https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/feature/Explore-the-consumption-based-IT-and-Opex-storage-landscape
As cloud providers continue to entice organizations with their services, hardware vendors have been looking for ways to keep their customers' operations on premises. This has led companies such as Dell Technologies, HPE and Lenovo to offer consumption-based IT services that aim to bring a cloud-like experience to data centers, edge environments and other on-site locations.
Under these new programs, customers lease the equipment from vendors on a subscription basis, but pay only for the resources they use, moving from a Capex to an Opex model. But the idea of consumption-based IT is still relatively new, and the landscape can be confusing, with little consistency from one vendor to the next. Organizations that try to navigate this terrain can find it difficult to determine what services each vendor offers and how those services compare.
Consumption-based IT programs make it possible for organizations to get cloud-like services in their data centers and other on-premises locations, with minimal upfront costs. Organizations pay only for the services they use, unlike purchasing the hardware outright, which can result in overprovisioning and the need to support underutilized hardware. With consumption-based IT, customers typically pay a monthly subscription fee based on usage and level of service. Some vendors also offer value-added services such as advanced monitoring or AI-driven insights.
Many consumption-based vendors include reserved capacity with their hardware that sits unused until the customer needs it. In this way, organizations can more easily handle fluctuating workloads without having to invest in hardware they use only part of the time. The vendor continuously monitors usage to ensure accurate billing; customers can also use the collected data to plan capacity and tie budgets to specific workloads.
Most vendors also offer some level of management and support, although these services can vary significantly from one vendor to the next as well as between packages from the same vendor. The vendor will typically provision, deliver and install the systems and provide support. Some consumption-based packages also include ongoing system administration to offer an even greater cloud-like experience.
Consumption-based programs promise to simplify IT and deliver greater flexibility than traditional approaches. If the programs can live up to their promises, they can help companies increase their agility by aligning infrastructure more closely with the dynamic nature of today's workloads. In this way, organizations can be more responsive to changing market conditions and customer requirements. At the same time, IT can focus on higher priority initiatives and more innovative efforts. Taken together, these changes can provide organizations with a competitive edge, but only if they can realize the benefits of consumption-based IT, while minimizing the disadvantages.
Organizations have embraced the consumption-based model because it can address the challenges of traditional on-premises systems and public cloud services. Among the benefits are the following:
But challenges exist. For example, the TCO might be higher than buying the hardware outright, especially since customers have nothing to show for their investments after the leasing period ends. Customers are also required to commit to minimum capacity levels and lengths of service.
At the same time, customers have less control over how infrastructure components are assembled and when equipment and software are refreshed and updated when compared to purchasing the equipment outright. Vendors also collect metrics about usage and other operations and often need access to manage the systems.
Consumption-based services for on-premises infrastructure is a young industry. It lacks a widely accepted definition of what these services are and what they should provide. This can make it difficult to compare services between vendors because they each take a unique approach.
Here are offerings from five vendors whose programs rank among the top contenders in the consumption-based IT market. They represent a good cross-section of what decision-makers are up against when trying to make sense of available services.
Dell Technologies recently introduced its Apex infrastructure services to gain a more solid foothold in the consumption-based IT market. At some point, Dell plans to deliver its full portfolio as infrastructure services through the Apex program, which provides the following four categories of services:
Dell offers the Apex Console to work with Apex services. The Console provides a self-service portal that customers can use to subscribe to different services, as well as to expand their resources and add new ones. They can also use the portal to monitor the health and performance of Apex resources and configure alerts and notifications.
HPE has been at the forefront of the consumption-based effort with GreenLake, a pay-per-use program that delivers HPE infrastructure as a service to multiple customer locations, including edge, data center and colocation settings. HPE delivers the systems preconfigured and manages them throughout their lifecycles.
HPE has made GreenLake available for a variety of HPE products and plans to offer its entire portfolio by 2022. GreenLake uses advanced metering technology to enable the pay-for-use model, basing it on a wide range of metrics. Although customers must make a minimal resource commitment, they pay only for what they use beyond that.
The real powerhouse behind the GreenLake program is HPE GreenLake Central, a software platform that provides customers with the following capabilities to manage and optimize their GreenLake services:
HPE offers the GreenLake services as packaged infrastructure. For example, one of the listed packages is Private Cloud, which is based on the HPE Synergy composable infrastructure appliance. The package comes with either VMware Cloud Foundation or Red Hat OpenStack. Another package is Storage, which includes several configurations based on HPE Primera or HPE Nimble Storage systems. HPE also offers packages such as Machine Learning, Database Platform and High Performance Computing.
The TruScale program targets all organizations with infrastructure that can deploy on premises or at the edge. Customers can choose from Lenovo's ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile product portfolio, including ThinkSystem DE Series All-Flash Arrays. Lenovo installs and deploys the hardware, maintains it throughout the service period and then removes it when that period ends. Lenovo also provides each customer with a dedicated customer success manager who handles the service account.
Unlike most consumption-based IT programs, Lenovo requires no minimum capacity commitment. Customers can define their plans with any configuration that meets their requirements, whether they want to emphasize server or storage resources, or need a more specialized configuration, such as hyperconvergence or high-performance computing.
TruScale is strictly a pay-as-you-go program that enables customers to scale up or down as necessary. The program offers easy-to-add incremental capacity and predictable monthly payments based on usage. Customers have continuous, real-time visibility into their consumption, with access to multiple layers of information, helping to control and predict costs and resolve potential problems.
Lenovo has also teamed up with SAP and Nutanix to provide additional TruScale services.
TruScale includes metering that's separate from and outside the customer's data plane. Customers own and control their own security policies at the application layer and above. Lenovo provides a hands-off plugin to facilitate 24/7 remote monitoring and management, which is handled by Lenovo's professional services experts.
Keystone offers a portfolio of services based on NetApp storage products and cloud software. Keystone enables customers to set up hybrid cloud environments that span on premises and the cloud. NetApp offers customers three financing options for acquiring Keystone services:
Of these three options, only Flex Subscription offers customers the type of pay-as-you-go services comparable to those from Dell, HPE and Lenovo. The Flex Subscription plan lets customers choose one of many service levels. The levels define the type of storage -- block, object, or file and block -- and the expected performance. Each service level comes with a minimum capacity requirement.
The Flex Subscription program is available in three operating models that define who's responsible for specific operations:
In all three operating models, NetApp owns the hardware and software and controls which software version is used and when it can be upgraded. However, customers that sign up for the NetApp-operated model can also use the NetApp Service Engine, a self-service portal to provision storage, view reports about consumption levels, and initiate service requests or subscription changes. NetApp also offers data protection as an add-on service to the basic packages.
Pure Storage offers multiple financing options for its storage products, but it's not always clear what the vendor considers to be storage as a service (STaaS), in part because of inconsistencies in the company's own labeling. In some places, Pure Storage includes the following four packages in its STaaS portfolio:
In some cases, Pure Storage classifies only Pure as-a-Service and Pure Block Cloud Store as STaaS. However, only Pure as-a-Service is comparable to the programs offered by Dell, HPE and Lenovo.
Pure as-a-Service includes two types of storage: block storage and unified file and object storage. The vendor offers block storage services in four tiers and file and object storage services in two tiers, with each tier providing a different level of performance.
Pure as-a-Service offers a 100% Opex subscription model. Customers pay only for what they use. In addition to the storage itself, a subscription includes the Pure1 management tools, which enable customers to manage their hybrid cloud environments from a single dashboard. They can also use the tools to perform VM analytics and access AI predictive support.
The consumption-based IT services offered by Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo, NetApp and Pure Storage make it clear that pay-as-you-go programs can vary significantly from one vendor to the next. To muddy the waters even further, many vendors, such as NetApp and Pure Storage, offer multiple programs, some of which don't fit the consumption-based model.
For this reason, decision-makers must carefully vet each vendor's services to determine which ones qualify as consumption-based. Once they do, they should then ask each vendor five important questions before choosing one over the other.
Consumption-based IT programs vary significantly. For this reason, decision-makers should make no assumptions about what a vendor is offering and should try to learn everything they can about a program to ensure they'll get what they expect if they do sign up. The last thing you want is to be unpleasantly surprised after committing to a pay-per-use service.
16 Aug 2021