The Importance of Workload Placement Strategy

A recent Gartner infrastructure event drew over four thousand Infrastructure & Operations practitioners to hear from analysts – and network with each other – at the industry’s premier exchange of best practices.

It’s Gartner, so there was plenty on emerging themes (accelerating innovation, operationalizing AI, et al). Nonetheless, we were struck by how many sessions centered around a question GTSG has helped clients answer for decades:

What’s the best execution venue for a workload – or set of workloads – to enable the business, while also protecting it, and operating within the required cost envelope?

Challenges from sessions on cloud strategy, cloud costs, technical debt, and certainly the Broadcom/VMware issue can be addressed with a well-articulated Workload Placement Strategy, a capability for which Gartner first recognized GTSG in 2018.

First, some quick context-setting, then thoughts on the topics addressable via Workload Placement Strategy (particularly Broadcom/VMware and Cloud Dissatisfaction).

GTSG Values Gartner’s Insight

Each Gartner analyst has perhaps a thousand interactions annually with a broad range of organizations. We engage dozens of these analysts each quarter.

GTSG is recognized in Gartner research for its strategy, workload migration, disaster recovery, and mainframe expertise. We continually find that our methods are consistent with Gartner-recommended practices and solution paths.

On Broadcom’s Acquisition of VMware

Sessions included:

  • How Broadcom’s Acquisition of VMware Is Impacting I&O
  • The Field Guide to VMware Alternatives
  • Technical Insights: VMware Migration — Assessing the Technical Challenge

Gartner continues to field a tremendous number of calls on this topic. The net of what they are hearing:

  • Significant cost increases, and issues with term extensions of existing licenses
  • A different experience for “strategic” customers (generally the largest 2000, with some exceptions)
  • Channel disruption: Broadcom wants to deal directly with the customer
  • Available licenses are far too expensive for remote office/branch office and edge locations
  • End-user concerns about the future of the platform, support, innovation and future pricing
  • Finding alternatives is a challenge – for most, there is no 1:1 replacement

Analyst Paul Delory presented two paths: application modernization and hypervisor replacement. Application modernization is preferred where possible, but the required level of funding and resource commitment isn’t available to everyone. Alternatives for hypervisor replacement are HCI, public cloud IaaS, standalone hypervisors, distributed cloud, container orchestration, and open infrastructure.

GTSG has customized our Gartner-recognized approach to Hybrid Cloud Workload Placement Strategy to help clients sort through the options in a fashion that:

  • Understands the complexity of what you have: VMware has been integrated into the estate for decades, and this is more than a software replacement decision – it’s a platform decision
  • Above all, keeps you aligned with the business: GTSG has a long-practiced Decision Modeling method which engages stakeholders in the development of Guiding Principles, Technical Design Points, within an evaluation framework which lends structure to (and removes emotion from) what for many is a difficult decision – the resolution of which provides zero business benefit.

Best of all, we’ve structured the engagement so that you don’t spend a full year’s cost increase studying the problem.

Gartner Strategic Planning Assumption: “By 2028, cost concerns will drive 70% of enterprise-scale VMware customers to migrate 50% of their virtual workloads.”

If Gartner’s strategic planning assumption is correct, a great many organizations – VMware has perhaps 375,000 customers worldwide – are going to be studying this problem. GTSG is here to help with the same methods and skills that have helped to set Workload Placement Strategy for years.

To discuss how GTSG’s Workload Placement Strategy and Platform Replacement Lifecycle can help as you develop a realistic set of alternatives and evaluate them, write us at partners@GTSG.com.

Workload Placement Strategy; Cloud Cost; Cloud Dissatisfaction; Cloud Strategy

This year’s event featured multiple sessions which revolve around two questions GTSG has answered since our inception: “where should I run it” and “how can I run it optimally?”

Where should I run it?

  • Cloud Repatriation: What, Where, When and Why?

    • Cloud growth remains solid and strong, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 20.4% between 2023 and 2028.
    • Repatriation of workloads is anywhere between 5 and 12% while 2-8% are canceled projects. This leaves 80 to 92% as successful implementations, workloads which have not been repatriated.
      Gartner concludes that individual workload repatriation does not represent a trend of cloud repatriation. The job is to get your workload placement strategy right.

  • Technical Insight: Should I Migrate to Cloud – Assessing the Cost Implications of Lift and Shift

    • On the model you use: The outcome of pure lift and shift is rented virtualization: “…you may find a better car, but you’re still using a car.” You must lift and optimize to ensure workloads modernize and improve.
    • On cost estimating: No one starts with perfect estimates. “The first step to being skilled at estimation is to be bad at it.”
    • On the requirements and constraints that will inform your decision: Availability of cloud skills; ongoing and upcoming on-prem costs, your objectives and deadlines, and whether your software is custom or COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf)

  • When Technical Debt Becomes Technical Bankruptcy

    • Technical debt means borrowing time and effort from the future by developing suboptimal fixes in the name of expediency vs. long-term solutions – just as financial debt borrows capital from the future. 57% of CIOs say their IT organization is not effective at managing technical debt.
    • Technical bankruptcy, according to Gartner, is a structured process, modelled on a financial bankruptcy proceeding, that determines which debts get “paid” according to their value to the business and their relative priority.

  • Your Data Center Is Now Your Edge:

    • If you’ve got a substantial edge presence, the “same drivers that support the edge use case – latency reduction, autonomy, data/bandwidth, and privacy/security – will make the case for your on-prem data center.

To discuss our Workload Placement Strategy and how it can help you decide which execution venue is best for your business needs…write us at partners@GTSG.com.

  • Avoiding the Top Mistakes in Your Cloud Strategy

    • Before even discussing the mistakes, David Smith warns that many organizations fail to leverage cloud’s advantages either because they have no strategy or mistake something else – perhaps an adoption path – for a strategy.
    • The mistakes themselves:
      • Confusing a cloud strategy with a cloud implementation plan
      • Not involving the business
      • Expecting multicloud to save money or improve disaster recovery
      • Equating a cloud strategy with “we’re moving everything to the cloud,” cloud-first interpreted to mean cloud-only
      • Starting with critical, complex, large workloads (e.g., ERP)
      • Believing that an executive mandate is a strategy or confusing executive sponsorship (which is needed) with executive mandate
      • Being too broad in scope — doing too much within a cloud strategy, not aligning with other strategies
      • Finalizing vendor negotiations and contracts before the strategy is complete

To discuss our series of workshops designed to create unbreakable links between the needs of the business and the decision model that guides implementation…write us at partners@GTSG.com.

  • The I&O Leader’s Guide to Cloud Strategy: A Cookbook Approach to Ensuring Business Focus

One addition to this year’s presentation was the notion of “Representative Journeys:” these included Business Transformation, Cloud Innovation, Cloud-Native, and Replacement.

How can I run the workload optimally?

Addressing cloud dissatisfaction was a major theme in the conference.

In the keynote, Roger Wiliams identified two major sources of this dissatisfaction: Cloud project failures and cloud spending concerns.

Roger shows a continuum of increasing cost and effort from basic cloud hygiene through cloud financial management to FinOps. Net: ensure basic cloud hygiene and only do more if necessary.

The breakout sessions included:

  • Technical Insights: The Metrics That Drive Success in Cloud Cost Optimization
  • Technical Insights: Future-Proofing Your Cloud Financial Management and FinOps Tooling
  • Technical Insights: Why Some FinOps Programs Fail
  • The Secrets of Accurate Cloud Cost Forecasting

Let’s spend a minute here: cloud cost forecasting is hard. Current tools and methods are imperfect. Set executive expectations that forecasts will be inexact and have an approved process for variance analysis and budget adjustment.

  • Cloud planning should be conducted by cloud consumers. Groups that generate cost (application teams, product teams, developers, DevOps engineers, data scientists, system admins) have been empowered to create billable liabilities for your organization. They must be held accountable for producing an estimate of those liabilities upfront.
  • Cloud Cost Hygiene: Your First Step in Managing Your Cloud Costs. “Industry surveys estimate that companies that do not optimize their costs incur up to 28% annual overspend in the public cloud. Without executive oversight, cloud cost management will be difficult to get other stakeholders to pay attention to and participate.”

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We hope these notes have been of value to you. If you want to talk further, please write to us at partners@GTSG.com.