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.

In this blog, let’s explore how a top-notch IPM system can change the way you handle your IT infrastructure and show you how a cutting-edge IPM platform can address these common issues.

1. See Everything in One Place: The Benefit of a United Approach

A fragmented view of IT infrastructure can cause delays and make it harder to spot issues. IPM solutions solve this problem by providing a single dashboard that brings together data from different sources, giving you a complete picture of your infrastructure’s performance.

Imagine an IPM tool that shows everything you need to know in one place, making it easy to spot and fix problems throughout your infrastructure. Virtana’s IPM platform does exactly that. This straightforward approach speeds up response times and keeps your systems running smoothly, enabling you to resolve IT infrastructure issues 5X faster and reducing problem-resolution time by 70%.

2. Stay Ahead of the Game: The Power of Predictive Analytics

IT professionals often face costly downtime and have to wait for problems to appear before they can fix them. But what if an IPM solution with predictive analytics could help you spot potential issues before they get out of hand?

That’s where a platform like Virtana comes in. Its advanced analytics identify trends and patterns, allowing you to address concerns proactively and keep your infrastructure running at peak performance.

3. Smarter Problem-Solving: AI to the Rescue

As IT infrastructures get more complex, solving problems quickly and effectively can feel like finding your way through a maze. That’s where AI assistance comes in, providing a faster, more efficient way to tackle challenges.

Imagine an IPM platform that uses artificial intelligence to make sense of the massive amounts of data your infrastructure generates. By spotting patterns and connections that might be missed by manual analysis, AI-driven solutions save time and minimize the impact on your operations.

4. Boost Your IT Team: Working Together for Better Results

Advanced IPM solutions not only make life easier for IT professionals but also encourage teams to work more efficiently and cooperatively. With a clear view of your infrastructure, team members can easily share information and insights, improving communication and decision-making.

Virtana’s IPM platform is built with collaboration in mind, promoting a proactive and efficient work environment. Its predictive analysis and AI assistance free up IT professionals to focus on strategic tasks and initiatives, rather than constantly putting out fires. To demonstrate its effectiveness, one Virtana IPM client went from 40M users to 295M users with only 3X infrastructure investment.

Ready to Dive In? Discover Virtana IPM Today!

Experience firsthand the benefits that Virtana’s IPM platform can bring to your organization. Choose one of two easy ways to get started:

1. Take a hassle-free, guided tour of Virtana IPM without any forms to fill out. Start here
2. Request a 30-day trial and see for yourself how Virtana IPM can transform your infrastructure management: Request a trial

Don’t wait – unlock your IT infrastructure’s true potential today!

The post The Future of Infrastructure Monitoring: Cutting-Edge Technologies IT Leaders Can’t Ignore 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.

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

Radically simplify cloud cost management: Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for free

The post Does Cloud Have a Storage Problem? appeared first on Virtana.

The value of containers in a hybrid/multi-cloud strategy 

Why the move to containers? They help organizations increase agility, flexibility, and scalability for mission-critical applications. This enables them to accelerate software development, scale deployment, and enable faster digital transformation. Because containers are not hindered by traditional architectures, they can: 

• Consume resources more dynamically than a typical physical host, or even a VM.  
• Run on premises and in public clouds, which facilitates “burst to the cloud” for capacity on demand, a model that has become increasingly important to address rapid and sometimes unpredictable growth. 
• Run independently of cloud providers. The big three—AWS, Azure, and Google—all offer easy-to-consume container services. 

Here at Virtana, we’ve undergone our own app modernization leveraging container technology. We transformed our Virtana Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) on-premises application to a scale-out, container-based architecture with services distributed on Docker containers spread across multiple physical nodes. This provides us with hardware independence, which is particularly important given the current physical component supply chain limitations. It also gives us extreme scale potential in terms of number of nodes as well as the ability to share resources between on premises and the cloud. 

With the benefits come challenges 

Containers’ dynamic nature creates observability challenges 

Containers and microservices, like those managed in Kubernetes, provide the required speed and agility to modernize applications successfully. However, their dynamic nature also has the potential for availability and performance concerns. They can spin up and down within seconds, which enables agility, but it also introduces several major challenges to observability. Most containers are short-lived; 22% live for less than 10 seconds, and 54% for less than five minutes. So, when it comes to containers, we need to think differently about monitoring. To ensure consistent application delivery, you need to measure the container layer and the interdependent components that microservices rely on. Measuring key indicators (errors, latency, throughput, saturation) of not only the container layer, but also the microservices’ interdependent components, is essential to understanding the overall state of application delivery.  

Rapid scalability creates cost challenges 

Public cloud Kubernetes offerings have been a significant facilitator of their overall adoption. While there is a huge opportunity to unlock development speed, flexibility, and operational efficiency by using containers in the cloud, many enterprises forget the basics of rightsizing and monitoring before and during development. This leads to exponential growth of cloud container resources without understanding whether those resources are being used efficiently. A lack of effective rightsizing and visibility into costs across multiple cloud vendors leads to huge end-of-month bills and unnecessary cloud spend. 

Solving container challenges with Virtana Platform 

With containers quickly becoming a key component of hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructures, organizations need to be able to solve these observability and cost challenges. That’s why we’ve unveiled a Kubernetes strategy to deliver container support across the full portfolio of Virtana Platform solutions. The first is container rightsizing recommendations, delivered alongside traditional compute rightsizing recommendations within the Cost Savings Opportunities dashboard in our Cost Management solution within the platform. With this new capability, customers can:  

• Rightsize traditional compute and containers across multiple clouds in one tool. 
• Tune sizing based on their organization’s risk tolerance with what-if analysis that includes CPU and memory. 
• Automatically optimize instances with rightsizing recommendations. 

• Adjust to real-time changes in cloud service provider offerings to optimize cost structures. 
• Analyze performance metrics using open-source data collection. 

Try Kubernetes rightsizing for yourself 

Try Virtana Platform Cost Management with full feature access free for 14 days (no credit card required)! After the trial, continue to access complete features with a paid account or downgrade to a free account with a simplified summary of potential savings. 

The post What You Need To Know About Hybrid Cloud Kubernetes appeared first on Virtana.

The value of portability is understood but not yet realized

According to our recent State of Multi-Cloud Management survey, only 4% of respondents said that they don’t see cloud portability as viable for their business. But just because the vast majority of organizations do see value in cloud portability doesn’t mean they’re able to execute. While 49% of respondents are porting workloads today, about half are in the very early stages. Nearly the same number—47%—see the value but aren’t yet porting workloads, and of that cohort, 40% say it’s a long way off for them.

Top-cited benefits of cloud portability

We also asked respondents to tell us what the top three benefits of cloud portability are for their organization. Overall, respondents are primarily looking to maximize cost savings (58%); reduce risk from changes in CSP quality, performance, etc. (46%); and increase business agility (43%).

As we noted in the survey report, there’s somewhat of a contradiction in the top two benefits. To truly maximize cost savings—rather than simply shift costs—you have to use cloud-specific capabilities, but this locks you into the CSP, making portability more difficult.

The impact of maturity on perceived portability benefits

This led me to wonder whether the perceived benefits of workload portability might depend on the organization’s stage in the journey, so I dug a little deeper into the data and found that the top three benefits pretty much stayed the same, but there were a few interesting correlations. For example, while 66% of those who are a long way from porting workloads cite the ability to maximize cost savings as a top benefit, that number drops to 48% among those who have operationalized cloud portability. In fact, the further along in the portability journey, the less likely that cost savings is named as one of the primary benefits.

On the flip side, there were two benefits that were more likely to be cited as workload portability maturity increased: the ability to take advantage of leading-edge innovations (from 29% of organizations who are a long way off from starting the journey compared to 43% who are comfortable porting workloads today) and data-residency compliance (from 9% to 26%).

The lesson here is that as an organization becomes more adept at cloud portability, the better it is at assessing and capturing its true value for their business.

Considerations to prepare for workload portability

While few organizations have done more than dip their toes into the cloud portability water, this will change as more and more seek to realize the value of easily moving workloads among cloud and on-premises environments. But doing so effectively requires the ability to view, analyze, monitor, and manage their multi-cloud environment holistically. You need to be able to understand the performance, cost, and risk characteristics of your workloads where they’re currently running as well as what they will be in any potential new target locations, and then easily plan for that migration to avoid disruptions and unwelcome surprises.

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According to our recent State of Multi-Cloud Management survey, this is a very real problem that enterprises are struggling with. In fact, 73% of respondents stated that siloed efforts are limiting their ability to realize the full potential of the cloud. This means that three-quarters of digital transformation efforts are being sold short by an inability to capture maximum value from the cloud. That’s a lot of missed opportunity that could translate to lower-than-expected revenue, higher-than-expected costs, competitive backslides, and obstructed agility and innovation.

Why Siloed Cloud Data Is Such a Problem

Organizations have lots of tools—migration, cloud cost management, cloud cost optimization, IPM, APM, cloud infrastructure monitoring, and more—to monitor and manage different aspects of their complex multi-cloud environments. Each of these tools serves a particular need, solving one piece of the multi-cloud infrastructure puzzle and delivering visibility into its individual area of focus. The answer isn’t to consolidate all your tools down to just one or two that can do everything. Such a beast doesn’t exist. But you do want to consolidate the data from all the tools so that you can get a comprehensive and complete view of your multi-cloud infrastructure. Without that global visibility, you have an incomplete understanding of cost, performance, and risk.

The data consolidation effort, however, can be problematic. Only 17% of organizations surveyed said that the process is fully automated. More than three-quarters—76%—reported having to expend some level of manual effort. This creates a lot of extra work for teams that are already strapped. And 7% aren’t consolidating the data at all; they’re simply using each tool separately, keeping siloes firmly in place.

The Impact of Siloed Cloud Data

So, most organizations are manually consolidating data to some extent. It’s not a leap to imagine that this has an impact on how effective teams can be, but the numbers bear this out. We asked respondents to rate their ability to do the following:

• Automatically discover, map, tier, and monitor their infrastructure regardless of location
• Monitor and manage the performance of critical services and applications infrastructure anywhere within their distributed enterprise environments
• Manage the capacity of infrastructure elements and estates up and down the stack from on-premises storage and compute to multi-cloud resources

Overall, the majority of respondents (78-82%) said they somewhat or strongly agree they can do all of these things. When we break down the responses based on level of manual effort required to consolidate data from all their tools, however, it’s clear that the more effort it takes to fully and consistently “unsilo” the data, the harder it is to perform these important actions.

One-fifth of respondents who have fully automated data consolidation agree they can automatically discover, map, tier, and monitor infrastructure regardless of location, compared to only 7% who disagree. In contrast, 46% of the organizations performing the most manual and incomplete consolidation can’t accomplish this versus only 20% who say they can.

The numbers are similar when it comes to monitoring and managing performance of critical services. Of those who have fully automated data consolidation, 19% agree they can accomplish this and only 5% disagree. And 42% of respondents with highly manual data and spotty consolidation processes cannot perform this action compared to only 21% who can.

Likewise, 20% of those with high levels of data consolidation automation say they can manage the capacity of infrastructure elements and estates up and down the stack compared to 5% who cannot; 40% of the most manual and lest complete data consolidators cannot do this while only 24% can.

The takeaway here is that it’s not enough just to have data. After all, data is simply a means to better manage the multi-cloud environment that enables the ultimate digital transformation ends. For the data to facilitate your ability to understand, monitor, and manage a complex multi-cloud infrastructure, you need to be able to easily—i.e., with as little manual effort and as few gaps and inconsistencies as possible—combine it into a common data set. Only then can you improve your ability to realize the full value of the cloud.

Get More Value From Your Cloud Investment With Virtana Platform

Virtana Platform is a highly modular, scalable multi-cloud insights platform that provides unique performance, availability, capacity, and cost information to enable you to better manage your entire IT infrastructure. With Vitana Platform, you can achieve a complete end-to-end view of on-premises, private clouds, public clouds, and modern environments such as containers and serverless to understand your entire multi-cloud infrastructure. Try it for free

Get the survey report: The State of Multi-Cloud Management 2022Manage hybrid cloud performance, cost, and capacity: Try it for free

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