Distributed IT - Juggling More Balls with the Same Number of Hands

Learning to Juggle

The term “data center” has become somewhat of a misnomer, and that’s because data is no longer centered. As businesses have become more distributed, so too have the technology resources that support and enable them. With infrastructure and applications now dispersed among data center, cloud, branch office, and edge environments, many organizations are reaching an inflection point. One where the business’ appetite and need for technology enablement has expanded beyond the IT team’s reach and capacity. Throw in that Technology talent is in extremely short supply and many IT budgets continue to be flat.

In colloquial terms, this means the same number of hands must learn to juggle a growing number of balls. And some of those balls may be half a world away. Enter Cisco HyperFlex Edge, Cisco Intersight, and Cisco UCS

Juggling Successfully

Take Resolute Mining, for instance. The Australia-based company has a number of mines and satellite offices in remote parts of Africa where IT resources and skillsets are scarce. Deploying compute, storage, and network systems in those locations was always a challenge, and small technology problems often resulted in days of downtime.

With Cisco HyperFlex Edge and Cisco Intersight, however, Resolute now has a “hands-off” infrastructure that is remotely managed from Perth.

“In the past, we had to get someone onsite to help troubleshoot problems, and it would take countless hours getting the servers back up to an operational state. Today, problems are solved in 30 minutes, tops,” said Peter Ta, systems administrator at Resolute. “We’re now in a mode of proactive monitoring instead of reactive remediation.”

“We’ve regained confidence in our edge environment,” added Simon Duncalf, IT manager at Resolute, “and that allows us to move on to other priorities.”

Another example is Riot Games, developer of the wildly popular game and esport, League of Legends. Riot’s globally distributed collection of 200-plus competitive esports game servers previously needed to be configured individually and managed locally. That’s no longer the case, however, with Cisco UCS servers that are remotely managed from the cloud using Cisco Intersight.

“Cisco Intersight is a game changer for us. In the past, each server was its own island. Now we treat them as a pool of resources and administer them collectively,” said Scott Adametz, Head of Esports Technology Group at Riot Games. “A single pane of glass to manage all of our esports game servers around the world is our dream state. It has an enormous impact on efficiency and time savings. And with the integration of Intersight and HashiCorp Terraform, we can further simplify our operations, ensure consistent infrastructure automation and security, and improve DevOps agility.”

In both cases, the companies found ways to streamline their IT operations, centrally manage their distributed infrastructure resources from the cloud, and do so collectively instead of box-by-box, site-by-site.

In other words, they have become better jugglers. Fewer balls are being dropped, and additional balls can now be put in the air.