Predictable
prɪˈdɪktəb(ə)l/
adjective
able to be predicted. “the market is volatile and never predictable”
synonyms: foreseeable, (only) to be expected, expected, par for the course; unsurprising, anticipated, probable, likely, foreseen; formulaic, formularised, obvious; informal inevitable, on the cards — Google
KISS
For many years now I’ve held a personal belief that if we can make life simpler, generally things are better. People refer to this as KISS — keep it simple stupid. I’ve even talked about keeping things simple in previous blogs.
Applying this to my professional life has meant that when I spot a new technology that can, I think, make things simpler, I generally get on board.
This doesn’t mean that the technology is simpler, just that it makes things simpler, normally processes involved with the day-to-day work of managing IT infrastructure are made simpler.
Simplicity
Many (OK, many many) years ago I was introduced to HDS storage and their ability to virtualise storage. This was amazing stuff that greatly reduced the amount of storage admin work and had the nice side effect of generally improving performance.
Server virtualisation — this simplified the process of standing up new servers so much that the industry came up with a new term; virtual server sprawl. Making things simpler doesn’t mean by default we’re making them better. But the fact that virtual server sprawl was a thing, proves that we certainly made the process of server instantiation simpler.
Data deduplication, and in particular Data Domain (now EMC Data Domain). What a great technology; fast backups to disk made affordable by dedupe and compression, what’s not to like. The fact that it made backups, and in particular backup schedules simple (full backup, all the time on everything), was the icing on the cake.
Meraki (now Cisco Meraki) and their centralised cloud management platform for wireless, switching and security appliances is really moving the simplification game on to a new level.
Another new technology I think is moving the game on is hyper convergence and the whole software defined approach. Look at the simplicity that the likes of Nutanix bring to the infrastructure environment. Simple single pane of glass management, one click hypervisor upgrades, performance and functionality improvements with software updates; this is a KISS overload for me.
And the point of this blog is?
I was having a discussion on Friday (21/11/14) with a couple of IT guys and one of them challenged me to use one word to put forward the advantages of software defined (vs. a traditional approach).
I was all over this, I had my word:
Simplicity
He didn’t disagree. I think he even liked my points about simplicity. But he had a better word:
Predictability
I left that meeting thinking about the word, and he’s correct. Whilst my simplicity is nice and can help to drive efficiency, predictability is a game changer!
Not convinced?
How many VDI projects are you aware of that have failed at first attempt? Boot storms are a nightmare. I’d suggest that the use case for all flash storage in a VDI environment has helped spawn the all flash storage industry. Pure Storage would certainly like to help your VDI problems.
But given we know that boot storms are a problem, how do we keep getting it wrong. As with any complex situation there are a number of variables at play here, but a common problem is not being able to predictably understand scaling of the solution. A proof of concept (PoC) is initiated and 20, 30 maybe 80 virtual desktops are run, successfully. But the actual requirement is to run 400, 500 or maybe 1000 virtual desktops. Now we’re in guessing land. Granted they may be very well-educated guesses, but on a traditional infrastructure environment it would be guessing.
And over in software defined land
Nutanix offer VDI Assurance. No spending time and effort running a PoC only to have to guess what the final infrastructure configuration is. No need. Work out how many of each desktop profile you want and pay Nutanix, they work out what infrastructure is required and provide it. You just pay per desktop. And they back themselves.
“If additional hardware is required to meet profile parameters, Nutanix provides it at no additional cost. Assured infrastructure — delivering peace of mind and 100% predictability to your VDI deployment.” — Nutanix website 23/11/14
If you haven’t just had a WTF moment, rewind and read again.
How can they do this… predictability.
Their software defined building blocks are so predictable that they are able to foresee, expect, understand par for the course, not be surprised, anticipate, be formulaic. Yep, all the things that the word predictable defines.
And this isn’t a blog post about Nutanix, I’m just using them as a convenient example to highlight predictability of software defined. And Nutanix seem to get it.
A google search of the Nutanix website for the word predict (and variances of) returns hundreds of results (23/11/14). Similar searches of Stratoscale, Simplivity, ScaleComputing and Maxta return a much more limited set of results. So I’m sure Nutanix probably have way more marketing budget than some of those companies and can pump out much more marketing collateral, but the point is they understand that predictability is a unique selling point for software defined.
Software defined USP
So if you ever find yourself talking to a peer, your boss, a customer or maybe you just like chatting to your dog about software defined, I’d recommend introducing the word predictability into the conversation. I think it’s a unique point of difference that can’t help but drive reduced risk and better ROI calculations.
