IR focuses on cloud cost optimization in Prognosis presentation at TBC 2020

The recent NonStop All-Digital Experience, previously known as the NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC), concluded only a matter of days ago. It is probably still too early to draw any conclusions as to how well this event met the needs of the HPE NonStop community, but as one of NonStop’s major partners with a longstanding history of supporting NonStop solutions we anticipate seeing the NonStop community continuing with virtual events for the foreseeable future.

IR participated in this event by giving a presentation: TBC20-062 NonStop as a Service – Optimizing costs. One of the benefits from participating in a virtual event is that our session was recorded and can be replayed either by following the hyperlink above or by simply cutting and pasting the following to your browser –

Either way, even as this event has concluded, it would be worthwhile to return to this presentation by Jim Bowers if you were unable to do so at the time.

“It would be topical,” began Bowers to consider the “Evolution of monitoring NonStop solutions as a service (NSaaS) as more and more NonStop (systems) are forming the basis of cloud solutions, be that HPE GreenLake offerings or the many as-a-service providers across a wide spectrum of solution offerings.” In his introduction, the concept of evolution came up more than once with more than a few attendees appreciating the references made to product offerings originating in the 1960s. “You could make an argument that (IBM’s) Time Sharing on mainframes” said Bowers in reference to the origins of cloud computing today, “even if access was extremely limited.”

The reference to GreenLake was topical as participation by NonStop in the GreenLake purchase program was covered in more detail by NonStop product management. As Bowers explained this opportunity for NonStop customers to pursue a different payment strategy with NonStop, with “HPE GreenLake (there is) an economic advantage to continuously available services when deployed on NonStop servers.” This is all quite understandable as HPE CEO Antonio Neri has made it clear that HPE will become a consumption-driven company whereby every product on offer from HPE will be available as a service. Having made such a commitment, there is now an increased emphasis being placed on how best to monitor usage and ensuring there are no overpayments for services rendered.

In his presentation, Bowers made reference to the March 23, 2020, Gartner report, How to Manage and Optimize Costs of Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS. According to Gartner, “The adoption of cloud computing introduces a number of new challenges, but managing cloud spending is proving to be one of the most difficult. However, cloud computing also allows unprecedented visibility into IT costs that organizations can use to drive more efficient consumption of IT. Organizations need to develop capabilities to produce an application budget and consumption forecast as accurately as possible.”

However, as Bowers made very clear in his presentation, there are many more metrics involved apart from tracking costs when it comes to pursuing the optimal usage of cloud resources. “Availability metrics,” for instance, said Bowers “are the cornerstone of any services deployment on NonStop.” When it comes to resource availability – often a gating factor when tracking availability – it is becoming less constrained and more elastic meaning “performance is less of an issue but capacity planning requires renewed focus with views towards service consumption.”

This isn’t the only time consumption pricing and resources being consumed to meet demands is referenced. With Prognosis you will have the dashboards you have become familiar with through the years but now they will be complemented with displays more attuned to the needs of ensuring SLAs are being met in this new world of elasticity in provisioning.  Historical profiles, analytic “what ifs” and even profitability charting at the macro to the micro cost level are even more important than they were when services were provided out of traditional, converged systems. And it is worth noting that with cloud computing no cloud is an island, with connectivity via internet protocols ensuring that any number of systems may be involved with any one transaction.

“Legacy solutions focused on just one system are now antiquated,” concluded Bowers.  As Gartner reported, “Organizations are transforming their culture and processes to adopt cloud computing. They are adopting a product-oriented delivery and DevOps. This transformation forces organizations to become more decentralized and require granular cost controls.” Whether it is a case of decentralization or simply executing on the move towards cloud to edge computing, IT organizations have many systems in play when it comes to supporting a solution with micro-services architectures dominating the agenda. It is important for every NonStop customer to recognize that Prognosis already has today’s Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) covered, including NonStop!

To find out more about the value proposition of Prognosis in a world where NonStop as a Service is developing traction in the marketplace, please take the time to replay this latest IR presentation as given at this year’s NonStop All-Digital Experience. Should you have any questions or would like to learn more, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your IR sales team. We look forward to addressing any topic that may be of interest to you and your enterprise.

Kevin Johnson,
VP Sales – Payments Performance Monitoring
www.ir.com