Modern infrastructure management has unlocked a new standard of functionality and support for all businesses. A growing collection of innovative, cloud-native tools has revolutionized how we approach operations management, offering seamless integration between enterprise software packages and decentralized computing infrastructure.
When opting for an infrastructure managed service, it is essential to understand your objectives and requirements so that your service provider can offer the best possible advice. You should collaborate with your provider to define the existing services, controls, and reporting tools that fulfill your present operational delivery requirements. This initial assessment will concurrently unveil the bottlenecks in your current infrastructure implementation, planting the seeds of change that’ll be nurtured through your new infrastructure managed service.
Homogenous vs. Heterogeneous Computing
Understanding what type of IT environment you currently have is important when moving to an infrastructure managed service. Homogenous and heterogeneous environments will need supplementing with very different management strategies to maximize value due to differences detailed below:
Homogenous Computing – Derived from the Greek word for “same,” which is homos; homogenous describes a computing environment that solely utilizes services from a single software vendor. Remote instance management hypervisors, all the way down through intermediate software management layers, ending with the end-user service delivery modules, are sourced from a single vendor.
- Homogenous environments are typically easier to configure out-of-the-box as they come pre-integrated from your vendor of choice. Every aspect of the computing stack is made to work seamlessly together, thanks to confluent integration on the code level by the software vendor.
Heterogenous Computing – In contrast with homogenous environments, a heterogenous infrastructure aims to integrate software packages from a variety of vendors. This is typically done using an orchestration utility, which contains modules that are specifically designed to manage individual software packages. These modules feed back to a unified management dashboard, which compiles and standardizes the information to elucidate the overall status of your heterogeneous environment.
- A heterogeneous environment poses a challenge for infrastructure service management due to the complexity of streamlining connectivity between fundamentally incompatible software packages. If done right, this allows you to leverage the best features from a range of software solutions, maximizing the capabilities of your infrastructure managed service.
There are positive and negative aspects to each approach, which are ultimately weighted through the determination of your present and future computing requirements.
A homogenous approach is heavily reliant on a single vendor. From a support perspective, this simplifies infrastructure management as you are dealing with the same company, reducing points of contact to one. The renewal of contracts is simplified, and bulk discounts will apply due to the volume of products you use. At the same time, you’re confined by the developmental progress of this vendor. Overall product upgrades will be slower, but you benefit from improved compatibility through the integration of services at the code level by the vendor.
A heterogeneous approach also has varied results. You have the flexibility to pick and choose between best-of-breed software packages, maximizing the overall functionality of your infrastructure. This comes with an increase in complexity, placing the burden of integration on your own development team. You are likely to pay a higher overall price with a heterogeneous approach, with the added management requirements of several concurrent vendor contracts. A range of vendors will increase the number of upgrades you receive, offering bleeding-edge functionality at the expense of potential downtime and re-integration difficulty.
When choosing between the two, determine whether you want to maximize functionality at the expense of stability or take a more risk-averse approach to guarantee uptime, albeit with slightly less functionality.
Develop Your Infrastructure Managed Service with Trianz
Trianz is a leading infrastructure managed service provider, dedicated to building agile, scalable infrastructure deployments for our clients. We’re partnered with industry-leading software companies, choosing only the best solutions for use in our managed service provisions.
Our proprietary Concierto.Cloud platform offers a feature-rich foundation, tailored for the management of heterogeneous infrastructure deployments. We provide seamless integration with independent software vendor applications to simplify the orchestration of your cloud operations.
Get in touch with our infrastructure managed service team, and start defragmenting your IT processes today!
