By Jaap Scholten, Head: Group Hybrid IT Strategy at Datacentrix
The uptake of public cloud over the past decade has ushered in a new era of speed and agility, with the cloud experience giving enterprises the ability to scale new apps and capabilities, while greatly simplifying IT.
Cloud adoption has also served as a catalyst for new business models, new experiences and new efficiencies in every industry. However, despite these numerous advantages of the public cloud, a large percentage of apps and data must live in data centres and colocations due to issues such as latency, application dependency and regulatory compliance. This creates various hurdles as businesses struggle to unlock the value of rapidly-growing data across their hybrid estates.
These challenges can easily be overcome with the hybrid cloud model from Datacentrix that is hosted in Teraco and powered by HPE GreenLake. The Africa-first cloud offering delivers an ‘as-a-service’ experience that provides a base load combined with on-demand capacity, providing the agility and economics of public cloud with the security and performance of on-premises IT.
The discussion around consumption-based IT and its ability to offer flexibility and scalability of cloud whilst maintaining on-premises autonomy over an organisation’s data is not new. Nor is the narrative around the cost benefits of pay-per-use economics that eliminate investment in excess compute, storage or networking capacity.
However, it is worth unpacking the total economic impact of this hybrid cloud solution to get a better picture of the holistic cost benefits that it delivers to the modern enterprise.
Financial commitment on the baseload
- Firstly, with Datacentrix, one effectively pays for a baseload set at a certain threshold, plus whatever you consume over and above that baseload, on a varying basis. The financial commitment is thus made on the baseload, with predictable costs as you scale up, which makes for a predictable financial outlay if you need more capacity for your baseload. For example, should you decide that your baseload is 75% of the capacity of the entire deployment, then typically the baseload will be built at 110% capacity. This allows one to comfortably burst beyond one’s 75% baseload capacity – and even beyond the 100% specification - while building out and bolting on additional capacity, giving you enough time to scale out to your planned new capacity. Referred to as a linear scale-out, this means that the infrastructure can scale massively, without impacting the availability of the services that you run on it.
- Secondly, the dark horse is probably that the pricing is fixed in South African rand (ZAR) at the beginning of the term (usually five years) and even your scale-out options during the term will still be quoted at that same unit price. This ultimately adds more stability and predictability to your financial commitment.
- Thirdly, there are various intangible factors that should be considered. For instance, if you work with a reputable systems integrator, you could gain high availability across multiple data centres, which effectively means no downtime. In addition, if the deployment is in the right data centre, you also gain significantly from connectivity savings – a cable into the African Cloud Exchange will give you a gigabit per second or faster connectivity for the cost of a cross-connect cable.
Lower historical TCO
- Fourthly, it is important to note that your data egress costs remain fixed. As we know, with some hyperscalers it is free to feed your data in (ingress), but costly to get it out again (egress).
- Next, we believe our customers can expect to see a significant drop in historic total cost of ownership (TCO). Issues of growth and capacity planning can introduce those nasty financial surprises, such as: no similar hardware being available when wanting to upgrade; a lack of integration between disparate infrastructure; and price hikes on new generation equipment. This is not the case with Datacentrix as these costs are eliminated.
- Lastly, it is worth mentioning that, with Datacentrix, you do not need highly skilled resources to keep your systems running. Should you already have these skills in place, they can be applied to rather optimise your deployments, instead of having them look after hardware, storage and networking stability. Essentially then, the associated people cost is also lower.
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