Hybrid Cloud

Most businesses weren’t “born in the cloud.” While much of their important data and applications may eventually reside in a cloud, a mix of hybrid cloud infrastructure services will always be the answer for some.

When hybrid cloud is the answer for your organization, you want to partner with experts in virtualized on-premises infrastructure architecture and public cloud design.

You want a partner with the experience to help decide which part of the hybrid cloud infrastructure your workload should reside in to best serve the business. Most importantly, you want a partner with the competency to architect your hybrid solution with agility, flexibility and security as fundamental tenets of the design from its beginnings.   That’s p1 Technologies.

There are numerous reasons why hybrid cloud may make sense for your business. You may run a key workload on your own virtualized infrastructure due to application dependencies, but you want to use public cloud’s scalable, pay-as you-go benefits for data protection or dev/test. Other times, the reason is a simply a practical financial matter. You must use the on-premises infrastructure you already own to the end of its useful life. Or, maybe you’re in the early stages of a public cloud adoption journey. You have a gradual plan to shift workloads to a cloud platform of choice, but for now, you must operate in both worlds. Whatever the reason for choosing a hybrid strategy, p1 can help!

DR in the Cloud


A common strategy for employing hybrid cloud is to shift disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure to a public cloud.  This is because public cloud offers the flexibility to deploy DR infrastructure in a wide variety of locations throughout the world and on platforms that are highly available and durable by design.

Cloud disaster recovery solutions provide the ability to meet almost any Service Level Agreement (SLA). “Hot Standby” DR for nearly instantaneous fail over, “Pilot Light” warm services to meet modest SLAs, and even “Cold” DR designs when cost is as important as the speed of recovery are all available in public cloud DR solutions.

p1 employs a proven methodology to enable DR in the cloud for your organization:

We begin with exploration of your application environment, existing data protection methods, SLA, RPO and RTO objectives.
We then provide a detailed design and POC the critical components as required. From there, we validate the final design, deploy to production and automate your cloud DR solution.
Last we’ll help test and validate your DR Plan with minimal effort and no disruption to production using your cloud DR architecture.

Storage Tiering & Archiving


A common use case for hybrid cloud takes advantage of the highly scalable, low-cost storage options found in public cloud. As on-premises data sets age, their value to the business often diminishes. Using high-cost, on-premises production storage to house this data doesn’t make sense. Sending aged data to low-cost, yet highly durable storage in the public cloud is quickly becoming the design choice. The pay-as-you-go model coupled with the native data life cycle policy capability of public cloud is truly compelling.

Whether you want to leverage public cloud to house secondary copies of low performance file storage, or send snapshots and backups of your primary data sets to a public cloud tier, p1 Technologies has the design and build expertise in hybrid cloud architecture to get it right.

p1 Technologies will help you select the right hybrid cloud tiering strategy to power your business:

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Select the cloud storage with the required mix of performance, durability and cost to match the value of the data
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Determine whether “cloud native” or on-premises, “cloud-enabled” backup and archive storage platforms are right for your business needs
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Select the appropriate “cloud native” or on-premises “cloud enabled platforms

Selecting the best infrastructure on-premises and in the cloud is only part of any effective hybrid cloud solution. Moving data to the cloud in an efficient and secure manner, while ensuring SLAs are maintained, is equally important. Bandwidth and data retrieval costs imposed by cloud providers can be significant as well and must be considered when deciding which data is a good fit for public cloud tiering.  p1 has extensive experience with these and other key hybrid infrastructure considerations. Let us help you identify the appropriate workloads for hybrid strategies, based on your data’s value and the access patterns of your organization.

Hybrid Cloud Bursting

Bursting

Using the nearly endless compute and storage of public cloud to run applications during intermittent demand peaks is one of the original hybrid cloud use cases. The example of a retailer pushing an e-commerce workload to public cloud during the Holidays to service the burst in transactions is a common hybrid cloud success story. The truth is almost any workload with peaks of demand greater than normal is a candidate for cloud bursting infrastructure.

Designing on-premises infrastructure to meet intermittent peak demand can be expensive and wasteful, which is why autonomic cloud bursting is so attractive to IT teams and CFOs alike. However, designing the hybrid cloud architecture required for cloud bursting requires careful planning too. Network load, application inter-dependencies, user experience, data gravity and of course, security are key design considerations to ensure a bursting strategy will be successful. p1 Technologies’ architects can design an optimized on-premises infrastructure with the public cloud access and services needed to deliver an autonomic cloud bursting design for peak operations.

Dev Test Background

Dev/Test

Today’s software development cycles are intense. The business requires new features are delivered in short order to compete, while the continuous threat of “bad actors” seeking vulnerabilities in code makes constant patches and revisions essential. The cycle has driven development methodologies like Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery and operating models like DevOps to grow, just to meet the frenzied pace of innovation. These new development cycles can place significant burden on an organization’s traditional IT infrastructure and the IT operations team that manages it.

The flexible, pay-as-you-go nature of public cloud infrastructure makes it an ideal host for Dev/Test environments. With public cloud, Dev/Test teams can spin up and shut down resources on demand. This frees developers to provision infrastructure as needed, speeding software innovation and offering pressure relief for the on-premises infrastructure and operations teams. Let p1 show you how to adopt an hybrid cloud strategy that ensures your Dev/Test workloads are fully cost optimized and run only as needed.

Cost optimized, pay-as-you-go model
Self-service for development team
Rapid provisioning and tear-down enables faster innovation cycles
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p1 has been a great technology partner for many years. For me, they offer a personalized engagement with a higher level of support and engineering. At the same time they maintain an awareness of our environment. This attention shows in how thoughtful they are about providing solutions that actually fit our technology ecosystem and goals. Jason Hart Vice President Information Technology

When hybrid cloud is the answer for your organization, you want a partner with expertise in both virtualized on-premises infrastructure and public cloud.

Contact p1 and we’ll architect a hybrid cloud strategy that best fits your business.