The 3-tier IT infrastructure is actually outdated, but with the dogmatic cloud-first approach, the pendulum has actually swung too far. A more nuanced perspective is required.

Although it is still quite popular, today none of the experts at the roundtable on data centers and IT infrastructure organized by ITdaily really advocate a 3-tier model for IT infrastructure. This model symbolizes the old IT landscape: network, storage and computing power are purchased for a period of three years or longer and provided disproportionately so that there is certainly enough available. These rigid environments run legacy applications that are difficult to move.

From one cell to another

With the emergence of hyperscalers, the solution was clear for some parties. “We will all do that Cloud firstIT experts were screaming,” recalls Tom Van der Hulst, Business Unit Manager Intelligent Infrastructure at NTT. The cloud-first strategy sometimes led to mass migration to the cloud, all too often without thoughtful motivation, let alone optimization of workloads. A Lift and moveAfter all, being in the cloud was not uncommon.

“The public cloud initially seemed to be a simpler and cheaper solution,” recalls Luc Costers, regional manager Nutanix BeLux, CIS and Eastern Europe. “Until the bills started piling up. Then it turned out that the cloud wasn’t always so cheap.” Something else turned out. Frank De Campenaere, Senior Solution Sales Executive at Lenovo: “Migrating to the cloud is always easy. Getting something from the cloud is a different story.” If you weren’t careful, you were stuck in your cloud just as much as you were in your 3-tier environment.

After all, the cloud is not always so cheap.

Luc Costers, Regional Manager Nutanix BeLux, CIS and Eastern Europe

Nice and local

There are also many other reasons not to put data in the cloud. “Many customers are now opting for local anchoring,” notes Xavier Warnier, CCO at Datacenter United. “In this way, they can react quickly to their infrastructure and find a party that thinks for themselves in their language. Regulation is also an important aspect that has an impact on the market.”

In reality, there is an argument for local workloads and hypercaler workloads. “Today the question is no longer which of the two to choose,” says Warnier. “Edge data centers, colocation and cloud all have their role to play.”

Stay hybrid

Instead of “cloud first”, a hybrid multi-cloud model is the norm. “You should actually always start an analysis from the workloads,” says Van der Hulst. Costers confirms: “Many workloads are better run on your own infrastructure, especially if they are very predictable.” By this he does not mean that the workloads necessarily have to remain completely static. It is certainly possible to grow steadily in an on-premise environment, but not with a 3-tier model.

In a modern IT environment, HCI is essential. A hyperconverged environment, consisting of a large block of storage, compute, and networking building blocks, can stitch these components together on an ad hoc basis through a software layer tailored to a workload. “And if you don’t have enough storage or processing power, you can easily add it as needed.”

“We can also predict when an upgrade is needed,” adds De Campenaere. With TruScale, Lenovo is positioning itself as a type of on-premise cloud provider that installs and maintains hardware for customers in (colocation) data centers. Customers pay for what they use, just like in the cloud. “We measure this consumption based on electricity,” he adds.

We measure consumption based on electricity.

Frank De Campenaere, Senior Solution Sales Executive Lenovo

With monitoring tools from Lenovo, but also other providers such as Nutanix, a customer can detect when the memory is about to fill up or the computing capacity of a server is no longer sufficient. In this case, an organization can order the required parts and they will be immediately available in the HCI environment. The model doesn’t work à la minute like in the cloud, but that’s usually not necessary.

Flexible

HCI’s abstraction also lends itself to an overarching platform that brings together the environment across edge, data center and cloud. “And then you can move your workloads to where they run most efficiently,” says Costers. This is more important than ever in a changing IT landscape where regulations and sustainability goals are directly related to IT vision.

HCI in a hybrid multi-cloud environment appears to be the nuanced answer to the question of what to choose when 3-tier local and cloud first are not the solution. However, there is still a lot to do, and not because everyone has already migrated to the cloud with a lot of clicking and clacking. On the contrary, says Warnier: “Two thirds of the total IT load still runs in private areas, the broom closets, so to speak.”

Two thirds of the full IT load still runs in the private sector.

Xavier Warnier, CCO Datacenter United

SaaS first?

Perhaps the leap seems too big for the generally more conservative Belgian IT landscape. “The environment is more complex,” admits Van der Hulst. “A platform that provides consistency across different environments helps. Of course you can outsource things too.”

Outsourcing probably sounds tempting to many people. “Organizations actually want to focus on their core business and not necessarily on managing their IT,” says Warnier. This has an interesting consequence. Van der Hulst sees this with some customers Cloud first is replaced by SaaS first. “Organizations want the functionality, but not the complexity behind it. The first question when assessing a new solution is increasingly whether it is available as a service.”

But no one is FirstApproach is by definition the right option. You always have to pay attention to what you want to achieve, why and what people and resources are available to you to achieve it. Your own IT component is an important pillar of every strategy and this component should be as flexible as possible.

This article is part of a series following the roundtable on data center and infrastructure organized by ITdaily. Read more here.