Field CTO, Microsoft 365 & Azure
When discussing Azure VMware Solution, I often receive one of a handful of reactions ranging from real or perceived technical and financial challenges. Today, I’ll touch on a few of those common obstacles I most commonly receive.
While this is a true statement, it doesn’t reflect an apples-to-apples comparison of what you are purchasing with AVS. With AVS, as depicted below, you are not only buying servers and storage, but you are also buying facilities, services, and maintenance that allow you to focus your team on tasks that create value for your business, not maintenance.
It’s a tough sell but I particularly enjoyed the perspective of our friends at the State of Alaska, “Migrating to Azure has empowered us to focus on the data and the meaningful changes that we can start making” (read more). Niel Smith (Deputy CIO), makes the case that most organizations really struggle in understanding the true and total cost of ownership for their data centers. Something I couldn’t agree with more. We can solve this through sizing and migration planning exercises to clarify what your operational costs of running in AVS would be. From there, we can compare that to the total costs of everything in the yellow and orange sections above.
This is a great objection. It is rooted in the fact that AVS nodes are fixed to a limited set of options and if you are “storage heavy”, meaning, you have a lot of need for storage with relatively low needs for compute and memory, you could be in a situation where you are “wasting hosts” to meet the storage requirement. This makes AVS untenable from a pricing perspective with compute costs so high. Answer: Our partners at Pure Storage offer external block storage that allows you to separate storage from AVS to find the correct balance. With Pure Cloud Block Store, you can get the right fit for your data heavy workloads.
In this scenario, all the points are correct. However, I’d argue that this is a strength of the solution vs. a weakness.
Mainly because:
The considerations you need to think about in this scenario are essentially the time it takes Microsoft to provision nodes to your environment. Planning your minimal size (minimum nodes at the ready) for rapid recovery operations (sub 1-hour RTOs) and additional nodes for those +1/+4 hour Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). Effectively balancing your steady state costs and cost savings for your desired RTO.
The frequent concern is well-founded. Current research indicates that approximately 50-55% of operations for businesses will continue to be on-premises in the coming years. Not all processes are fit for the cloud owing to security, availability, and network needs, which highlights the advantage of bare metal as a service (BMaaS) options such as AVS, compared to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) models.
AVS is managed in the same way as on-premises ESXi. VMware management can “see” AVS as another datacenter/cluster and allows mobility of applications between on-premises and the cloud. This provides several benefits:
AVS isn’t a blocker to on-premises requirements. In fact, it’s a strength in allowing flexible options so applications can run where they are best suited with a consistent management experience for IT teams.
Like the previous concern, AVS aids in modernization by offering conventional infrastructure options that integrate seamlessly with Azure platform services on high-performance, low latency, networks. This helps app and infrastructure teams avoid challenging interdependency issues during modernization efforts. It’s possible to update applications, data, and storage layers separately without compromising on efficiency. This results in quicker and more effective team modernization.
Hopefully you found this helpful. I would love to hear other challenges and objections for BMaaS solutions you have. I am a firm believer that the goal of technology is to provide applications and data to people that allow them (or their businesses) to be more productive. We have a range of technical tools available to us to be effective, we just need to understand the goals to choose the right one. If you are interested in digging in, reach out for a discussion or a Technology Strategy Review today.
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