Everything is the Same - And It's Still Hard!
We look to cloud providers to make things easier through abstraction. However, it all still remains stubbornly hard.
I was on a briefing with one of the significant OEM tech vendors. It doesn’t matter which one. The problem remains consistent regardless of the company selling it. All of the major OEM hardware vendors are racing to abstract their bare-metal offerings via some pay-as-you-go scheme. I’m not pouring salt on these movements. Overall, it’s a significant thing to bring automation and abstraction to enterprise IT operations. However, with the new abstractions come new silos.
We’ve produced sponsored research with both Dell and HPE separately. Both HPE’s deliver psuedo managed private cloud solutions. So you can sit a completely managed stack next to your self-managed infrastructure with all of the comforts of on-premises IT.
The catch? You get all of the comforts of on-premises IT. A simple thought is HPE’s rather excellent HPE Infosight management software for Nimble. You have the challenging yet straightforward problem of what happens when you have the same visibility/management platform managed by two different teams.
I haven’t had vendors provide clarity on this classic managed service problem. There’s the control plan that you manage and then there’s the control plane that your managed service provider manages. How do you ensure policy intent is shared across both control planes? I’m running out of space on this “CTO Short.” It deserves a full on blog post.
How have you managed the same tools across your internal team and your managed service provider?