[Hardware] Seagate/ESG Multi-Cloud Maturity And Linux Foundation Sustainable Data Center Hardware

[FazzNoth]

This article talks about a recent interesting cloud maturity report from Seagate and the Enterprise Storage and discussion of the Open19 Linux Foundation effort to create hardware that supports sustainable data centers.

Seagate sponsored a survey and report by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) called the Multicloud Maturity Report. 500 survey respondents from around the world participated. The participants were senior IT leaders (71%) and leaders in software development and data analytics (29%).

Many organizations are spreading their workload over many data centers, trying to balance the costs for various services versus these service capabilities. The report recognizes that most clouds are not built for interoperability, but try to lock-in customers so their services are used. Where data lives it tends to attract applications, a concept often referred to as data gravity. The report refers to the difficulties in moving content between clouds as friction.

 

In the survey, about 30% of the participants used four or more clouds. The report says that this will rise to 63% of these companies in two years. 76% of survey takers say monitoring, measuring, and ensuring service-level agreement (SLA) adherence for applications that rely on intercloud integrations is challenging. The figures below show some interesting results from the survey.

As shown in the figure below, 73% of the survey participants report that their organization is hampered by data retention costs, which limits their ability to maximize data value.

With the majority of survey participants indicating difficulties in deriving value from their data the economics of retaining data is reduced. The figure below shows that 57% of the surveyed business leaders said that they deleted data that they knew could be valuable because they saw the costs of storing that data to be prohibitive.

 

The Seagate/ESG report shows the challenges and opportunities for organizations pursuing a multi-cloud strategy. The report projects that companies who achieve multicloud maturity with data driven strategies will achieve the greatest advantages form their cloud efforts. The report creates a multicloud maturity index from a cumulative metric from the survey.

The report says that companies that are most adept at navigating the multicloud in terms of costs and innovation are 5.3× more likely than their peers to beat revenue goals by 10%. Organizations scoring high on multicloud maturity are 6.3× more likely to go to market months or quarters ahead of their competition. As a consequence, the report says that multicloud maturity leaders will achieve better bottom line results. Leaders in multicloud maturity were 3.2× more likely to forecast their valuation 3 years from now will be 5× or greater than it is today.

Open19 is part of the Linux Foundation to promote open hardware in standard 19-inch racks for data centers and providing cable-free installation and maintenance. It was founded in May 2017 and has members from major data center and equipment companies. Open19 is intended to be deployed in edge environments as well as custom cloud data center deployments.

 

Among the initiatives they are working on is moving from 12 to 48V DC power and providing a consistent environment for all cooling technologies (e.g. liquid cooling) in a box (or brick). Key to the organizations initiatives is removing waste and complications from rack data center deployments. Examples include removing power supplies from the boxes (bricks) and in general standardizing these bricks. By removing power from bricks, the bricks can be replaced or removed without replacing the power supplies, or vice versa. The goal is to extend the life of peripheral components and move from a 4 year to a 15-year life for many peripheral components.

There is a move towards greater use of sustainable energy such as fuel cells using hydrogen. Their plans for 2030 include providing more efficient power and cooling (such as liquid cooling). Open19 also has plans to limit Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions. There are many factors in controlling this that must include shipping and manufacturing as well as operation of data center components. One possible item to tackle is packaging used to ship hardware to data centers, today this is thrown out to reduce fire hazards, are there other options?

Seagate and the Enterprise Storage Group released a multi-cloud maturity report showing that organizations who do the best job of integrating their multi-cloud strategies will have faster time to market, control their costs better and have a better bottom line. Open19 is a Linux Foundation effort to create hardware that supports sustainable data centers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2022/06/25/seagateesg-multi-cloud-maturity-and-linux-foundation-sustainable-data-center-hardware/?sh=734f364a673c