A recent report from Gartner highlights an interesting trend that we too have seen in the market: The move towards As-a-service consumption of on-prem infrastructure.
Despite all the push to the cloud, on-premises infrastructure will still be hosting at least one third of workloads for the foreseeable future for reasons such as security concerns, costs concerns, custom built app architectures that are not cloud-compatible, Data sovereignty and regulatory demands etc.
Most hardware vendors are now offering as-a-service options instead of the traditional buy and own offering the same benefits a the cloud: cost savings, CAPEX to OPEX, scale, burst capabilities without the need to purchase additional equipment.
To name a few:
Gartner sees this trend as growing:
“By 2025, 40% of newly procured premises-based compute and storage will be consumed as a service, up from less than 10% in 2021.
Billing model
While the mechanics of each service is different Gartner also provides a snapshot of the overall process:
In a nutshell, you estimate how much you need+some buffer, the vendor provides the hardware to you, including the buffer and then you pay only for the servers that you instantiate.
Automation model
While the procurement model is cloud-like, the actual systems must also be cloud-like in order to provide the company the efficiency and flexibility that you get in the cloud to.
By 2025, 70% of organizations will implement structured infrastructure automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency, up from 20% in 2021.”
Note that this does not mean virtualization but rather hardware (bare metal) with cloud-like flexibility as you need to get new equipment spun-off quickly, switches reconfigured, storage allocated etc. To get cloud-like efficiency you need to be able to:
Easily move resources between projects as they are no longer needed
Self-service driven consumption of bare metal
Automatic lifecycle management
Easy security audits
Software such as MetalSoft provide the "cloudification" of on-prem hardware enabling end-to-end provisioning of servers, switches and storage.
Contact us if you want to talk with a solution architect to understand how to build a modern on-prem infrastructure.