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the hall and ask about an application’s status, that’s something only an on- premises solution can offer.
Vargas said the cloud can be more secure than on-premises technology in some circumstances. The security algorithms used to monitor and keep systems safe are more efficient when there is more data to study, she added, and no one has more data than cloud providers.
There are other considerations that argue for keeping on-premises data centers — the simplest being that agen- cies aren’t ready to dump their invest- ments in equipment. “When they come up for maintenance, maybe you’ll look at transitioning,” Heiter said.
Such debates will be different for ev- ery agency. And as IT managers hash out the appropriate hybrid strategy, they must also plan for the ways data center technology itself is changing.
VIRTUALIZATION AND SOFTWARE-DEFINED EVERYTHING
In the 1990s, it was difficult to stack multiple applications on a single server, Fichera said. Companies popped up to tackle the issue and made a living tun- ing and tweaking systems to facilitate application stacks, “but it was tricky,” he added.
For a long time, the industry pushed the idea of “one server, one applica- tion,” which caused server sprawl and underused infrastructure. “Virtualiza- tion was a godsend for that,” Fichera said.
“With the advent of virtualization, it has blurred the lines of what a physi- cal device is going to be,” Heiter said. “Now it becomes a little bit less physical and a little more abstract.”
Virtualization allowed for more than one software-defined server to operate under a hypervisor — software, firm- ware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. Software-defined data centers take advantage of virtual-
“THERE IS NOTHING BUT
A BRIGHT FUTURE FOR HYBRID MOVING FORWARD.”
— CAMERON CHEHREH, DELL FEDERAL
ization and other technologies such as consolidated monitoring tools and hy- perconverged infrastructure.
Software-defined networking ab- stracts the physical switches and in- frastructure. When capacity needs to scale, the structure can be easily modi- fied, Heiter said. A new protocol or se- curity procedure can be deployed with a few keystrokes, he said, rather than going through a purchase order, wait- ing for the vendor and installing a solu- tion in a rack.
Similarly, software-defined storage allows data center managers to see a single pool of physical, hardware-based storage that is allocated to various vir- tual machines on the fly. That approach allows managers to be more efficient in handling storage resources, Heiter said.
Software-defined data centers also take advantage of hyperconverged and converged infrastructure. “They’re the key for modernizing and taking advan- tage of the automation,” Chehreh said. Converged means bringing networking and storage into a common device, and hyperconverged means adding soft- ware-defined, virtualized technology to that structure.
“The federal government really grav- itated to that because it really allowed them to consolidate,” said Dan Fallon, director of federal systems engineers at Nutanix, which specializes in hypercon- verged solutions.
Putting computing, storage and net- working into a single appliance has helped with consolidation, he added. Organizations can get applications up and running more quickly because there are not multiple management si-
los. “We can power all of those work- loads on the same platform,” he said.
DOD took advantage of such efficien- cies in a 2015 data center consolidation effort. The 12-month initiative replaced 1,000 servers that took up 60 racks with a Nutanix solution that needed only 10 racks of hardware.
THE POWER OF PORTABILITY
Data centers don’t have to be either in the cloud or in a building packed with servers — they can also be portable.
Modular data centers, or pods, are often the size of shipping containers and usually deployed to rapidly deliver the services of a standard data center. Microsoft started working on portabil- ity a few years ago, McClure said, and smaller agencies have started taking advantage of the technology.
“You don’t worry about building a data center; you move these things around to where they’re needed,” he said. “Mainly it was small agencies \[that\] were looking for cloud environ- ments that they wanted to be on-prem but didn’t want to build a data center, so pods became a reality.”
Fallon said his company has been working to increase the mobility of the Navy’s Deployable Joint Command and Control program. A mobile cloud at the edge of a combat area, powered by por- table hyperconverged hardware, can communicate with a traditional, fixed- site data center. The new solutions are about a quarter of the size of the sys- tems they are replacing.
“It just shows the scalability, but also that you don’t have to change architec- ture regardless of the size,” he said. •
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