SMB, Hyperconvergence and Colocation
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If ever there was a set of technologies or circumstances ready to come together for a singular purpose, hyperconvergence and colocation are probably this perfect match made for the small and medium business market.
For years, forever really, the SMB market has struggled with computational systems that were either very rudimentary compared to their big business competitors or the SMB was stuck paying for systems and tools that were significant overkill for them. Lacking the scale of a large business or enterprise, SMBs have simply been left stuck in the middle with systems that were underutilized, but too complex and costly to use more thoroughly. And just as SMBs struggle with costly and complex computing systems, they also struggle with providing adequate environments into which to put these compute systems.
The problem is that SMBs, by and large, simply need far too little "capacity" or total size from their systems to warrant the things that make sense in the enterprise. The scale just isn't there. An enterprise can build a datacenter, keep it an even seventy two degrees, have diesel generators and a staff watching everything around the clock for only a few dollars per server. But an SMB might only need two servers and to do the same could cost a hundred thousand dollars per server!
But today, the needs of SMBs are not that much different than those of enterprise businesses. Of course, every business, of every size, is unique; but increasingly SMBs also need to maintain systems around the cloud, every day of the week, every week of the year, with long data retention, good performance and access from anywhere in the world, any time. These things are trivial for a big business and staggering for an SMB.
This is where hyperconvergence and colocation come into the picture. Hyperconvergence tackles this from the computational systems side while colocation tackles this from an environmental and physical side. Together, these technologies can allow an SMB to operate far more like only an enterprise has been able to do in the past.
Hyperconvergence changes the landscape by introducing computing, storage, platform management and high availability as a single, cohesive system taking many of the most expensive and complex pieces of IT infrastructure and collapsing them into a size that SMBs can readily consume. Lowering the cost of the physical investment while easing management concerns around complexity and a need for advanced skills, many of the best benefits that enterprises have enjoyed can now be had by nearly any SMB. Lower cost, greater agility, more flexibility and less investment per workload radically change the SMB IT picture.
Similarly, colocation takes the physical aspects of the environment and make it available to the SMB market in a consolidated way that allows each SMB to invest in a small amount of real estate at enterprise quality and feature level while paying only for the size that they need, and only for as long as they need it reducing capital expenditure risks. Colocation gives SMBs the ability to scale up and down in a reasonable way (not minute to minute) that provides for the needs common in this market.
Because cloud computing is such a bad fit for the general SMB market as SMBs rarely have needs for auto-scaling or for horizontally scaling workloads, tend to be unable to invest in DevOps processes and need to minimize investments in platform support the combination of hyperconvergence with colocation can bring the majority of the beneficial ancillary aspects of hosted cloud computing to the SMB without encumbering them with the costs and complexities of the elastic workload models.
With hyperconvergence and colocation, companies can reduce or effectively eliminate all platform management needing no more than basic capacity projects (normally several weeks ahead) and license management with no need to understand storage, high availability, virtualization, imaging and, in many cases, even backups. Workloads can be created and destroyed rapidly and with ease. Everything can be centralized and managed through a single pane of glass or platform portal. Unlike cloud that assumes management via scripts and APIs, HC assumes snowflake management at the highest level while, of course, not barring DevOps management in any way.
While some companies will have technical needs that may keep hyperconvergence from being their solution or, at least, they only solution and some may have physical limitations and needs that may curtail colocation the majority of the SMB market should most likely be looking to the marriage of hyperconvergence and colocation as the "go to" solution set for their computational infrastructure and support.
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"systems around the cloud," .... systems around the clock, maybe?
Nice write up.
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Updated
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How much do you think the "buzz" around the cloud plays into adoption from an SMB?
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@ChrisL a lot. same reason everyone wants a SAN even though they don't need it. that is until they hear the cost
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@wirestyle22 I think it's a combination of people not wanting to deal with hardware--even though there's nothing to "deal" with, as colo's will set everything up for you--and the "cloud" positioning itself as future-tech.
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@ChrisL get me more places with per U availability and I will definitely be more interested colocating.
The problem I have is clients want to have something regional but not in town so that if needed they can tell me to go get it to recover in a disaster scenario.
I'm not saying that is the best solution but that is the responses I get when giving solutions
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@JaredBusch Understandable. You're right though, a lot of providers don't offer those lower-U solutions. I wish we were able to offer that in our non-LA facilities.
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@ChrisL said in SMB, Hyperconvergence and Colocation:
How much do you think the "buzz" around the cloud plays into adoption from an SMB?
It's huge. So many places go to cloud computing and have no idea what they are buying.
