actions in response. Yes, this requires investment. However, when you consider the time spent manually stitching together data and reports, the inefficiency of “swivel-chair” monitoring and management, and the impact of blind spots wherever there’s a “seam” between silos, you can see how that investment will quickly pay off. Furthermore, it’s only from this vantage point that you can truly optimize your entire infrastructure for better performance and reduced risk at a lower cost.

Get to “and” with Virtana Platform

Virtana Platform provides unique performance, availability, capacity, and cost information to enable you to better manage your entire IT infrastructure. The high-performance platform consists of four modular products that help you monitor and optimize Infrastructure Performance Management, Capacity Planning, Cost Management, and Workload Placement. We deliver these capabilities across a multi-cloud environment, providing a unified view that manages both your on-premises and cloud infrastructure assets. With Virtana Platform, you can make data-driven investments and accelerate planning, all tied to business outcomes that support your business requirements and goals. Try it for yourself.

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