Hybrid infrastructure: make your business competitive and cost-effective

Israel is a hot tech nation. The Israeli tech boom rivals that of Silicon Valley, and the ‘start-up nation’ spends double the world’s average GPB on R&D. Not surprisingly, many Israeli start-ups have been acquired by US companies.

Israel’s innovative drive and tech focus has created a magnetic bond between Leaseweb and Silicon Wadi, as many call the country today. We have organized several events with local Israeli partners and have invested funds to help customers benefit from both our products. We believe true partnership means that partners complement each other’s abilities to accomplish what one partner cannot accomplish alone.

About a month ago, we organized the panel discussion and happy hour ‘Drink and Think’ in Tel Aviv together with our partner MoovingON and one of our mutual customers. The topic of the joint event: pro’s and con’s of a hybrid infrastructure.

There were forty interested participants who listened to the panel members and questioned them in a lively discussion. Panel members were: Avi Shalisman, CEO at MoovingON; Anatoly Atamanov, Director IT Operations at MyThings; Ofir Nachmani, CEO at I Am OnDemand, a famous cloud blog in Israel; and Leaseweb’s Robert van der Meulen, Cloud Manager. We’d like to share a few quotes with you, since they neatly illustrate the trends, doubts, needs and available solutions today:

Anatoly Atamanov stressed the need for a blended solution at MyThings, since the company works with big amounts of data. “We collect about 2-3TB logs per day, divided into two types of data: operating data (online logs) and data that we store for legal purposes (offline logs). We chose to go with a bare metal solution for real-time data. For this, we have a Hadoop cluster with Leaseweb. We use a cloud solution from Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the data we store longer.”

Deploying a hybrid cloud can be complex, Ofir Nachmani pointed out. “You need to be able to deploy in two places, and if you are going multi-cloud, in more than two. The main challenges are to plan it, that your application can run on different platforms, and then to be able to manage it. Calculate the cost correctly and make sure you are actually saving.”

“I think you should start with what you need”, said Robert van der Meulen when asked whether it would better to go for bare metal or a cloud solution when it comes to scalability. “If you need bare metal, figure out a provider that can deliver such a service to you in a way that you can scale. Look at things like portability. Can you move at any point to a different provider easily? Can he add hybrid capabilities to your infrastructure? Will he help you grow?”

The bottom line of the panel discussion: don’t lock yourself down or plan too far ahead. In ten years time, technology will be completely different. Better start with cost effective, high performance, easy portability and good service that you can get now.

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