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For many oftodays applications and workloads, cloud computing offers the enterprise ahost of advantages over traditional data centers, including lowered operationaland capital expenditures, improved time to market, and the ability todynamically adjust provisioning to meet changing needs globally. Consequently,there has been a massive shift to cloud migration over the past decade, with cloud computing trends showing significantyear-over-year growth since it was first introduced, and Cisco predicting thatby 2021 cloud data centers will process 94 percent of all workloads.According toMarketsandMarkets, the global cloud computing market is projected to surge at acompound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18 percent to reach approximately $623.3 billion by 2023,up from $272 billion in 2018.

Today, however, we are seeing more companies bringing workloads backinto their data centers or edge environments after having them run in the cloudfor several years because they didnt originally fully understand theirsuitability in a cloud environment. 451Research has referred to this dynamic as cloud repatriation,and a recent survey found that 20 percent of cloud users had already moved atleast one or more of their workloads from the public cloud to a private cloud,and another 40 percent planned to do so in the near future.

All of this begs a deceivingly simple question: How do I know whena workload would be better off running in or outside of the cloud?

When Latency, Availability and ControlAre Key

Aswith any IT decision, an inadequately researched, planned and tested process islikely to cause setbacks for enterprise end-users when the organization atlarge is faced with uncertainty whether to move an application or workload outof the public cloud and return it to an on-premises data center or edgeenvironment.

Very often, moving an application or workload from the cloud makes good business sense when critical operational benchmarks are not being met. This might mean inconsistent application performance, high network latency due to congestion, or concerns about data security. For example, we know of one Fortune 500 financial services firm that was pursuing an initiative to move its applications and data to the public cloud and only later discovered that its corporate policy prohibited placement of personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data beyond their internal network/firewall. Although many security standards are supported by public cloud providers, because of its internal policy, the financial organization opted to keep its data on-premises.

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Somecompanies, such as Dropbox, have chosen to migrate from the public cloud tobenefit their bottom line. While cost is but one criterion for leaving, it is amajor one. In the wake of leaving the cloud, Dropbox was able to save nearly$75 million over two years.

Generallyspeaking, applications that are latency sensitive or have datasets which arelarge and require transport between various locations for processing are primecandidates for repatriation. Consider smart cities and IoT-enabled systems, whichcreate enormous amounts of data. While cloud computing provides a strongenabling platform for these next-gen technologies because it provides thenecessary scale, storage and processing power, edge computing environments willbe needed to overcome limitations in latency and the demand for more localprocessing.

Additionally,if your applications and databases require very high availability orredundancy, they may be best suited to private or hybrid clouds. Repatriation alsoprovides improved control over the applications and enables IT to better planfor potential problems.

Yes,moving to the cloud means a decrease in rack space, power usage and ITrequirements, which results in lower installation, hardware, and upgrade costs.Moreover, cloud computing does liberate IT staff from ongoing maintenance andsupport tasks, freeing them to focus on building the business in more innovativeways. And yet, while many businesses are attracted to the gains associated withpublic or hybrid cloud models, they often do not fully appreciate the strategynecessary to optimize their performance. Fortunately, there are tools to assistIT teams to better understand how their cloud infrastructure is performing.

DemystifyingCloud Decision-Making

Nomatter the shape of an organizations cloud public, private or hybrid data center management solutions can provideIT staff with greater visibility and real-time insight into power usage,thermal consumption, server health and utilization. Among the key benefits arebetter operational control, infrastructure optimization and reduced costs.

Beforeany organization moves its data to the public cloud, the IT staff needs tounderstand how its systems perform internally. The unique requirements of itsapplications, including memory, processing power and operating systems, should determinewhat it provisions in the cloud. Data center management solutions collect andnormalize data to help teams understand their current implementationon-premise, empowering them to make more informed decisions as to what isnecessary in a new cloud configuration.

Intel Data Center Manageris a software solution that collects and analyzes the real-time health, power,and thermals of a variety of devices in data centers. Providing the clarityneeded to improve data center reliability and efficiency, including identifyingunderlying hardware issues before they impact uptime, these tools bring invaluableinsight to increasingly cloudy enterprise IT environments, demystifying thequestion of on-premises, public and hybrid cloud decision-making.

Here are some factors to consider whenmaking a decision about embarking on a course of cloud repatriation:

If you answered yes to a majority of the questions above, it might be time to consider cloud repatriation.

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When the Cloud Falls to Earth. Is It Time for Your Organization to Consider Cloud Repatriation? - Data Economy

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By 2023, 70% of enterprises will be running some form of hyperconverged infrastructure

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Demand for on-premises data centre equipment is shrinking as organisations move workloads to the cloud. But on-prem is far from dead, and one segment that is thriving is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).

HCI is a form of scale-out, software-integrated infrastructure that applies a modular approach to compute, network and storage capacity. Rather than silos with specialised hardware, HCI leverages distributed, horizontal blocks of commodity hardware and delivers a single-pane dashboard for reporting and management. Form factors vary: Enterprises can choose to deploy hardware-agnostichyperconvergence softwarefrom vendors such as Nutanix and VMware, or an integrated HCI appliance from vendors such as HP Enterprise, Dell, Cisco, and Lenovo.

The market is growing fast. By 2023, Gartner projects 70% of enterprises will be running some form of hyperconverged infrastructure, up from less than 30% in 2019. And as HCI grows in popularity, cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft are providing connections to on-prem HCI products for hybrid deployment and management.

So why is it so popular? Here are some of the top reasons.

A traditional data centre design is comprised of separate storage silos with individual tiers of servers and specialised networking spanning the compute and storage silos. This worked in the pre-cloud era, but it is too rigid for the cloud era. Its untenable for IT teams to take weeks or months to provision new infrastructure so the dev team can produce new apps and get to market quickly, said Greg Smith, vice president of product marketing at Nutanix.

HCI radically simplifies data centre architectures and operations, reducing the time and expense of managing data and delivering apps, he said.

HCI software, such as from Nutanix or VMware, is deployed the same way in both a customers data centre and cloud instances; it runs on bare metal instances in the cloud exactly the same as it does in a data centre. HCI is the best foundation for companies that want to build a hybrid cloud. They can deploy apps in their data centre and meld it with a public cloud, Smith said.

Because its the same on both ends, I can have one team manage an end-to-end hybrid cloud and with confidence that whatever apps run in my private cloud will also run in that public cloud environment, he added.

HCI allows you to consolidate compute, network, and storage into one box, and grow this solution quickly and easily without a lot of downtime, said Tom Lockhart, IT systems manager with Hastings Prince Edward Public Health in Bellville, Ontario, Canada.

In a legacy approach, multiple pieces of hardware a server, Fiber Channel switch, host-based adapters, and a hypervisor have to be installed and configured separately. With hyperconvergence, everything is software-defined. HCI uses the storage in the server, and the software almost entirely auto-configures and detects the hardware, setting up the connections between compute, storage, and networking.

Once we get in on a workload, [customers] typically have a pretty good experience. A few months later, they try another workload, then another, and they start to extend it out of their data centre to remote sites, said Chad Dunn, vice president of product management for HCI at Dell.

They can start small and grow incrementally larger but also have a consistent operating model experience, whether they have 1,000 nodes or three nodes per site across 1,000 sites, whether they have 40 terabytes of data or 40 petabytes. They have consistent software updates where they dont have to retrain their people because its the same toolset, Dunn added.

By starting small, customers find they can reduce their hardware stack to just what they need, rather than overprovision excessive capacity. Moving away from the siloed approach also allows users to eliminate certain hardware.

Josh Goodall, automation engineer with steel fabricator USS-POSCO Industries, said his firm deployed HCI primarily for its ability to do stretched clusters, where the hardware cluster is in two physical locations but linked together. This is primarily for use as a backup, so if one site went down, the other can take over the workload. In the process, though, USS-POSCO got rid of a lot of expensive hardware and software. We eliminated several CPU [software] licenses, we eliminated the SAN from other site, we didnt need SRM [site recovery management] software, and we didnt need Commvault licensing. We saved between $25,000 and $30,000 on annual license renewals, Goodall said.

To run a traditional three-tiered environment, companies need specialists in compute, storage, and networking. With HCI, a company can manage its environment with general technology consultants and staff rather than the more expensive specialists.

HCI has empowered the storage generalist, Smith said. You dont have to hire a storage expert, a network expert. Everyone has to have infrastructure, but they made the actual maintenance of infrastructure a lot easier than under a typical scenario, where a deep level of expertise is needed to manage under those three skill sets.

Lockhart of Hastings Prince Edward Public Health said adding new compute/storage/networking is also much faster when compared to traditional infrastructure. An upgrade to our server cluster was 20 minutes with no down time, versus hours of downtime with an interruption in service using the traditional method, he said.

Instead of concentrating on infrastructure, you can expand the amount of time and resources you spend on workloads, which adds value to your business. When you dont have to worry about infrastructure, you can spend more time on things that add value to your clients, Lockhart adds.

Key elements of hyperconvergence products are their backup, recovery, data protection, and data deduplication capabilities, plus analytics to examine it all. Disaster recovery components are managed from a single dashboard, and HCI monitors not only the on-premises storage but also cloud storage resources. With deduplication, compression rates as high as 55:1, and backups can be done in minutes.

USS-POSCO Industries is an HP Enterprise shop and uses HPEs SimpliVity HCI software, which includes dedupe, backup, and recovery. Goodall said he gets about 12-15:1 compression on mixed workloads, and that has eliminated the need for third-party backup software.

More importantly, recovery timeframes have dropped. The best recent example is a Windows update messed up a manufacturing line, and the error wasnt realised for a few weeks. In about 30 minutes, I rolled through four weeks of backups, updated the system, rebooted and tested a 350GB system. Restoring just one backup would have been a multi-hour process, Goodall said.

HCI products come with a considerable amount of analytics software to monitor workloads and find resource constraints. The monitoring software is consolidated into a single dashboard view of system performance, including negatively impacted performance.

Hastings recently had a problem with a Windows 7 migration, but the HCI model made it easy to get performance info. It showed that workloads, depending on time of day, were running out of memory, and there was excessive CPU queuing and paging, Lockhart said. We had the entire [issue] written up in an hour. It was easy to determine where problems lie. It can take a lot longer without that single-pane-of-glass view.

Goodall said he used to spend up to 50% of his time dealing with storage issues and backup matrixes. Now he spends maybe 20% of his time dealing with it and most of his time tackling and addressing legacy systems. And his apps are better performing under HCI. Weve had no issues with our SQL databases; if anything, weve seen huge performance gain due to the move to full SSDs [instead of hard disks] and the data dedupe, reducing reads and writes in the environment.

IDG News Service

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Reasons to consider hyperconverged infrastructure in the data centre - Small Business

A ransomware attack is a disaster. When ransomware infects an organisations IT systems, stored and backup data are encrypted and made unavailable.

The IT system is unable to function and in many cases that means the organisation cannot function either until it remedies the attack. In essence there are two ways to do this: paying the ransom to decrypt the files or getting clean files restored from a disaster recovery (DR) facility.

Affordable and fast DR is a good way to defeat a ransomware infestation. Datrium, a hyperconverged systems vendor, has recognised this and in August 2019 launched its own DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service), incorporating home-grown HCI system backup technologies.

Historically, disaster recovery has been a hugely expensive but relatively niche aspect of customer storage and system buying strategy. But the massive increase in ransomware attacks in recent years has expanded the DR vulnerability surface. At the same time availability of the public cloud to provide a form of remote DR facility has brought costs tumbling.

A September 2016 FBI alert said: New ransomware variants are emerging regularly. Cyber security companies reported that in the first several months of 2016, global ransomware infections were at an all-time high. Within the first weeks of its release, one particular ransomware variant compromised an estimated 100,000 computers a day.

Data protection vendor Acronis reported the Spring 2017 WannaCry outbreak afflicted over 200,000 computers in over 150 countries. Global costs were estimated to total $8bn.

A second FBI alert in October 2019 said: Ransomware attacks are becoming more targeted, sophisticated, and costly, even as the overall frequency of attacks remains consistent. Since early 2018, the incidence of broad, indiscriminant ransomware campaigns has sharply declined, but the losses from ransomware attacks have increased significantly, according to complaints received by IC3 and FBI case information.

Although state and local governments have been particularly visible targets for ransomware attacks, ransomware actors have also targeted health care organizations, industrial companies, and the transportation sector.

Indeed ransomware is now so prevalent that automated failover to a recovery site is becoming table stakes for all data protection suppliers. In that sense ransomware recovery is a killer feature, and suppliers without this capability will be in trouble.

Many data protection suppliers already offer DR facilities, including Cohesity, Commvault, Dell EMC, Druva, Rubrik and Zerto. And more are sure to follow.

Datriums background is somewhat different. Founded in 2012, the company is a venture-backed startup that has raised $165m to date, including $60m in the most recent round in September 2018.

Datrium pioneered a middle way between converged and hyperconverged systems with hyperconverged nodes running storage controller software that linked them to a shared storage box. However, it faced enormous competition and the HCI market consolidated rapidly around two leading suppliers: Dell EMC, with VxRail, and Nutanix.

Datrium then moved in to unified hybrid cloud computing and protecting its DVX systems, specifically backup to the cloud. The company announced Cloud DVX in August 2018, claiming up to 10 times lower AWS costs for cloud backup, and CloudShift, a SaaS-based disaster recovery orchestration service for VMware.

This hit the market as the necessity of dealing with ransomware became even more pressing, and Datrium realised it had a potential killer app for VMware users.

CEO Tim Page told Blocks & Files in a phone interview that Datrium has gained 60 new accounts in under two months since launching its disaster recovery as a service. DR is catapulting our business revenues upwards.

He said the reason for this is that Datriums DRaaS preserves the VMware environment, is affordable and lightning fast, failing over in minutes when an attack takes place.

Datrium offers DR as a Service (DRaaS) using the VMware Cloud on AWS. In other words it protects VMware virtual machines (VMs) by spinning up DR copies in AWS. Page told me the time between attack detection and recovery should be as short as possible i.e. the DR copy VMs should be spun up quickly.

He said backups, even air-gapped backups such as tape, are inferior to a DR facility. It takes time to restore backup files and the ransomware infestation must be removed from the affected IT site. With a DR facility in place, the victim can use clean files while the ransomware is found, removed and infected files deleted. Post clean-up, the DR facility can fail back to the main site.

Datrium stores backup immutable snapshots in Amazons S3 storage, which lowers cost, but in a form that means they can be immediately spun up without rehydration or conversion as VMs running in the VMware cloud. Admin staff at the ransomware-infected customer just switch from one VMware environment to another; there is no difference.

Immutability means that the snapshotted data cannot be altered subsequently. Any ransomware infection after the date the snapshot was taken will not infect that snapshot.

Datrium offers a short RTO (Recovery Time Objective) because it has selectable restore points. This short RTO is made feasible by automating the recovery process, which can involve hundreds or thousands of separate operational steps to get a large suite of VMs up and running in the right order.

With the orchestration routine in place, the DRaaS facility is told via a mouse click to fail over to the cloud DR site when a ransomware attack or other disaster happens, and that takes just minutes. DR recovery can then start a few minutes later at the source site.

Backed-up VMs exist in a timeline. Some time before an attack with its file locking-by-encryption and ransom notification, ransomware infects a system and starts started encrypting files. This event can be located by checking file activity records.

In a recent incident a Midwest US municipality was attacked (the town is unwilling to reveal its identity, Datrium said). The IT department had backed up its VMs to a Datrium DVX system but without the DRaaS option in place. Admin staff and Datrium consultants checked the incoming snapshots to the target DVX system and found a sudden size increase:

The highlighted snapshots in the image above have sizes of 23.6Gib, 80.2Gib, and 80.7Gib, while prior and subsequent snapshots are 6.1Gib and 3.6Gib in size. This enlargement was caused by Ryuk ransomware encrypting files.

To combat the attack, a prior snapshot from a day earlier was used and powered up on a quarantined network. It was verified malware-free by a security team and became a so-called recovery golden copy.

The recovery team restored individual VMs in priority order and verified each one was clean with an anti-virus scanner before restoring the next one. This took almost two days to complete. A mass update restoration of all their VMs would have taken less time and a DRaaS option would have been quicker again.

Datrium initially provided cloud backup for its own on-premises DVX semi-hyperconverged system semi, because the storage repository was separate from the compute nodes. It extended this to source systems from Dell EMC, NetApp, Nutanix, Pure Storage and others, and also to VMware running in AWS.

Datrium can provide DR with failover to VMware Cloud on AWS so long as the source site is a VMware site. Datrium uses its own backed up VMs and data from the source site.

VMware is accommodating Kubernetes and containers and Page pointed out that as VMware embraces Kubernetes we can do so too.

He said Datrium DRaaS will work with Microsoft Azure cloud by the end of 2020.

And what about the rising tide of cloud-native applications that do not use VMware? We have a CSS login for bare metal servers, Page said. He suggested Datrium could develop this ability to backup bare metal Kubernetes environments to the public cloud, and reinstantiate containers there for DR, in the same way as it spins up VMs today.

As long as ransomware infections exists Datrium should prosper by offering a simple and fast recovery option, viable both for virtual machines and containerised environments.

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Ransomware protection is killer app for Datrium DRaaS - Blocks and Files